Aaron Conant  0:18

Happy Thursday everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co founder and managing director here at BWG Connect. We're a networking and knowledge sharing group of 1000s of organizations who networking knowledge share together to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it might be shaping, this ever changing digital landscape as a whole, spent a lot of my time talking to organizations 20 to 30 a week when the same topics come up over and over again, we host an event like this. But we also bring in some of the top recommended experts out there to help us kind of walk through some of the data that we're seeing as a whole. A couple of housekeeping items as we get started. First off, we want this to be as educational informational as possible. If you have any questions along the way, drop into the chat or the q&a section there. And we'll try to get those answered real time. The other thing is just want to be really respectful of everybody's time. So we're starting this at three to four minutes after the hour. And we're going to wrap this up with probably between three and five minutes left in the hour as well, we're gonna give you plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. Before we jump into this, you know, some of the information we've gathered, just want to you know, shoot it over, we got some great friends over at EPAM. And Adobe, been really great friends and partners and supporters of the network helping a lot different organizations out within it as a whole. And they're gonna be part of the conversation today, and should be fun as a whole. But you know, Chris, I'm gonna kick it to you first, if you want to do just a brief intro on yourself. That'd be awesome. Then we kick it over to Alex. And then we'll roll through some of the data here. So I'm good.

Christopher Young  1:48

Yeah, sounds great. Thanks. And always thanks for having me and Adobe participate in the session. So Christopher Young, I am the industry strategy lead for financial services at Adobe. I aligned to our digital experience business. And I work with all of our large financial institutions, primarily across North America. So it ranges from, you know, the wealth and asset management insurance side to of course, you know, the major national banks to regional banks, all the way down to credit unions. So excited to be part of this conversation today.

Alex Jimenez  2:22

Awesome, Alex. Hi, Alex Jimenez, I'm managing principal and EPAM financial services consulting practice. And, you know, my work is working with banks and other financial services organisations, to help them with the digital transformation that we're going through in the industry. I have over 25 years of experience with in banking with the Bank, Bank of America, Ruppin process, Zions Bank Corp. And for the past few years I've been working on consulting with with banks. So practice, I've done the practice. Now I'm helping organisations do some of the stuff that I'm doing previous organizations. I'm very excited to be here and glad that you've included EPAM into this discussion.

Aaron Conant  3:16

Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure. So as we kick off, I'm gonna run through some of the data here, through the survey that we did together. And then we can kind of jump into some questions, discussion on the back end, if that works out for everybody. So quick recap here, executive summary, general questions, trends, looking forward, and then we'll have that q&a session at the end. So you look like we just want to take a high level, surveyed 77, banking professionals, wide variety of sizes of banks from less than a billion to over 100 billion across the US as a whole little heavily weighted towards California. But you see, we try to cover as much of the US as possible. And then a full spectrum of banks, although the biggest portion that was focused on those commercial retail banks as a whole, but also have some just straight up online banks and some of the smaller more local banks as well. Really, what we're trying to get at this point in time, and anything we do in this space across the digital landscape is getting a holistic view as a whole of what's going on. So if we look at just some of the things, what do you expect to happen to the frequency of branch visits by your customers for the following services over the next two to three years? And then the other one, what do you expect to happen to the frequency of digital use by your customers for the following services over the next two to three years? And I don't think anybody would be really shocked that we would see overall total number of visits to go down and frequency of digital use to go up. I just think that's a general trend as a whole across the board. As we keep going through it. Which of the following digital banking services does your bank offer? And so this was more of a focus on what's the current landscape of the services that are out there and what are you focusing on as a whole. And just as a follow up was we're kind of breezing through these. So you get a feel for what we're asking who we're asking, and the type of banks that we're asking. But also, we're going to make this available to everybody afterwards. So you can really deep dive into the data and more than happy to connect you with Alex and Chris, or Christopher afterwards as well. In this case, you know, we also asked for the respect of your bank, how likely are your customers to switch to a competitor for lack of digital services on your part? I was a little surprised and this one, but you know, you seem like there wouldn't be a lot for the longest time a tonne of loyalty. And in this space with a younger demographic, really more apt to switch based on the digital services that are being provided. You know, some of the lower end ones are just, you know, offering not a lot offering credit scores, credit health account aggregation. Obviously, though, the easier ones online bill pay and access to statements as a whole is something that I think a lot of people have been doing. We're gonna jump to the next slide where, how important of the following categories to your bank right now? And then what do you expect will happen to your budget for the following categories over the next one to two years, so really taking a prioritization and then looking at, hey, how are our banks going to be actually being spent spending money against those. So again, you know, cybersecurity regulation top of everybody's mind, but was really interesting to me was that the third one, there is personalization. And I think that goes along the lines of what we saw on the previous slide, where people are looking for a more digital relationship as a whole. And everywhere else, they're interacting from Amazon to direct consumer sites, whatever it might be, people are looking for a lot more personalization. And it's more of that, you know, treat me right. And, and delight me and specifically me. And so that's where they've you see, where they think they're gonna be spending money over the next one to two years, cybersecurity has to be number one, kind of in my mind, but number two super interesting personalized experiences, has made his way to the top. And I think at this point in time, you know, from a budget, and what are you going to be investing in, I think we're at a point on the digital side where that's something that can really be done. And it can be really done well. And so super interesting stuff that I that I've, I've seen from this, which of the following trends will result in the biggest change in financial services in the next five years. Another one, we actually did a dinner last night around data and data driven forms being filled out and what you can extract from data and from the forms that are being filled out, again, personalization showing up as number two,

