As a curious person by nature, I’m always asking our team for their insights and observations. As many have been attending in-person conferences, fielding inquiries about the laser focus on digital transformation, and networking with industry peers, there is no shortage of knowledge gathering. It seems I’m not alone in wanting to listen and learn. The pandemic seems to have ushered in a fresh focus on how finserv can best meet the needs of customers in a digitized and demanding world.
For banks, wealth management firms, and fintech startups searching for answers, resources are critical. And there is no time to wait in tapping technology to drive performance and profits.
So I asked some of our core team members what questions they get asked. One thing was clear: there is definitely an increased need for basic information on just how cloud platforms work. How can and does technology impact the financial services industry, especially in today’s fast-changing, highly-regulated, and competitive market?
Here, then, a handful of questions, with resourceful answers, to help marketing teams better understand how platforms answer the need for greater personalization, and better customer experiences, to create operational and compliance efficiencies, while driving relationships and revenue.
Q: How does cloud technology support finserv offer management goals?
A: Purpose-built for financial services companies, leading industry cloud platforms allow marketing teams to accurately build personalized offers that provide an all-important elevated customer experience. With digital transformation being a primary focus in meeting customer needs, this prioritization of personalization efficiently and impactfully attracts, retains, and grows more customers. By offering personalized products, pricing, and fulfillment, the technology is a force multiplier for banks, wealth management firms, and fintech.
Q: What are the benefits of a Centralized Offer Management Process?
A: There are four ways that a centralized process delivers results:
- Increases the scale and effectiveness of personalized offers, resulting in higher revenue and faster time to market.
- Easily creates, manages, and tracks different offer types, across multiple lines of business, which eliminates complex and time-consuming manual processes.
- Quickly determines eligible audiences and prioritizes offers based on customer and business value.
- Omnichannel outreach, by presenting personalized offers to customers in any channel, including web, email, direct mail, print, or branch.
Q: In what ways do cloud platforms help with dynamic product and pricing strategies?
A: Financial services institutions gain and sustain a strong competitive edge when they can deliver complex products and pricing strategies. These are not possible with legacy systems, so cloud technology supports those products, pricing, and fulfillment needs. In addition, the technology can create bundled products (multi-product) offers that drive up-sell opportunities. Higher retention rates are realized by delivering relationship-based pricing that reflects the value of the relationship to the customer. Lastly, it provides the ability to deploy products and pricing for very targeted segments to obtain the best risk-adjusted returns.
Q: How can we improve the challenges of optimal workflow and governance criteria?
A: Today’s leading banks and wealth management firms are discovering that operational benefits, including more efficient workflow and coordination of governance issues, are byproducts of this cloud-based technology.
As an example, the Naehas platform offers these four core capabilities:
- Automated proofing, reviews, and approvals, reducing risk and decreasing cycle times.
- AI-powered quality control and auditing tools to ensure offers meet compliance and brand requirements.
- Collaborative review and approvals process to ensure that stakeholders have signed off on the final offers.
- Full auditability for every change throughout the change management process.
Q: How can our customer care teams improve the customer experience and achieve better enterprise-wide outcomes?
A: The answer focuses on the value of real-time fulfillment visibility. One of the primary benefits of cloud platform technology is real-time visibility into the status of offer fulfillment requirements, which ultimately drives a better customer experience. How?
It allows the team to collaboratively monitor offer responses and take a proactive approach to ensure customers satisfy all stipulations to receive their reward. The customer care teams are provided with real-time visibility into fulfillment status, as well, so they can promptly respond to customer inquiries. Notably, aggregate reporting and actionable insights allow them to track offers sent to consumers, as well as to measure offer reach and performance.
Q: Can these cloud platforms deliver these outcomes for all finserv institutions?
A: Good question! Ensuring that the tech vendor selected as a platform partner can deliver enterprise grade solutions is fundamental to the success of any finserv campaign, regardless of the size, type, or age of any financial services institution. Whether for a bank, wealth management firm, or fintech startup, the industry-specific platform is proven to meet the security and scalability requirements of top financial services organizations. An additional bonus: business configurable offer data models are flexible and easy to modify and manage without IT support. As an example, our solution offers out-of-the-box integration with 3rd party and home-grown solutions via secure APIs. Data protection for stored and transmitted data is at the center of everything we do.
Q: What should a marketing technology team look for in a finserv platform partnership?
A: A lot! To make the selection process easier, we surveyed top banks to develop a requirements checklist. It includes 70+ functional and non-functional criteria to better identify which platform providers best match the unique needs of any financial services institution.
