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Customers are important intangible assets of firms. Customer equity (CE) and customer equity sustainability ratio (CESR) cannot only provide a crucial basis for measuring the growth potential of firms but also provide managers a reference standard to allocate the marketing resource. This empirical study discussed the CE measurement of a mobile payments aggregator. With the rapid development of mobile payment in China, it is very meaningful to calculate the CE of these aggregators as an emerging business pattern because calculating CE cannot only help the mobile payments aggregator evaluate its future business development but also help it to provide value-added services and generate service fee from its clients, i.e., the retailers. The main purpose of this paper is to calculate CE of a mobile payments aggregator generated from a specific retailer from the perspective of technology diffusion. Based on the Bass model and Rogers’ theory of innovation diffusion, we calculated CE and CESR for five segments, namely innovators, early adopters, early majorities, late majorities, and laggards. The results show that it is the early adopters and the early majorities who generate most of the profit and it is also these two segments that have the greatest growth potential in the future.

Customers are important intangible assets of firms. Customer equity (CE) and customer equity sustainability ratio (CESR) cannot only provide a crucial basis for measuring the growth potential of firms but also provide managers a reference standard to allocate the marketing resource. This empirical study discussed the CE measurement of a mobile payments aggregator. With the rapid development of mobile payment in China, it is very meaningful to calculate the CE of these aggregators as an emerging business pattern because calculating CE cannot only help the mobile payments aggregator evaluate its future business development but also help it to provide value-added services and generate service fee from its clients, i.e., the retailers. The main purpose of this paper is to calculate CE of a mobile payments aggregator generated from a specific retailer from the perspective of technology diffusion. Based on the Bass model and Rogers' theory of innovation diffusion, we calculated CE and CESR for five segments, namely innovators, early adopters, early majorities, late majorities, and laggards. The results show that it is the early adopters and the early majorities who generate most of the profit and it is also these two segments that have the greatest growth potential in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Securitization is a remarkable financial instrument; it enables securitizers to increase their short-term profits at the expense of the long-term value of their customer base. This ability might be tempting for firms, especially because it does not need to be disclosed transparently to stakeholders. The authors show how their newly developed customer equity sustainability ratio (CESR) complements customer equity reporting and creates more transparency about the consequences of securitization for future earnings and the riskiness of the underlying business model. Their model compares the future value of an existing customer base with current earnings. In an empirical study of 38 banks in ten countries, the authors demonstrate the limited transparency of long-term value creation in financial statements. Next, they outline the adequacy of CESR for creating more transparency in empirical cases of Countrywide Financial Corporation and nine firms from nonbanking industries. They recommend that marketing should play a prominent role in providing stakeholders with substantial information about the long-term value of the customer base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]