Digital Innovation for Financial Services: How Brands Are Disrupting the Banking Space

Marketing for financial institutions involves a myriad of regulations and traditions. Still, banks and other organizations are innovating and shifting to become more nimble and innovative to create differentiation. In recent years, we’ve seen more financial institutions leveraging the advanced capabilities of digital platforms to better target, engage and retain customers and prospects. They are now able to do this while improving regulatory and corporate compliance.

Where is the industry heading? Let's examine the digital innovations that are transforming financial services.

Expanding the Experience with Digital Platforms

Nearly every industry has shifted towards mobile services and self-service options, including financial services. Digital platforms allow banks to serve clients with lower costs but higher engagement. It’s not just a matter of following trends — today’s customers demand digital platforms and personalization for their financial experiences. They want greater flexibility in accessing financial information and managing their money. Financial Institutions must become more adept at understanding their customers and providing highly relevant content and recommendations.

Digital channels allow financial services organizations to connect with customers on a different level and offer scalable, adaptable platforms providing convenience, customization, and consistency to the experience. Technology and AI often drive these platforms but don't forget the human element. Getting this right enables a seamless experience as customers move between channels. It needs to all feel seamless and frictionless along the journey. A smooth digital platform connects customers to traditional contact centers or other channels for additional service. Think about meeting your customers where they are on the journey and maintaining context during the interaction.

Through our conversations with big clients, the focus of digital platforms is clear: personalization. Creating a customized experience means ensuring clients have the right content at the right time on a digital platform and in digital channels. Personalization also requires leveraging data through journey optimization to create real-time personalization. While it may seem overwhelming, organizations don’t have to start from scratch. Utilize tools from Adobe, Microsoft, Sitecore, and Optimizely to increase customer identification, conversions, and retention for marketing website properties and digital products and customize the existing tools to your needs.

Optimizing Your Interactions with Content Supply Chain

As digital innovation grows, one of the most impactful things an organization can leverage is the concept of a content supply chain. Much like how distribution companies, such as Amazon or Apple, see optimizing their supply chain as a critical path to success, a content supply chain provides the same benefits. When done well, there is an opportunity for significant differentiation and efficiency. These technologies help the entire content lifecycle, from ideation and creation to ROI tracking.

Consider these five key benefits for leveraging content supply chains:

1. Streamlining, automating, and accelerating the content creation and delivery process while maintaining brand standards and complying with regulatory and legal requirements.

2. Reducing errors. Streamlined workflows leveraging technology improve speed to market and reduce the chance of human errors.

3. Improving content discovery. Content supply chain connects content, makes recommendations, and improves searchability to maximize the impact of that content.

4. Supporting personalization at scale. Instead of sending the same generic version of content to every customer or partner, organizations can easily create and track multiple versions personalized for targeted audiences across distribution channels down to microsegments.

5. Enabling content performance tracking and measurement. Content supply chain closes the loop on each piece of content through metrics and ROI, allowing organizations to continually improve their content efforts and make data-informed decisions to shape their tactics and strategy.

Financial services firms need to prioritize content to optimize their content supply chain, which requires developing a comprehensive plan with key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the performance along the supply chain and understand the value being delivered.

Optimizing speed and quality through the content supply chain also means reimagining workflows and taking a cross-functional marketing approach to unlock new ideas, introduce new perspectives, and increase content production efficiency. Automation and AI accelerate content creation and help generate ideas, draft content, and even personalize messaging at scale.

How Financial Services Companies Are Innovating

Companies continue to transform around people, processes, and technology. Perhaps the most important aspect of these transformations is culture. Each organization has a unique culture that impacts its digital innovation. Consider the unique culture of your organization. It’s not about using a cookie-cutter approach but finding the right innovations and technology and implementing them in a way that reflects your culture and values.

The changes across the industry are being accelerated by Fintech companies as they adopt new digital platforms quickly and optimize their customer journey. These organizations understand that little differentiators make big differences; even small innovations can transform the client experience.

One example is Lemonade Insurance, which takes a quick and straightforward approach to remove the complexity of buying insurance. Instead of wading through the traditional research processes, Lemonade personalizes recommendations to make buying insurance more of an impulse and an overall simpler experience for customers. Buy pet insurance for your cat as easily as you make a purchase on Amazon.

Capital One also leans into personalization by keeping credit card customers up to date on progress and leveraging its partners and personalized offers. Rather than offering every type of card to every customer, Capital One delivers targeted, personalized offers and highlights the benefits of its cards that customers care about.

How can organizations follow these examples and continue to innovate into the future? There are three key areas of focus:

1. AI. It should be no surprise to see AI listed among digital innovations. One of the most impactful AI applications is to help employees service customers. AI chatbots, search, and knowledge bases empower employees to access information anytime and provide answers, not just links to additional content. Once companies have a robust internal AI offer, they can expand to the end customer experience.

2. Connecting employees and customers. Customers want smooth connections. Technology can keep employees informed and allow for smooth handoffs between employees or from digital channels to people.

3. Personalization with boundaries. There’s a fine line between delivering the personalization customers crave and being considered overbearing or possibly creepy, especially with financial information. Boundaries matter. Be careful not to over-personalize but to continually consider how the experience feels for customers and test and adjust as you go.

The Digital Future Is Now

Digital innovation is advancing rapidly, and companies have an opportunity to impact the industry and the future of the customer experience. With the broad adoption of AI, we are at the cusp of the next acceleration in change within financial services and finance markets. This will enable financial institutions to increase the performance of their risk, compliance, and fraud detection solutions and improve decision-making accuracy.

Digital innovation is here. As the industry transforms, organizations that lead with experience and technology will set the standard. Ready to explore the benefits of a content supply chain for your organization? Connect with us today.