Tuning into Technology
Keeping up is hard to do. Staying adequately informed of market drivers, platforms, and regulations in financial services is, understandably, an ongoing struggle. Segment managers and martech leaders who best track and understand today’s tech innovations are best prepared to tap solutions for success. For those coordinating offer management, from strategy and operations to execution and fulfillment, collaborating with partners who understand their unique challenges can help them find and maintain a competitive advantage for the enterprise.
With time-to-market as a top priority, there’s no time to lose. The race to resources, and revenue, is on.
An in-depth information exchange was recently held, gathering a senior banking executive, system integration partner and software platform founder. The goal of the high-level discussion was twofold: identify market trends and technologies available in financial services, and share examples of how those innovations deliver significant, sustainable improvements.
Panelists shared their experiences with proven marketing compliance solutions. Chief among them was how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is leveraged to help banks streamline processes and maximize resources. These actionable insights on AI serve as navigational tools to steady the course for any finserv enterprise seeking strong ROI. One particular case study shows how a leading bank leveraged AI to streamline marketing compliance and gain a competitive edge, while increasing time-to-market and reducing risk.
Engaging Finserv Partners on Martech Innovations
Contributing their expertise with offer management, compliance, disclosures, customer engagement and personalization were:
Jenn Warren, who served as Senior Vice President, Partner Services and Delivery for MetaBank, a leading provider of innovative financial solutions for consumers and businesses in underserved niche markets. One of the country’s largest issuers of prepaid cards, Meta has issued more than a billion cards in partnership with banks, program managers, payments providers and other businesses.
Arindam Choudhury, a Data & Technology Executive at Capgemini, with 20+ years of experience in the financial services industry. He leads Capgemini’s Insights & Data Practice for Banking and Capital Markets. Arindam conceptualizes, creates and advocates transformation solutions to his clients who leverage advances in AI, Big Data & Cloud technologies to deliver tangible business benefits.
Rab Govil, CEO and founder of Naehas, an industry customer experience cloud purposely built for regulated industries. Rab is a founding board member of AI4ALL (www.ai-4-all.org). He regularly authors articles, and facilitates expert panels, sharing industry insights and innovations.
The on-demand webinar and companion eBook created from this discussion offer relatable, replicable support:
- Seven Trends in Financial Services
- Pitfalls and Pathways to Hyper-Personalization
- Best Practices for Achieving Regulatory Best Interests
- Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Financial Services
- Case Study in Streamlining Compliance Marketing
AI + Personalization = > CX
Tracking tech’s role, and finding examples of proven platforms, is critical in the fast-paced, increasingly complex financial services industry. Current trends, noted by Capgemini’s Arindam Choudhury, offer valuable insight into where the market is headed. He emphasized the evolution of banking and insurance as a service. Through his experience with leading companies, he observes these institutions are becoming much more open to partner integration as a means to land and expand customer relationships.
This shift toward partner integration is delivering multiple benefits. By bringing system integration partners in as part of the ecosystem, they are able to extend broader offerings to the customers. Driving this process transformation is Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI-powered platforms are increasingly allowing for first and third-party data. This enriches the organization’s ability to gain a stronger customer view. In turn, with more insight, its offer teams are better able to personalize to the segment of one. In monitoring these industries, Choudhury sees increased effort and importance in trying to humanize the digital experience, especially during COVID.
Additional market insights are driving martech teams to expand their vision and their resources. Amidst dramatic digital transformation, fraud and risk are on the rise, demanding greater oversight. Additionally, there is increased focus on automation, reducing both back-office costs and marketing costs. Greater attention to sustainability and ESG is calling on financial services organizations to become more responsible and resilient. Each of these is driven by, and impacts, hyper-personalization.
Humanizing the Digital Experience Wins the Day
Capgemini’s Choudhury reinforced the necessary focus on customer experience, noting,
“Hyper-personalization is expected to have the most significant business impact — and
a very high adoption priority — for all finserv organizations.” He added, “The technology exists today where you can bring in first and third-party data, create machine learning algorithms to create those microsegments, and help you to direct the personalization of the customer through the right channels.”
Hyper-Personalization 101
- Predict customer needs and preferences
- Arbitrate between all potential options
- Contextualize content to the customer and moment
- Deliver at moments of need
For Govil, and the Naehas teams who collaborate with clients on AI-powered platforms, this is where he sees the strongest potential for finserv to improve personalization, processes and profits. He notes, “The ROI is immense.”
The panel offered a range of recommendations they consider to be key to impactful personalization:
- If personalization is not impacting or informing better decision-making, don’t do it
- Link personalization to the individual customer journey
- Consider negative space
- Give the customer choice and control
- Ensure you are compliant with relevant regulatory mandates
- Finally, the golden rule – just because you could, doesn’t mean you should
Regulation Best Interest RBI
Linking personalization to the individual customer journey is critical, emphasizes Choudhury. Finserv marketing teams need to understand first: what part of the journey the customer is in, and, secondly, through which channel the organization is most likely to engage the customer.
Choudhury reinforces that hyper-personalization centers on implementation of Reg BI: Regulation Best Interest.
How does a bank demonstrate throughout the entire process of customer engagement that it has that customer’s best interests in mind?
Why AI?
For financial institutions partnering with platforms, trust and proven performance are essential. Solution partners who have experience collaborating to meet finserv needs deliver are increasingly delivering value in today’s competitive and complex marketplace.
Naehas’ AI Compliance tool delivers significant improvements, by enabling martech teams to respond to cross-enterprise and partner requirements with greater agility and confidence by:
- Identifying errors upon initial entry based on deterministic rules
- Centralizing rules so there is one source of truth for all teams
- Transparently tracking change requests, annotating documents, tracking rounds, and reviewing process progression
- Achieving faster and easier editing with automated compare, annotation and comment tools
- Auditing all comments and approvals quickly and easily through a traceable, searchable compliance archive
Client Collaboration: Making the Case
“It’s not a matter of AI replacing people. It’s a matter of AI partnering with our people, backing each other up. We believe that’s the first foundational step to our being able to achieve greater speed-to-market”
Learning how to leverage technology, while staying focused on the mission to truly service customers, is a valuable step in driving strong relationships and results, said MetaBank’s marketing executive. She worked closely with Naehas CEO Govil and Capgemini’s Choudhury to communicate the bank’s priorities, and their enterprise-wide needs. This way, she explained, the results would be realized by both their internal teams, and with stronger customer experiences. Proven platform performance brought myriad marketing benefits.
“It’s not a matter of AI replacing people. It’s a matter of AI partnering with our people, backing each other up. We believe that’s the first foundational step to our being able to achieve greater speed-to-market,” noted the client. She added, “We hit immediate efficiency goals with respect to our business model. We have improved turn times with this additional volume, which has been encouraging. We still have humans do their review to ensure the tool is decisioning properly in the early phase, but we do anticipate more dramatic change in the coming year. We have seen a reduction in compliance findings, and an uptick in quality.
“The AI platform is still proving to be a really good investment while we are seeing a lot of growth in our company, so we are excited about that,” said Warren.
In the next article in this series, we’ll present a case study that delivered measurable outcomes for MetaBank. Meanwhile, catch the on-demand webinar, or check out the eBook developed from our expert panel discussion.
