How to Create a Website Presence That Generates New Business

Jim Marous (00:11):

Hello and welcome to Banking Transformed, the top podcast in retail banking. I'm your host, Jim Marous, founder and CEO of The Digital Banking Report and co-publisher of The Financial Brand.

Jim Marous (00:21):

A strong web presence isn't just an advantage, it's essential for survival and growth. In today's competitive marketplace, a powerful digital footprint can mean the difference between thriving and merely surviving. Understanding how to optimize your digital presence is crucial. Whether you want to increase brand awareness, drive engagement, or boost conversions.

Jim Marous (00:44):

In this episode of Banking Transformed, we are joined by Anil Aggarwal, the CEO of Milestone. Anil dives deep into the strategies and principles behind building a commanding digital web presence. From content creation to audience engagement, to measuring and adopting changing technologies, he shares the key elements of a successful online strategy.

Jim Marous (01:08):

Anil will also share ways financial institutions of all sizes can go beyond using their website for brand building to creating new business opportunities.

Jim Marous (01:20):

Traditional banking websites are often designed as mere digital brochures, and they fail to capture the sophisticated needs of the modern consumer who express personalized experiences, seamless transactions, and real time financial insights.

Jim Marous (01:36):

Banks can now convert casual visitors into loyal customers by completely rebuilding their digital presence with advanced features like AI powered product recommendations, interactive financial planning tools, and customized content delivery.

Jim Marous (01:52):

So, Anil, welcome to the show. Can you introduce yourself to our audience, and tell us a little bit about how Milestone helps financial institutions strengthen their digital presence?

Anil Aggarwal (02:03):

Thank you, Jim. Good morning, and I'm very excited to be on this show. I’m Anil Aggarwal, CEO of Milestone. Milestone is a MarTech, marketing technology provider as well as marketing services provider. And we work in many different verticals, finance being one of the key verticals that we work in.

Anil Aggarwal (02:27):

And what our platform does is, essentially it brings in all the tools that any financial institution, banks or mortgage lenders or any location-based business needs to build out their full digital presence. That includes their website, their visibility in the local listings profile, any of the AI tools and analytics. So, we bring the full background there.

Anil Aggarwal (02:58):

The biggest thing that differentiates us from a lot of other companies in similar space is Jim, what we're doing is focusing on how do we actually make this website and Amazon equal in for the bank? How does this site actually produce money? So, this is not just a website, and you rightly said, people do a lot of brochure sites, and really what we're after is how do you get the site to make money for the banks.

Anil Aggarwal (03:28):

And that's what we excel at. And the money can come in many different ways, whether you're looking for more account openings or you're looking for more deposits, or you're looking for more mortgage lending applications, or you're looking for more credit card sales. So, that's really what we excel at.

Jim Marous (03:49):

Well, it's interesting Anil, as I mentioned in the introduction, many financial institutions have not updated their websites for years. Maybe they've made little tweaks here and there of new products introduced, but the overall foundation has been more of a broadcast branding element rather than an interactive digital tool.

Jim Marous (04:09):

What fundamental elements make up a true, effective digital presence in today's marketplace? So, what should organizations focus on for a better digital customer experience?

Anil Aggarwal (04:21):

That's a great question, Jim. One of the biggest things that we find all the chief marketing officers of different banks and CEOs is really shifting from information based tool (like a website that just gives you information), into a platform that will actually do business development, lead generation and drive revenue for them.

Anil Aggarwal (04:47):

So, we see this as a very fundamental shift. I think it really started after COVID and then it's just continued to accelerate. And banks are increasingly relying and redoing their website to make sure that the site actually generates revenue.

Anil Aggarwal (05:06):

So, now if you think of ... in my view, a lot of people think it's all very complex. I think it's actually very straightforward. There are two or three components to it. One is making sure that when you're building your digital presence, when you're building your website, how do people find you.

Anil Aggarwal (05:26):

They can find you from advertising, which is fantastic, but you also need to make sure that foundationally you're set up so that you're maximizing the organic and the local listings and all of that revenue that would come from the website.

Anil Aggarwal (05:40):

So, how do they find you? And once they find you, what is the digital experience you're delivering? If I happen to have expressed interest in one of your mortgage products, either by browsing to that page, or because I clicked on your mortgage ad, then how do you actually deliver that personalized experience for me so that I can actually buy that product?

Anil Aggarwal (06:05):

So, those are the two things that we hone in on. Now, within those, it starts getting sophisticated. So, in terms of for example, right now the biggest thing is making sure that your website is optimized for search.