the data driven side, I think we're all sitting on a tonne of data. And we finally gotten to a point where there's some tools and some AI out there that can help us make better decisions with it. Which of the following trends will you probably prioritise for the next three years, and again, personalization, I couple that really closely with being data driven as a whole, and being able to grab that data, crunch it, and then realise who the customer is, and how you give them a personalized experience.

So we just, we rolled through those really, really quickly. Again, we can share all of this data. But, you know, that was kind of just to set the tone as a whole for what we'd like to talk about. And again, if you have questions in the drop in the chat, drop in the q&a, and we'll be sure to get to them as a whole. But if I kick off the conversation, you know, and I'll kick it off with you, Alex as a whole, right? We we looked at some general survey questions, we had kind of that focus around like seven key trends that are popping up that we asked over and over again, you know, can you talk a little bit about, like, how you look at that space, in how you look at those trends as a whole? Yeah,

Alex Jimenez  9:06

so early this year. Those of us in financial services here at EPAM got together to talk about the the theme, the trends that we're seeing for for banking for the next couple of years. And also we were using data from our 2020 and 2020 long consumer surveys that we do, and in fact, we've just finished it at the 2022. We don't have the results published yet, but that's coming. But what we what we discussed was the seven themes being next generation experiences which we defined as that the organisms that the sorry the consumers are now expecting hyper personalization. And yes, people hate that word. And it's truly what they're expecting, because they're getting that from all other experiences beyond financial services. So now they expect that you know them, that you go on on your on your digital into your mobile app, and that you're going to get something that's different that is not, that is not that is for you and for you alone, right? So personalization is something that is expected, just as many of us expect, oh, actually, experience personalization, where we go on Instagram, for example, you know, I get all kinds of golfers, because of my searches throughout the internet, and, and I wind up buying stuff through Instagram, because of that, right. So that's sort of experiences is what consumers are expecting. And that is true, and that's come up come out in our surveys. Secondly, is this whole idea of, of seamless payments and open banking, or API driven experiences, I mean, a lot of these things kind of go hand in hand together. But from a technology standpoint, you know, it's no longer okay to have an experience that's very separate by channels, or very separate by by type of product that you buying or using from a bank, it should all be one and the same. And then you know, we're seeing the impact of payments that are being baked into other people's experiences, right, or other organisations experiences. So the example of Uber or Lyft, or any of those, they integrate integration of business models that are being offered out there buy organisations outside of banking. So I'm talking about banking as a service. You know, we're seeing more and more organizations, offering banking products and services that are no, they're not banks, or, or, or financial services, organizations. Just Just today, I was reading an article about Walmart, and how it is one of the biggest banking competitors that nobody talks about. Because they can bank you, right. And they have a very strong brand. And they and they have a lot of a lot of customers. So that that that is a theme that we see the fact that we are all need to think about how to future proof our infrastructures is another one, not just talking about core systems that can keep up with the current technologies, certainly, real time course is something that we should have in 2022, but we're still working in batch in most organisations. But beyond that, what else what other things we should be doing? Should we be moving to the cloud should be should we be not just talking about data warehouses? But data lakes? Should we go beyond that? Should we be thinking about what the impact of AI and quantum, quantum computing and all sorts of other technologies, so we need to start thinking about that journey, upgrading technology, data driven banking, of course, can't have personalization, if we don't understand the data, and we are not using that data to personalise experiences.

And not just for those experiences, but also to be able to drive the bank right to be able to manage the bank. I still see many organizations that manage by the rearview mirror, right, meaning that they're looking at reports of what happened last quarter, what happened a year ago, instead of trying to use current data capabilities to look at what's coming and what's next. And then finally, the last two, which are big ones, right regulation and security, security's not getting any easier. It's getting harder every day. And if you're not, if you're not looking at security as something important, then you're missing the boat. And clearly banks are thinking about security a lot. And of course, regulation, and regulation changes. And of course, you know, that's, that's different by locations different by state, different by country. And organizations that that are operating in various different regions have to keep up with all of those. So that, you know, so those are the themes that we we define, and those were the themes that we use for part of the survey. Yeah, I want to

Aaron Conant  14:29

I want to pull a little thread and there's a question that comes in as personalization is such a vague term. What does it mean to you? You know, and is it a segment of one and this is something that comes up across the board is how personalized you have to get because the segment of one is incredibly tough.

