Ways You Can Use Real-time Personalization To Become Irresistible To Customers

Customer experience in financial services is undergoing a well overdue revolution. Customers are not ready to settle for anything less than hyper-personalized real-time interactions and offerings consistent across all banking channels.

Digitally native, non-traditional financial services players also known as Challenger banks are testing the limits of a delightful customer experience (CX) in this unprecedented COVID-19 environment where a fully digital banking experience is bound to get market traction.

As per Capgemini’s World Retail Banking Report 2020, just 24% of banks are able to use data effectively for hyper-personalization.

The Real-time Personalization Journey

For banks and financial services organizations with abundant data, real-time hyper-personalization is a unique opportunity to offer a value proposition that makes customers feel understood and valued.

Boston Consulting Group estimated in 2019 that personalization of the consumer experience has the potential to earn banks up to $300 million in revenue growth for every $100 billion held in assets.

The major challenges that the banking and financial services industry faces when it comes to real-time personalization are:

• Processing the millions of transactions in real-time
• Scalable technology platforms to enable real-time personalization
• Delivering a customer experience that is truly in real-time
• Leveraging personalization to cut costs
• Personalization Privacy Paradox

Processing Millions of Transactions in Real-Time

HSBC addressed the challenge of real-time data processing and personalization by integrating its on-premises mainframe with AWS services such as Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon DynamoDB. Leveraging the capabilities of these tools enables HSBC to engage in real-time with millions of retail banking customers in a more personal and dynamic approach.

July 15, 2020, AWS and HSBC have reached a Long-Term Strategic Cloud Agreement where HSBC plans to use AWS serverless and analytics services, including Amazon Kinesis, to create a more personalized and customer-centric banking experience.

Scalable technology platforms — Rabobank’s Robo Alerts in personal finance management

Rabobank, a Dutch multinational bank, known for its digital initiatives uses Apache Kafka for one of its essential service called Robo Alerts. The objective of this service of push notifications is to inform the customers about the various financial events, from small events such as transaction alerts to more complex events such as future investment recommendations based on customer’s credit score, etc.

Delivering a customer experience truly in real-time — Real-time motor insurance premium calculation by Direct Assurance AXA Group

In the insurance sector, the “YouDrive” program by Direct Assurance, a part of the global AXA Group, connects a DriveBox device to the customer’s vehicle that monitors and analyses the events during every journey and generates a score after the ride completion. The higher the score, the lower the premium based on the user’s driving pattern.

Leveraging personalization to cut costs — Monzo real-time analytics and customer service

Monzo, one of the UK’s challenger banks, refines and optimizes its fast-developing digital product with high-powered business intelligence analytics based on Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Platform as a single source of truth available in real-time.

Since they were able to understand how users behave and where things go wrong on a granular level, Monzo has achieved its goal, with 85% of day-to-day business queries answered by customer service staff directly, without consulting the Monzo data team.

The Personalization Privacy Paradox

Revolut, a digitally native challenger bank that offers app-based current accounts, received complaints due to an advertisement addressed to people that ordered a takeaway meal for one on Valentine’s Day.

The advertisement was criticized for appearing to mock singletons ahead of Valentine’s Day as it asked commuters of London Subway: “To the 12,750 people who ordered a single takeaway on Valentine’s Day. You ok, hun?”

A recommended approach towards Real-time Personalization

Quoting Steve Jobs here, “You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology — not the other way around”.

The ability to respond with agility to individual consumer expectations is a quality that makes an organization evolve its core business model and extend its offer beyond the traditional boundaries of banking and insurance.

Serving the unique needs of every customer, with hyper-relevance and hyper convenience might seem overwhelming.

But when banks and insurers use the right tools to figure out behavioral patterns among their consumers, they can offer trustworthy, omnipresent, real-time personalized services.

References

AWS re:Invent 2018: HSBC Uses Serverless to Process Millions of Transactions in Real Time FSV305

https://youtu.be/_UiyIJqDXXQ

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200715005162/en/AWS-and-HSBC-Reach-Long-Term-Strategic-Cloud-Agreement

https://aws.amazon.com/personalize/

https://axual.com/real-time-financial-alerts-at-rabobank-with-apache-kafkas-streams-api/

https://bankingblog.accenture.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Accenture_Financial-Services_Consumer-Study_2019_DACH.pdf

https://cloud.google.com/customers/monzo

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47117649

https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/revolut-app-controversy-data-fake-single-shaming-advert-latest-264103