Anil Aggarwal (06:21):

But one thing which is very interesting, Jim, what we've seen in the last two, three months is an increasing amount of traffic from AI engines. So, we're seeing more and more traffic from ChatGPT. We're seeing traffic from Perplexity. And it doesn't matter whether banking or any of the vertical.

Anil Aggarwal (06:46):

I don't think most the organizations are set up for attracting their traffic or are making sure that the content and their website is optimized for that. And that is going to be a major disruption here, that the source of business is going to be more than just Google.

Anil Aggarwal (07:01):

So, you need to optimize your site for search engines, which is also becoming very AI driven. So, Google, Bing. And then you need to make sure that the same content can be indexed by these AI engines. I would say that's a very important area that we'll see.

Jim Marous (07:17):

Yeah, and I think what you're saying really is, as opposed to simply having a good experience on the website, actually moving it from being a cost center to be even a revenue generator, which is a really new thought process from the perspective of what a website was meant to do.

Jim Marous (07:34):

We always hoped that the consumer or the prospect would come to the website, would find what they would need and would do all the action. What's happening now is, the websites are actually helping prompt you to not only where you should go, but how to get to the place you want to achieve and where the financial institution wants to generate new business.

Jim Marous (07:54):

So, what are some specifics that organizations are doing on their websites and through digital marketing to drive leads, and you mentioned earlier, creating more Amazon-like shopping experience. What are they doing specifically?

Anil Aggarwal (08:09):

Alright, well, so let's break it up into two components. So, in terms of technology on the side, and it's technology where it translates to user experience how quickly — and the benchmark is mobile, so you want to make sure mobile experience is perfect and then you translate that to desktop.

Anil Aggarwal (08:33):

But making sure that the speed of the site is really good. It loads really fast. It's a stable website. That user experience is very important, and search engines reward you for that. So, when you do that, not only will the consumers be happy, but actually you're going to get found more because the search engine measuring that how quickly the site loads, whether people just jump away because the site didn't load, or the site kept moving while you were on the phone.

Anil Aggarwal (09:05):

So, speed of the site is very important. The second thing that is very important is deploying structured data. So, once you have your content, deploying all kinds of structured data so that search engines can understand the content you have, the context of the content.

Anil Aggarwal (09:23):

And we'll touch a little bit more on structured data later on. So, once you've done all of this and people are actually getting to your side, then it comes down to the technology is only facilitating the engine to find your content. The key component of your site is the content, how you've actually set up the content, what you talking about, have you made it useful for the consumer?

Anil Aggarwal (09:48):

So, I'll give a very simple example, if you're interested in a mortgage. What we found is majority of the home buyers are younger people who have never taken a loan before and have no idea what that process looks like of buying a house.

Anil Aggarwal (10:05):

So, a very good quality content piece on a mortgage section of your site is actually how to buy a house, what are the different steps and the transactions. And we've seen that consumers really consume that kind of content.

Anil Aggarwal (10:19):

So, if you now combine what I just said, the other could be rate calculators. How do you figure out what my price would be, or the rate calculators, typically, these are things that the agents would show you or mortgage brokers would show you. But if you can include some of these tools on your website, it creates for a very good experience.

Anil Aggarwal (10:37):

And you combine this with technology, and you market up the structured data. Now, what you're happening is, as a young married couple who's looking for a new house, and I get to your site, not only am I informing them that I have a mortgage product, but I'm actually educating them on the whole process.

Anil Aggarwal (10:59):

And that's really what search engines want. That's what consumers want. So, there are different tools, there's calculators, there's interactive tools. The biggest thing that we're working on is AI agents, where the website is actually going to talk to you instead of you relying on the website and navigating based on the questions or interest the website is going to guide you to where to go.

Anil Aggarwal (11:25):

So, that's what we see. And I think actually it's very exciting what's going to happen. The information is going to become more readily available; AI is going to revolutionize some of the content creation and what's happening on these …

Jim Marous (11:40):

So, when you look at what organizations, you come in and you see an organization and you almost are sure there's certain things, especially in financial services that are going to be wrong, that organizations haven't updated things or haven't done.

Jim Marous (11:56):

So, what are some of the most critical mistakes you see as financial institutions are trying to make their online presence more known, and how can those be corrected?

Anil Aggarwal (12:07):

Yeah, the biggest thing that I see, Jim, is most of the sites are brochure sites. So, even more recent ones but most of them, anything that was built three to five years ago is built like a brochure.

Anil Aggarwal (12:23):

They spend money on advertising to draw the people to the site. But that advertising also becomes expensive if the user experience on the site is not good, Google will rank, your cost per click goes up, your overall advertising expense is also higher.

