5 Strategies On Building A Personalized Banking Experience

No doubts, the banking industry is transforming with every passing day. With the rise of fintech and open banking technologies, customers are pressing the accelerator. And the most obvious question here is rather straightforward — What‘s next?

The answer is hyper-personalization. It may sound superficial. Perhaps even dubious if you’re critical. But we believe that is where the banking industry is heading. Well, you may ask, how so sure? Let me explain.

Imagine for a second that you are streaming Netflix in North America, finding a ride on Ola in India, ordering from Amazon in Europe, or splitting the bill with Rappi in Latin America, your welcome screens are very likely to look different from anyone else‘s—even if you are in your own household. Ya! But, how, you may ask?

Well, that‘s because what you are seeing is a digital reflection of you based on your data: your profile, your browsing history, your purchase history, and so on. In short, whatever you click and skim through is monitored to make it more personalized for you.

Google, Amazon, and Facebook are all great examples of personalization. And using them in our day-to-day life, we expect the same kind of tailored experience. In all transactions we do, even in the banking and finance industry.

In fact, according to a new study, 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Digital Pulse, Coronavirus Flash Survey June 2020 found that, as customers change their behavior due to the pandemic, 81% of surveyed businesses state that generating a 360-degree view of the customer to understand better intent and context will have a high impact on their operations over the next two years.

What does this mean to banks as an industry? Well, banks can now cut-throat competition by delivering meaningful, personalized experiences to their customers. And all this is possible by leveraging your own existing business and customer data.

With technologies like data analytics and machine learning, you can now uncover customer behaviors, facilitate data-driven experiences, ensure seamless customer journeys, and drive stickier relationships for winning trust and revenue.

So how do you get started? Well, here are five different strategies that you can consider for planning your personalized customer banking experience.

Let’s dive right in.

1. Building customer relations with data

By leveraging customer data, you can discover when your customer’s car lease is expiring. And in turn, offer an online option for a loan and car insurance.

In the same way, your bank can alert customers to low mortgage refinance rates by tracking their credit scores. That’s how data can play handy in building relationships.

So, how to build a data bank from scratch? And how long would it take?

Well, you don‘t have to build it from scratch. You can start by evaluating industry-specific out-of-the-box solutions with pre-built use cases. This will lower your TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and help you rapidly adapt to changing market demands.

Moreover, out-of-the-box data bank solutions can easily be integrated with your bank’s existing architecture and help drive early practical and sustained results.

2. Tailoring Real-time Customer Experiences Across Channels

Your bank‘s data lives in many different systems, which include marketing automation systems, web analytics, point-of-sale, customer relationship management, loyalty programs, and other banking platforms.

With the help of internal data systems and automated psychographic data, banks can create an analytics-driven approach that goes beyond conventional personalization. How?

By applying artificial intelligence and machine learning. Banks can leverage advanced analytics to tailor customer journeys to provide hyper-personalized assistance, product recommendations, or real-time promotions at scale.

If you have your customer data ready and accessible, your bank can deliver real-time hyper-personalized experiences across channels much faster by implementing AI & machine learning technologies.

3. Stay Consistent Across All Touch Points

With longer customer journeys, it becomes imperative to keep your branding aligned across platforms. Or else, your customer might not recollect your brand or lose trust in the worst-case.

Ernst & Young Consumer Banking Survey stated that omnichannel experience was listed as one of the critical areas for banks’ improvement.

In order to stay competitive, you need to continue building out channel capabilities to provide 24/7 real-time personalized banking access seamlessly across channels without deviating from your brand experience and promise.

4. Personalized Marketing with Next-best-offers

Next best offer (also known as next best action) is a form of predictive analytics that helps marketers and their organizations better judge customer spending habits and guide marketing efforts toward connecting with customers to close a deal.

Amazon generates over $100 million per day with targeted and personalized recommendations and meanwhile provides exceptional customer experience to users.

Also, hyper-personalization engines, with the help of advanced analytics, can personalize your outbound campaigns, essentially targeting the right mix of products to the best potential buyers.

Such analytical engines can be implemented with great success in banking, especially for High Networth Individuals (HNIs) and Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs).

5. Optimize Customer-Facing Operations

Though the world is moving to digital, a large portion of the population would still step into your banks directly. And it becomes important for banks to carry the same personalization in the branches as well. How is that you ask? Automation technologies can help.

Even today, banks and credit unions depend a lot on manual processes, which are repetitive, error–prone, and inefficient. From document verification, KYC, account closure, accounts payable, the list goes on.

With intelligent robotic automation, all these repetitive manual processes can be more compliant with almost zero errors. That said, with RPA, you can reach out to your customers before they reach out to you. If you have not considered RPA till now, you should.

Personalization is a win-win proposition

Tailored real-time digital customer experiences are a clear differentiator in today‘s context. It adds value to customers as well as the banks.

With the right technology, banks could replace outdated attitudes with these modern digital strategies to reap the benefits and watch their investments appreciate over time.

PwC recommends prioritizing the five following steps to pave your path forward:

1. Update your banking systems. Simplify your expensive legacy core systems that sap your agility and speed to market with new competitive features or service offerings.
2. Build the technology to get more intelligent about your customers’ needs in real–time. It means integrating massive amounts of customer data and tying it with operational data.
3. Prepare your architecture to connect to anything, anywhere. To stay competitive, financial institutions will need to update their infrastructure to make it more agile and responsive so it can interact with data and systems that could be anywhere.
4. Work with the cloud, which makes it easier to capture, analyze and respond to your customer data.
5. Be API-first. Similar to online or mobile banking today, nearly all FIs will provide external APIs in the future. And banks will rely heavily on payment APIs to enable e-commerce.

To conclude, each of the personalization strategies and technology mentioned above is readily available for banks to provide a personalized customer banking experience right away.

Start today and position yourself on top of the heap. Book your free consultation here.

Want more convincing? Download our eBook on Personalized Banking.

Read Next:

• Trends to Watch: Major Fintech Trends in 2021 and Beyond
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• How banking customer journey has transformed post the pandemic