From Bank Tech:
It’s not news that U.S. banking models are changing. Fluctuating market dynamics include regulations reducing traditional sources of revenue, and gradually rebounding employment rates that are sparking renewed opportunity and competition for credit card products. Additionally, technological advances are allowing for greater opportunity to connect with customers: smartphone usage and tablet adoption are driving higher consumer expectations of mobile and digital banking experiences, and big data is encouraging insights on customer spending and behavioral attributes.
In addition to these shifting macro factors, we are in the age of the empowered customer, in which brands are crafting customer-centric strategies to stay competitive, and are optimizing the customer experience at every touch point. Financial institutions have reached a tipping point in which they need to leverage these technological advances, while maintaining focus on the individual customer, to ultimately move to the top of the consumer’s wallet.
For instance, Citi is adopting a strategy to better engage customers by utilizing big data to gather a combination of credit card spending, smartphone geo-location and behavioral activity information to initiate one-to-one localized marketing via mobile for customers who opt-in. The marketing goes beyond personalization (what you know about the person) to contextualization (adding current behavior to past history), which means highly relevant marketing in real time.
As financial institutions continue to reach out to customers and members in various ways, the relevance and timeliness of those messages are of paramount importance. At the core of such interaction is a need for accurate and updated data that can be transformed to useful information.
Increasingly, this information is mined from powerful and sophisticated analytics systems that can identify customer likes, needs, and likely behaviors based on personal attributes and usage history on previous transactions.
Both personalized marketing and customer analytics are gaining attention in banking, and their use is accelerating at many financial institutions. It will be difficult for financial institutions to differentiate themselves if they are not currently using – or considering – such management tools. For these institutions, research into ways to expand one-on-one marketing and analytics capabilities would be time well spent.
