We've just completed our second field trial with real brands and real bill-payers using our KulaQ technology which enables marketers to conduct mass-scale one-on-one MicroInterviews with opted-in bank bill-pay customers; and automatically make the right offer based on that interview. If you'd don't understand what a MicroInterview is, please go here.

KulaQ represents a new form of targeted outbound marketing based on a very old idea; namely, "Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face." Morris L. Hite, Advertising Hall of Fame.

Banks earn most of their profits from fees. The whole fee thing feels a little like a shell game to me. The bank advertises free checking and online bill-pay but, in fact, those services aren't free to the bank so -- it follows logically that they can't be free to the consumer.  So, the cost of "free checking and bill-pay" is moved from one shell to another which, of course, gets lifted whenever I, or someone else, stumbles on any of the tripwires the bank has set up to recover the actual costs of "free checking and bill-pay." 

We just completed our second field trial of our KulaMula cash-back bill-pay system with 5 consumers brands who collectively conducted 852 20-second interviews with about 150 bill-payers.  The results for both brands and bill-payers were extraordinary with average offer acceptance rates well above 50% -- meaning that more than 1/2 of the brand-offers presented, after customization, were accepted by bill-payers.