Dino Konta
Chief Strategist
Banks were always trying to provide the best experience to their customers. Sometimes it was unique, but rarely personalized. Bankers have been investing in customer journey in their branches, turning them to look like living room, using music and fragrances to create comfortable atmosphere and unique experience. You would then sit with a banker and ask for a service (in person, but not personalized). And after all, the banker would provide you with the same service conditions as would the other customers, at least those from your customer segment (same size fits for all). And this is where the story of unique banking experience usually ends. The same goes to mobile and internet banking, great banking experience but… It’s the same UI and products offer for all.
Personalized User Interface vs. Absolute Unique Customer Experience (AUCX)
Nowadays, when technology is able to do more than we can imagine, we can innovate approach to our customers. Not only that we can provide our customers unique (personalized) user interface in mobile banking apps, but we can also tailor unique service conditions for each customer. So, getting these both parts together, we provide to our customers absolute unique customer experience.
If we would provide only unique (segmented) user interface and offer them regular financial products and services, that definitely wouldn’t mean personalized banking. Because it is not personalized consuming of service, it is only personalized informing or, better to say, personalized browsing. Just as same as we had on the beginning of this article – unique branch experience, but the service is as same as for all customers.
But what does absolute unique personalized digital banking mean in practice?
Roadmap To Solution
In our vision there are three tiers or levels of personalized banking experience implementation:
Tier 1
Solutions based on predictive AI, such as tools that recognize your behaviour to protect you from fraud, to reward your loyalty or to predict your leaving the bank and try to “change your decision”.
Tier 2
Here we introduce generative AI to support predictive AI. There is a voicebot in call centre that ‘recognize’ you. It responds to your inquiry, blocks your card on demand and gives you information about your credit card current debt and minimum payment. ‘The solution’ also predicts your day-to-day financial needs as well as long-term investment needs. It offers you personalized loans and custom-made product recommendations.
Tier 3
Personal banking assistance – AI driven banking experience. It is your digital personal banker that informs you about everything what you are interested in, and what bank wants to inform you about. It advises you, keeps you from financial default, creates best offer for your needs, negotiate for you with the bank and follow-up your request while it is in process there in the bank. It does not authorize your payment orders, it does only what you ask it to do for you in the bank.
It is a true financial assistant, your personal banker.
We at Architech work on Tier 3 solution. Our vision of banking is to have personal banker available on tip of our fingers, on-the-line, easy to cooperate with, the one who knows you the best, the one who is engaged to create your best banking experience.
Where are we now with personalized banking?
Although there are many different ideas on the web of what possibly could be the use case for personalized digital banking, we still don’t see much in practise. Looking to market, we could recognize ourselves somewhere at Tier 1 but struggling to step into Tier 2. Apart of technical obstacles to create advance solutions, certainly, a part of a ‘blame’ is on the AI regulation. EU has recently come up with first AI regulation of its kind, also setting the frontiers to personalized banking AI solutions.
Onwards, fear of generative AI ‘hallucinating’ is another blocker to release gen AI solution. It is well known that generative AI is capable to produce completely incorrect response with high level of confidence. So, there is a reasonable fear to have such solution responding to customers without control.
However, on a competitive financial market bankers already feel pressure to provide customers with more advanced digital banking experience.
Because, if bankers don’t do it soon, someone else will. After recent fight to keep payments market share, for bankers it seems that next, more difficult battle is in front.
Big tech is more and more into financial services, not only payments but recently with savings accounts. What’s next?
This article was created by human. No AI nor LLM was used during research and writing this text.
