The enthusiasm which relationship marketing arouses and the rate which companies of all shapes and sizes try to adopt this approach leads to many interrogations on the nature of the changes to be carried out within the organisation. The adoption and the implementation of such an approach, centred on the customer, exert pressure on the ‘traditional’ model of the organization and require a major in depth transformation, unusual because of its amplitude and reach, which can be described as true organisational innovation. It is this hypothesis we have wished to test by observing the relationship marketing approach in retail banking sector in respect to transformation efforts deployed. The present article thus proposes an overview of the organisational innovation phenomenon applied to the concept of relationship marketing. The objective being to discover, explain and understand how relationship marketing develops within organizations, the conceptual framework aims at clarifying the dynamics of transformation. In depth interviews with marketing managers in the French banking sector were conducted to test the relevance of this framework. The results are presented and a number of important implications are discussed. These findings provide a basis both for research directions and for managers involved in developing and implementing relationship marketing in the financial world.