Demographic factors in the formation of customer policy of a commercial bank

Currently, the role of the banking sector in the existing model of spatial development and the influence of factors of demographic determination of the location of bank offices are increasing. The scientific problem here is to understand the complex relationship between the geographical and demographic contexts, as well as the concentration of financial intermediaries' services. The purpose of this study is to identify patterns of behavior of commercial bank customers determined by demographic characteristics and to form directions of the commercial bank's customer policy based on the identified patterns. Materials and methods. The pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Sklearn libraries were imported into the software environment for developing and executing program code in Python in the cloud – Google Colab. The Bank Account Fraud Dataset Suite (NeurIPS 2022) dataset was used to test the research hypothesis. The agglomerative clustering method was implemented in relation to the dataset, which made it possible to identify clusters of commercial bank customer activity and form their characteristics. Results. The obtained results confirm the existence of a connection between the demographic characteristics of the territory's population, their types of economic behavior and use of banking services. Clusters with the highest potential in terms of the client's current income level and age of clients have been identified. It has been established that when developing and updating niche banking products, one should focus on the younger generation, which, as it gets older and acquires a professional position, will move to the cluster of a stable client base or will be missed by the bank depending on the effectiveness of its marketing policy. The influence of employment status and family status when assigning a client to a particular cluster has been determined. In combination with geolocation data, the clustering results can serve as a basis for placing front offices in areas where the largest number of potential and actual clients of a commercial bank live. Conclusion. Stable patterns of customer behavior are active visits to bank offices or refusal to visit in favor of remote banking services or economically passive behavior. Bank customer policy should be formed with an orientation toward key demographic characteristics of target customer niches, differentiated by patterns of economic behavior. The results of geodemographic studies of commercial bank customers based on the proposed methodology can contribute to the development of strategies for banking structures to effectively perform the functions of accumulation and redistribution of financial resources. When developing strategic documents, the government of the Russian Federation and regions of the Russian Federation are recommended to take into account the boundaries and criteria for the influence of geodemographic factors on the development of regional socio-economic subsystems, as well as to form the prerequisites for the development of financial agglomerations in a number of regional socio-economic subsystems.