How can financial services provide more personalised experiences?

While Spotify’s fascinating annual reveal of our music habits, or food retailers’ nudges of what we might enjoy next demonstrate how personalisation of communications and experience creates win-wins for brand and customer, why is financial services late to the party?

Over half of consumers state they’re more likely to repeat buy after a personalised experience[1]. Equally, 80% of financial institutions view personalisation as essential to meet the required Consumer Duty led standards[2].

So what do we need to do to play catch-up? That was the crux of our breakfast event, run in partnership with The Financial Services Forum, with three leaders in the field:

• David Conner, Head of Experience Design at Scottish Widows
• Simon Ripton, Director of Propositions at Open finance platform Moneyhub
• Richard Sullivan, Financial Services Lead, LinkedIn
• Chair - Fiona Couper, CMO, Teamspirit

Key take-aways from the event held at Mintel were:

• Moments of truth. The importance of interacting with customers at key moments in their journey was critical - not just when providers wanted to sell to them
• Enriching existing data was essential to deliver meaningful customer understanding. And how Open Finance enabled improved tailoring of solutions on dimensions including vulnerability, behaviour and risk
• More creativity is required to achieve cut through. The panel discussed how personalisation needed to think bigger and go beyond the traditional
• The need for a value exchange. How there was a need to provide value in terms of rewards, decision-making information and entertainment through content and gamification in exchange for customers’ data, time and loyalty.
• Generational tailoring. The meeting discussed that given given Gen X and Gen Z's preferences and expectations of channels, tech and communication, tailoring now needed to work at these levels too
• The need for companies to now deliver customer personalisation at Total Experience (TX) level not just UX, spanning all customer touchpoints
• ‘Continuous engagement' as a marketing strategy. Speakers discussed how the impact of different engagements, nudges and interventions could and should be tested continuously to create learnings for later roll out and incorporation into experiences

Personalisation is just one of the emerging trends explored in our recent Signals report which you can view/download here

Sources:

1. https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-state-of-personalization-2021
2. https://www.dynamicyield.com/personalization-maturity-report-for-finance-2023/