Alex Jimenez  14:46

Yeah, right. Yeah. But yeah, go go

Aaron Conant  14:49

ahead now as well, yeah, personalization

Alex Jimenez  14:52

striving towards the to was that the segment of one that's what I would say. Crystal For? Oh, sure.

Christopher Young  15:03

Yeah, I think one to one is optimal. I think there's a difference between a one to one personalized experience and say, the efficacy of marketing in that capacity, meaning if I tailor something down to the individual, how far do I need to go to get kind of the optimal return? Like, you know, is like segment based effective micro segments, all the way down to individuals, but But either way, you know, that's something that requires a lot of testing. Yeah. And it is, it is a journey, you always start with, like, you know, like batch and blast, one for Buddy prospects versus customers, and you keep working your way down. And your organisation changes along with it, the processes the technologies, but when if when we think about personalization, the way I would phrase it right, is your customer is looking for specific information on potentially any product or service, right in the moment that they need it, and ideally, unique to them. Right? So the challenge with that is going to be scale, right? How do you do that in the hundreds of 1000s? How do you do that? The millions? So, you know, the way I always think about it is, you know, what does that require speed, context, privacy, security, we talked about it machine learning automation. But in terms of technology, I think the idea here, right is you know, how well do your systems work together? How fast? Are we talking about data? How fast does it move? How quickly can you understand it? You know, if we think about the the journey, right? How coordinated? Are those channels? You know, how coordinate do they need to be? You know, and a lot of it is non technical, too, right? You know, we have to think about how your organisations operate, how they have to operate differently than they do today. Right? Because I bet you, you know, your organization consists of individuals that really think about very specific pieces of the journey, I send emails, I'm responsible for paid media. I'm the product manager of your authenticated space. These people have to work together because the customer doesn't think of things that way. It? Yeah, no, let's keep let's keep going. Because Alex, you covered a lot of ground on like, my head hurts in terms of all the things that could potentially cover in this, but but if I could, I just want to do one thing, because some things stood out in the survey quite a bit, the 56% of individuals that would be extremely likely or somewhat likely to switch. And if we take a step back from all of this, right, we do our own survey data. And the focus of the industry, right are meaningful digital interactions to improve financial health of the customer, meaningful digital interactions, because when we think about this environment that we're in, right, the consumer, your customers are going to need help help in making smarter decisions with their money. And if you go back to the survey, in terms of the top offerings, and then 9798 96%, right, access to statements bilpin, the ability to take pictures, checks, these are pure transactional activities that aren't going to cut it right, I can access my statements out of, you know, financial situation that I'm in or pay bills than that. So we have to think about going back. And we're going to send out the survey. But we have to think about the alerts and the account aggregation and the ability to manage investments and get credit scores, and even use chat for health. So I do want to put the consumer lens on all of these things that we're going to talk about, and really where the bar is going to be raised in what you need to deliver to your customers in digital.

Alex Jimenez  18:25

And I would add that when we do when we do talk to consumers about who they get advice from, it is almost always not a bank. In generally, and it's interesting, because when we ask customers, who do they trust the most with their finances, the bank is the number one. Choice, right, my bank, I trust my bank, they trust the bank to do the transactional stuff. They trust the bank to keep my money safe. But they don't trust the bank to get advice. They're getting advice from TikTok they're getting advice from YouTube, or they're getting advice from friends and family. That's where they're getting advice. They're not getting advice from your branch manager, the not getting advice from your local banker. And and when we talk about personalization, it's not just personalizing the the minute experience within within mobile banking necessarily, but he's being able to give advice within the context of what they're doing, and given it in a way that is actionable and is and it's appropriate. You know, we spend tonnes of money in the industry on building these beautiful financial literacy sections of our website. And when we look at the data, or how often those webs that those sites those pages are actually visited, it's a very small amount of time Not many people go to your bank to read your about financial literacy. And now people actually want to it's boring. You know, I don't want to read a 2000 word article about how I can save. However, if you are getting alerts in giving small bite size, contextual advice to customers, they're more likely to look at that. I mean, to me, the, for my own experience, when American Express tells me that I just use my car, even though I just use my card, I kind of makes me feel good about it. And it'd be great if they also gave me some advice when they use that card. Right. And that doesn't happen yet. But that's the sort of thing that we're talking about. And when you're personalizing the experiences, those are the kinds of things we can I,

