From Life Stage to Life Configuration Marketing. Dating, Coupling and the New Segmentation of Retail Banking

Retail banking has built its products, customer journeys and risk models around an implicit biographical trajectory: current account, employment, couple, mortgage, children, protection, savings, pension, succession. This paper documents that this trajectory is breaking down. The structural decline in coupling — the formation of stable partnerships — is not a cyclical phenomenon: over one hundred million more people than a historical-continuity scenario would predict have remained single over the past decade, and in 26 of 30 OECD countries the share of people living alone grew between 2010 and 2022. The paper analyses the structural causes of the change, quantifies its K-shaped distribution by social class, and derives seven operational implications for retail bank marketing. The original contribution is the shift from a life stage marketing model to a life configuration marketing framework: the bank segments by actual life configuration rather than age or civil status.