We investigate the relative contributions of online and offline channels to the total value generated in financial services systems. This information can be used to evaluate and compensate the channels in a fair manner, and also to make better budget allocation decisions, helping firms to boost their revenues.

Many financial services firms still reach consumers through a combination of online and offline channels with the goal of acquiring new customers and managing relationships with the existing ones. Targeted online ads help businesses attract new customers whereas digital tools enhance the experience of existing customers. Traditional “human contact” methods are used when necessary to give a personal touch to the user experience. These various channels, when used in conjunction, may have a cooperative effect in creating a better customer experience.

To quantify the various contributions, we view the underlying channels as players in a cooperative game collaborating towards a common goal. We first propose a new metric that “adds” counterfactual reasoning to Shapley value while inheriting its desirable properties thereby addressing a known limitation of this cooperative game theory. Secondly, in order to make our proposal closer to reality, we show that a relatively broad class of cooperative games exists in which our proposed metric is amenable to efficient computation. We believe our theoretically-sound yet tractable approach has a unique edge over current practices and therefore, has the potential to be embraced by both researchers and practitioners. We also look at product-recommendation in settings as diverse as online retail, streaming services, and insurance and credit card recommendation.