Christopher Young  20:55

I totally agree with that. The idea that the bank's website is never going to be a destination for that type of content. And, you know, I want to get too off topic, but this idea of, of the journey, right of like, what is the individual trying to accomplish? What does that you know, typically look like? And where can you embed, or provide context along that to nudge them or add value in those moments, versus a static repository, maybe not static, maybe you're doing a lot of content there, but a repository of going to a bank website to read that type of content, you're right, it just doesn't seem really natural. The other thing, by the way, before I forget, because I'm really excited about some of the things that you said as well is about, I think you've alluded to, like embedded finance, right. And that's the other thing is, you know, where the banks are right now is they're focusing on perfecting their journeys as they should. But if you think about the customer journey, it's going to extend beyond your boundaries beyond your own properties. So that's an entirely different way of thinking in terms of partnerships, and ecosystems, right, and putting yourself where that payment or transaction or financial knowledge is required, that gets even harder, maybe a little too far. But that that's like the degree of personalization, that we have to think about outside of areas of our own jurisdiction, frankly, so partnerships are going to be important.

Aaron Conant  22:20

I just want to jump into the personalization side a little bit, because we talked about being data driven, which means you have to be collecting the data, crunching the data using the data. What, what, from the technology side is the biggest hurdle. And then what then so there's the technology piece, but then what does, you know, the actual staff look like, internally? Who do you hire? Right? Because that's another piece? Is that somebody that's outside that you have to go, you know, find and bring in? Or is this somebody retrained? Where does it fall?

Alex Jimenez  22:51

Yeah, it all depends on the organisation where they are with the data journey, right? I mean, we're going to be talking about journeys a lot here. Because it's, you know, do you have access to the data is probably the number one question, right? Oh, first is, are you gathering the data? Right? And we know, we are gathering the data, but where does it sit? And, and where does it go? Where's it? Where's, where's it stage and how we can get access to it, and what, what tools we can put on top of that, et cetera? It all depends, some organisations, you know, have a core system and their data sits in their core system. And that's it. And so the challenge for them is significantly bigger than someone who has already gone down the path of building a data stack that can give you access to the data and can build artificial intelligence intelligence on top of it on top of that, to, to, to be able to give some insights. But you know, this, you don't necessarily need to have data scientists. If you are, you know, if you're a billion dollar credit union, there are tools, there are partners that you can work with, that can help you do that. And that's, you know, that's what Ethan does. What's it Adobe does, what this what we do, and we can help you with that. But it's not, but it doesn't mean that you have to go out and hire a data scientist, that's going to make four times what your CEO makes.

Christopher Young  24:26

Because there are times when CEO makes maybe I should get into three and

Alex Jimenez  24:30

we should all have gotten

Christopher Young  24:32

doing the wrong thing this whole time. How do I answer that question as well with by being super repetitive, okay, so I think generally everybody gets right that that a lot of the systems that you have in place are not designed to move in real time, or incompatible with cloud based systems. Don't speak to each other can't be synchronized. I mean, the way that we at Adobe we look at technology and some of the things that we're doing right is not necessarily to just allow mandate everything that you have and replace it right? We recognize that there are systems that are mission critical that that can't be replaced, and nor should they, right. They're not designed to do the things that you're supposed to do in terms of personalization. So for us, we're looking to aggregate data from different sources for activation purposes, unification and activation, like how can we have a common understanding of the individual across that journey, we're gonna say that a lot, but across that, you know, journey, and then ultimately be able to activate that data, you know, in real time. And then also to coordinate you know, these different channels, it could be different systems that are sending emails or managing your mobile app, it's indifferent to us, right? We just want to make sure that we can speak to those systems to make sure that they're being consistent and progressing that customer down to that meaningful outcome. What do we look at?

Aaron Conant  25:53

Yeah, love it. I'm also thinking from the standpoint of we keep talking about data. But when you look at the how important are the following categories to your bank right now, cybersecurity, regularization and regulation and personalization?

Was all three go hand in hand? Right?

I mean, the collection of the data, what you're doing with it, following the regulations, and then using it to curate a personalized experience for somebody I see, love to hear your thoughts on that. I mean, it all goes hand in hand. So it's, I guess, I'm not surprised they show up as the top three.

Christopher Young  26:26

Yeah, yeah, it does go hand in hand, but it goes hand in hand in a regulated industry, like financial services, because it's what's required. Right. Like, you know, it's like the prime directive of a regulated industry that holds customer information that sensitive and especially financial data. So these things have to be addressed no matter what. The one thing I'll say, though, is why, you know, people talk about well, financial services isn't as far ahead as other industries. Yeah, because they have to deal with that. Right. You know, the the reality is addressing cybersecurity and regulatory concerns, competes with some of these digital initiatives, it's syphons off resources and budgets, that slows the experience down. That said, right, I just want to add one example. You know, we have a bank and we have actually multiple banks, I met with a bank in Canada last week, that they're using real time data and behavioral data for digital to analyse customer interactions and notify, you know, the, whoever needs to be a suspicious activity. So can you start identifying patterns in behavior? Right, you know, personalization is one thing, but also you can start looking at intention, right, and say, Okay, maybe potentially, this is a bad actor. And they're maybe trying to, you know, open 1000 accounts and you know, game the system, but either way, like, that's an opportunity that the same technologies that are used for analysis and personalization can help in areas of cybersecurity and risk. So interesting

Aaron Conant  27:54

question comes in, have you seen any good examples of financial planning that are personalized giving customers advice? That is right for them? I'm still very disappointed with men into it, you know, has offered

Alex Jimenez  28:04

as a whole Yeah, that the the problem with with what we have done in the industry for personalized financial management has been that it's been a separate thing. It's been an opt in kind of activity, right? It's, it's a separate tab within your digital banking to separate tab or a separate functionality altogether, right? You want finance? If you want to have aggregation through men? Do you have to sign up for men and it's not from your bank, right? So if you look at the people that have used things like Quicken, or mint, you're likely to find some very analytical people. And it's not the vast majority of people, right? So you'll find accountants and engineers, who are the ones that are spending a lot of time looking at their finances and categorising it and doing building pies that shows them where they spend the money and so on. And that's what you're offering to your regular consumer. And consumers are not interested in that, which is why I said that you got to have information that's contextual and advice that is easy to digest. And I think that's been the problem with with these solutions that we have, how I see many good examples. Christopher just talked about a bank in in Canada that does use that information for for security, but there are some banks and I won't use names but you know, if you if you reach out to me, I can connect to them that have that do use that information for for giving advice. And the challenge has been given advice real time that's you know, in some cases, it's really be more of a you know, we still live in a batch world and Therefore, we're gonna have to send you an email or some sort of other channel. But the, you know, the, the outlook is we want to be able to present in real time when they're when they're there. So it's, it's, there are some organisations that are in that path and move away from the word journey.

Aaron Conant  30:18

Yeah, I wanted to pull that thread just a little bit, because we had, you know, 80% of respondents say that we need to invest in next gen offerings.

Right, what is,

what does that look like, from a customer experience standpoint? What should the consumer out there be thinking about? Or be happy for, or whatever, you know, the top banks working on to put out there as the next gen offerings, what does that look like?

Alex Jimenez  30:41

Well, it's really more of what the banks should be thinking and not what the consumers should be thinking, right. But the banks should be thinking about how to provide services that are in concert concert with, within all ways that you serve the customer, right? The you have a very different experience, if you go to a branch and open an account versus what you do online. And it doesn't have to be that way. All right, you could be using the same technology and the same and the same capabilities to do it in various channels. So it's really just thinking through, what is it that the customer wants to do and how you're going to serve and, and provide a single view, that's your brand that is presenting that to the customer. And we're you know, we see a lot of this Britt processes, because, you know, as banks, we bought the best mobile app that we could find and the best online banking that we could find. And, and we have, and we have a website that was designed by our agency, and so on, and then you know, the experience that customer has is so disparate, depending on the channels, so part of it is just being you know, into a single experience. That's a minimum, and then really just start thinking about just as Christopher said, what what is it that the customer wants to do? Customer doesn't want to get a mortgage, the customer wants to buy a house, right? Mortgages, a chair is a vehicle that they use to buy to buy the house. But So think through that think through what is it that they're they're hiring the bank to do, as opposed to oh, we gotta get we've got to have a mortgage that looks like the bank down the street. Yeah. Chris, I'd

Aaron Conant  32:24

love to hear your thoughts on like, next gen two, what's what's coming down the pipe?

Christopher Young  32:29

Oh, you're on mute. Don't get on mute. Okay. The things that we talked to the, you know, some of the top banks about a lot of it, I wish it was like, Hey, this is this thing that they're figuring out. It's all mobile based. And, you know, I'm sure a lot of positive things around virtual assistants that are mobile based. But for them, it's the connectivity, because it doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter if you have like this amazing virtual assistant. On your mobile application, we work with a bank that you know, has, you know, PFM technology sending a millions and millions and millions of suggestions, right, if it's limited to that specific channel, right, if that's the that's the gap, right? So a lot of the things that we're focusing on is how do we get awareness of what the core banking system is indicating what transactional activity are happening? What recommendations is the PFM technology taking place? What is the marketing function trying to do based on the segments that they're having for personalization purposes? Today, these are three distinct things, three distinct things that do not communicate with one another. So that's, that's the big thing that we're focusing on, right? That is data oriented, that is orchestration of attorneys. And there's also content contents that fast follower to data, right? If data is my understanding of the customer content is how I express that to the customer. So big enterprise initiatives, right, that are trying to not only put together the different channels and points of interaction and systems that run that, but also the different business units that regardless of where they fit organizationally still talk to the same individual or consumer, those things have to be brought together as well.

Alex Jimenez  34:07

Yeah, what and in those cases, what the customer experiences is, is a disconnect. Right? So I just went online and applied for a mortgage. And then two days later, I get an email from marketing, you know, telling me about a mortgage. Right? You're in the

Christopher Young  34:27

segment, you fall in the segment, it didn't get information. Exactly, exactly. But at least the targeting is right. That's the good news. Good.

Aaron Conant  34:39

But me, we also get into this, the two sides of this multiple sides, personalization, but two of the big ones are the actual experience a customer has on the platform. It can be on the website or on the mobile app. And then this personalization of how are you communicating and what are you communicating to them? Is there a bigger emphasis you're seeing right now? Is it just showing up first the mobile app and the services being offered? Or is it more focused on the actual? How do we talk? And what are we saying? Because you're just bringing up, Chris, you're just bringing up content? Like, what's the content that you serve? A perfect example is that I already have a mortgage. Right? I just applied for a mortgage, you don't need to advertise to me.

Christopher Young  35:22

Yeah, what I'd say is, like, I think what you're describing is you're talking about the personalization of the banking experience itself. And then the communication of trying to engage people with that experience. What I would say is, you know, today, those are two different things, two different functions. But they're starting to converge, right. And a lot of the things that we're trying to do with our systems and our customers are trying to do is to converge these things, you know, and embed more of what we consider marketing in the product experiences, either through alerts or embedded within transactional experiences versus overt marketing, which is very clear as to as to what it is. So what I would say is, you know, there, again, these things are running in parallel, and then their enterprise function is trying to bring them together, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Aaron Conant  36:12

There you go. So a lot of discussion that comes in, Are there best practices to deal with leakage when all the marketing communications can't be synced fast enough?

Christopher Young  36:22

I think there's always the way that we talk about all of the things that we do, right is there are stages in which you're doing, right. And there are steps that you can take, right? There's steps that you can take with data, there's steps you can take with channels, there are steps you can take with specific journeys. So for example, if you were to isolate a mortgage application journey and run it in a specific way, like these are the individuals that we're going to isolate. This is the stream of communications, you might have a better shot at coordinating that specific journey and dealing with that leakage, right, even if you have to delay in some cases. But if you're focusing on kind of synchronizing and timing those messages, if you isolate a specific journey or a specific channel, you have a shot of addressing it, sometimes, like there are I mean, the reality is the question here about how to deal with leakage when they can't be synced fast enough? I mean, the reality is that is a technology fix. If you can't get that information in real time, then that's going to be a problem. So you can isolate, right? What are the specific signals or data that I need, you don't need all of it. So the example that you gave Alex is, if I, if I sink, a mortgage complete page, like the page that renders when I've submitted, right, and it's considered complete, and then sync that fast, I could have avoided the email that I sent you that one page. If it was a mortgage start without a complete, right, then I would probably email you again. And but I would also acknowledge that you haven't finished and the email version that would be sent would be finished your application, you know, so that's the sort of way to think about right, like what specific data that we need, right to inform communication. So they don't you don't have the Alex experience, which will be branded now as the Alex experience.

Aaron Conant  38:15

Yeah, Alex would love your thoughts there as well.

Alex Jimenez  38:18

No, I agree. With by Christopher said, it's absolutely the issue. There's also you know, there's a there's a bit of the art of, of, you know, the creative art that we do in marketing, and that that's where it fits, right, that's the, that voice of the brand needs to be reflected in how you approach it. And what I see organizations is kind of used that whatever the vendor provided you, and that's where you're going to push. And suddenly, you'll have an opportunity for marketing. Not in the overt way, but right there that you're not you're not taking, because you're using whatever your vendor gave you to communicate. I mean, in a simple, simple experiences, when when I open an account at a bank, and I get the standard email back saying you just you know, congratulations, you're part of our family, blah, blah, bah, bah, clearly was a It's not speaking in the same voice as the bank. And he always takes me out of the out of the experience and makes me think, Okay, why is this this way? And that's a real simple example. But if you started thinking about how we do give advice and real time advice, you got to be thinking about applying that. And I know, this is just an addition to what Christopher said, not a direct answer to the question. Yeah, it's I think we've

Aaron Conant  39:47

moved beyond. I mean, we have to move beyond that just checkboxes, right? Have a I need a standard response. When somebody you know, completes a form send it out. We need to have more thought out The back end, if we're going to be personalised, there needs to be more going beyond digital, you know, one point out here. And it's really interesting, if I have conversations, Ian just had one last week around the healthcare industry, and how much it mimics what's going on, especially around age and demographics in use. And then, you know, trying to tailor experiences, personalization, offerings, communications to, you know, a wide audience that also has a lot of differentiation. And total, I will say, tech savviness, as a whole, like any tips, you know, okay to you, Alex first, but Chris, I'd love yours, too. You know, for, you know, how banks can help. I don't know, like you solve that problem or address the issue of, you know, there's a large portion of people that may not be as tech savvy as we'd like them to be?

Alex Jimenez  40:57

No, well, you're dealing, you're dealing with customers in all banks make a big mistake, when they think about a customer being a branch bank, I mean, a branch customer versus a digital customer, most customers, you know, kind of move throughout the channels, whatever channel is convenient for them at the time. And yes, there's some customers that are wanting to be more person to person and less tech savvy and so on. But whatever you do in one in one area should be applicable elsewhere. So when we talk about personalization and giving and giving advice to customers, it should not just be we are only going to do that on the mobile app, or we're only going to do that online. And we're only going to do that from email or texts, that that information should be relayed to the person that you're dealing with. So at a branch, that kind of personalization bubbles up to because the branch employee gets the information to relay that that the advice to a customer in person, call centre person as well. So you know it, you got to be thinking holistically about all the channels and how customers deal with them. And yes, in some cases, you don't you there are certain themes, things that can only be done through a device or through a person, but you got to be striving towards the ability to be able to do it throughout. Not long ago, I talked to a bank that were really excited about the this process they had where they were sending texts and messages when a customer did something. And and and I asked them well, what if I'm not a digital banking user, and they pretty much threw their arms in the air and said, Well, I you know, we can reach them. Really, you can reach them you have their phone number, what if you call them? Is that something you would even consider? And they've said, Gee, you know, we never thought of that. I don't know, if we can build a capability to have a bunch of people calling out people it's like, okay, well, that's a different story. But you hadn't even thought about that. So there's a way to do that involve the quote unquote, non savvy customer. And I'm gonna go on a tangent here, because what you said reminded me of this, when we looked at the data in this survey, we found a significant difference between the larger banks and the smaller banks in their own tech savviness. And, and some other responses that we saw on the national banks where they weren't they lean more towards the need for personalization and for data and for infrastructure, or build up versus the national versus the small regional, small community banks and credit unions. They talked more about regulation and cybersecurity much more so than the others. And to me, it's, it's it it reflects on what we see in the market, we see that new customers to our banking system, which are generally younger but not always younger, because the roles could be immigrants and others tend to always go to the big banks because the the association of them having better better product services and or digital in the smaller organizations are not getting their fair their fair at bats because they're not they don't have the brand that says look, we understand where you're where you're going. We understand where you are, we honestly understand who you are, who you are, instead of saying you know, we also provide this in our name has a local name. So it to me that was a kind of a glaring difference in the results that we need to bring up some point. Well, I just thought so

Aaron Conant  44:56

another question that comes in. Can you give us an example of a retail bank that has addressed the shift to digital in a new or innovative way that we can learn

Christopher Young  45:03

from. I could start and I do want to address the some of the points before, I would just say that the idea of convenience is universal. So it's not an a, you know, convenience doesn't discriminate by age. So, you know, I think there was a chase as an example, in the pandemic, they had a press release, or they announced some of their digital metrics, I don't, I won't get the numbers, right. But a significant portion of their net new digital users were of older demographics, it's just a question of like, well, it's just once you have the experience of using this or doing something digitally, and it's super convenient, you know, that it becomes your preference, it's easier, we had a retail brokerage, what would happen was people would come in to adjust their forms, like beneficiary designation, but they were training their their in branch personnel, to show them the person that's coming in how to complete that task and fill out that form, digitally. And what they saw as increase of those, you know, those forms digitally completed, and less and less people coming in for those types of activities. So that's the idea is, like any opportunity that you can to, and I believe that there are examples of, you know, banks, using call centres to say, here's how you could do this digital. But to your point, there was a, we worked with a bank in the UK. And you know, they started in a similar way where everybody started, right, collecting data, creating segments of crossed customers and prospects, and really broad categories, and targeting each of these segments with batch materials. What happened in the pandemic, and what continues to happen is that there are multiple devices that people bank with. So now they have a really fragmented understanding of who these individuals are. And that segment, broad batch and blast stuff was not hitting the market wasn't working. So there's also always we're talking about before, right, the data that just simply isn't shared between online and offline. Isn't shared financial services, banking is an omni channel industry today. Right? So if systems can't share, then you're never going to stitch that journey together. So they used you know, what you know, are, are real time data platform, right? So it pulled this information from online and offline to that individual, right, making those updates in real time. So we get data that can update in real time, sometimes we get it batched. But either way, it gives us a better shot of synchronizing that data. So what took them previously 15 days to create and crunch and I think use the term and transform that data into actionable insights. They can do that with these consolidated data sources coming into the system and apply that to subsequent interactions, like almost instantaneously. So what does that look like? Right, that looks like if someone you know, having a branch interaction, that would that that branch interaction could inform the next digital interaction? Or right someone comes into a branch and they talk to a banker, and that banker has context over the previous digital interaction that should inform the discussion that we're about to have. Versus right. Alex, what's your name? Tell me what you're interested in, like you're starting over every time, right? So that unification of data and the speed in which you can get the information and then apply it back to the journey? I think the question is around a leakage reducing that leakage is what gets you to that end state. So this is a bank that, by the way, for 100% boost and loan applications in one year after going live. And they were able to cut a million dollars out of the marketing costs, because they were suppressing unnecessary communications, and not creating versions that they didn't have to and not oversaturating, you know, specific populations with, you know, many unnecessary messages.

Aaron Conant  48:58

I love it from that standpoint, because in the end there, you know, on the technology side, there's investment, a lot of times that needs to be made. So I want to kind of jump into that question comes in around that. How can technology help to address the digital deans?

Christopher Young  49:13

Can someone say technology investment to someone from Adobe? Yeah. Why don't you jump in. But also like,

Aaron Conant  49:21

just like real quick, how you're gonna get there is like you're saying there can be savings in it? Right? It's not just a another technology sunk cost that gets put into the system?

Christopher Young  49:31

It's a great question, right? Because what we are trying to communicate to our customers is the revenue and top line growth consistently. So how much incremental revenue can you drive? The easiest thing for us to do is to knock out costs, the easiest thing, right, you want to save, you know, that's what we immediately bring to the table. And when when when we talk about technology investments, I'll give you an example. But Alex, why don't you go ahead and do that

Alex Jimenez  49:59

i I'll give you an example of a pretty successful national bank or regional, large, large regional bank, it has been working on building an account opening platform for three years now. And they, the, they say that they're okay that 20% of their accounts are coming through the digital channels 20% 80% are coming into the branch. And when when we talk to them about, you know, comparing themselves against the chases to be a vase, the capital ones, and even some smaller organisations in their footprint, they say, Yeah, but you know, our customers are still 80% of our customers just to come into the branch. So, you know, we don't have the business case to, to justify, increase investments into into it, the reality is that, if they were to get their fair number of, of customers coming into the digital channel, that 20% would be much, much higher, and the revenue that they would be getting would be significantly better. And so this is not a cost savings play. This is not let's move, work away from the branches, so we can close branches, but it's, let's, let's build a better digital funnel a bit better digital branch, so we can get more people through and get more clients that way. But in their mindset is, you know, it's cost and, you know, we can't close enough branches to justify this, this expense. And the reality is that they're giving away the the, you know, customers will come in, will try to use, try to get an account, they'll get frustrated, leave and go to another bank and do it online. And they'll never know. Because that that prospect is never going to say, by the way Bank X, you know that you did not serve me well. And therefore I went somewhere else,

Christopher Young  52:15

or like individuals that don't go to the branch, individuals that don't live near a branch. That's where all the less money you're leaving off the table. Why not? Why not get to answer the the technology quo, I want you to find like weird, like, it's why I'm here. Yeah, jump

Aaron Conant  52:28

Yeah, the technology sheets, and then we're trying to answer

Christopher Young  52:31

this, I know, we're gonna give you time to answer this in like 60 seconds, right? There's a lot of talk around customer data platforms. But I think an important thing that to consider is customer journey analytics. Right? So we need to move away from Channel performance to journey intelligence, what I mean by that is, branch had these many transactions call centre and centre had this many resume, you know, we had a great it was called we resolved it, it was done quickly. That call successful call could have been a failed web interaction, a successful web interaction could have been a failed mobile interaction. So that's the thing that we have to solve for, like Journey intelligence. So we have the ability to ingest call centre data, web behaviour, branch interactions, transactional data, mobile app marketing responses, stitch them together, right in a sequence of chronological order, right, that will allow an analyst at you can see the journey, and what you're looking for, in particular, our breaks in the digital journey that cause someone to pick up the phone or walk into a physical location when they didn't want to. So those are things that drive cost, you know, so we had a company that was looked at like five different data sources, including call centre, including product ownership, including digital, right, they cut their time to find out the problems by two months. So imagine finding digital breaks in the process and having it take you at least two months to do it's over. It's it's opportunity lost. So they cut that down by two months. And they found 300,000 Just in this initial five data sources 300,000 calls, right that they could save annualised and if you do the math on that, that's approximately like a million bucks or so. So the point I want to make is we have to think about measuring the journey because you cannot optimize or fix what you can't measure. Awesome.

Aaron Conant  54:16

I think it's a great place to kind of wrap it up here. Chris, Alex, thanks so much for your time today. Again, you know, everybody you want to follow up conversation more than happy to connect you with both Alex and Chris here. We'll make sure everybody gets a copy of you know, the full report is a whole but you know, just all around fantastic conversation again, my friends. So as we wrap this up, hope everybody has a fantastic Thursday. Everybody, take care, stay safe and look forward to having you at a future event. Alrighty, thanks again. Thanks, Chris. Great chat. As always.