Anil Aggarwal (12:43):

So, the biggest thing that I see is that technology wise, they're not built on the platform that will actually drive organic traffic. You have to spend a lot of money. And then the content, once you come to the website, they have different sections, and they have different content pieces. But is really, has the thought been put into the customer journey, like Amazon does.

Anil Aggarwal (13:05):

Amazon has it. It's like you buy one product, they make sure they show you 10 others that you should need because you bought this, and they get you to buy those. And I'm thankful for that because I do need some of those things genuinely. If I bought one of these things …

Anil Aggarwal (13:28):

So, I think the biggest thing is the merchandising, the ability to turn the website into e-commerce is what we see lacking. That's where we've seen a lot of success, the conversations with CEOs of banks and credit unions, that they have a very high interest in making these websites produce money for them rather than being just high built billboards. Which is fine, I mean, that also serves a purpose, everything has a purpose, but really how do you make this an interactive-

Jim Marous (14:05):

It's interesting, Anil, when you talk about a mobile platform, it's very personalized in many cases. It's not perfect, but it's more personalized than a website usually is. But we're seeing more and more organizations building websites that quickly personalize the experience as opposed to simply being the same for every single person that comes to the website.

Jim Marous (14:26):

So, what role does content strategy play? And how do you end up personalizing the content based on the person who's going on the site, especially those who may not already be customers? So, how do you work with prospects versus customers and how does content strategy help you personalize the experience? So, it's different, if I went to it or if my wife went to it or somebody else.

Anil Aggarwal (14:51):

That's a great question. So, there're three categories of personalization, Jim. You can personalize the user experience for any consumer based on three things. One is their location. If I'm sitting in New York and browsing your site in San Francisco, that's a different consumer versus if I'm sitting in San Francisco two miles from your bank and browsing your site.

Anil Aggarwal (15:26):

So, you can customize the behavior for a location. You can customize for customer intent, or consumer intent. And I think that's the most effective one that I find. Customers actually give you a lot of signals. So, if I went to your bank site and I actually spent a lot of time browsing through your mortgage lending section, that's a clear indicator that I'm interested in getting a mortgage.

Anil Aggarwal (16:00):

And now what we are seeing, so the savvier organizations we're doing that a lot, is now as the consumer navigates through your website or goes away and comes back in a few days, I can tailor the experience towards a mortgage lending application.

Anil Aggarwal (16:20):

You can change the images on the homepage, you can change the different text, you can throw in an offer. So, there's all these things that you can do. And interestingly, what we're seeing is the conversion double actually.

Anil Aggarwal (16:34):

So, the typical thing is that 30/40% increase, we're actually seeing some that — 80 to 110% increase. So, it's pretty substantial because the customer is actually communicating the intent and you're just acting on that intent. Now, if they clicked on a certain ad, or whether they clicked or they browse certain sections of your website. The third category of personalization, which is a little tricky because it gets into privacy and everything is based on your user profile.

Anil Aggarwal (17:06):

So, if you're logged into ... but for that, I have to detect your — if I have your user profile, because you've shared that with me, saying that you just got married and you have all these things, that you're renting a home and I know that profile, and I detect that, I know that you're going to be in the market for a house at some point, or if you're just freshly graduating out of college, you'll be in the market for opening a bank account.

Anil Aggarwal (17:34):

So, there are different ways of personalizing. It is the future, all the search engines, everybody's doing that, the banks will have to do it. I think we have to do it in a way that it's non-intrusive and it doesn't intrude into people's privacy. But we're seeing a lot of instances of that happening right now in terms of personalization.

Jim Marous (17:58):

I think what's interesting too is that websites today don't really wait for me to push the buttons to go where I want to go. It really prompts you to go.

Jim Marous (18:07):

So, basically through questions and other things. You said it customizes and personalizes what I see based on who I am, what I've done, how I transfer travel throughout the site with many pages being invisible unless you go there. And that really makes it so that every experience is different for every consumer. It also makes it so the consumer engages more based on wanting to be there as opposed to simply searching for things.

Jim Marous (18:37):

So, my boss in sales used to say, nothing happens unless you measure results. How do companies effectively measure and optimize not only their digital presence, but the results of their efforts when it comes to building a better interactive digital website?

Anil Aggarwal (18:58):

Great question. So, there is a very simple measurement of what's happening on your website. So, I'll categorize measurement into two areas, and I think both are very important. Most companies will do one of them, they don’t do the second.

Anil Aggarwal (19:18):

The first one, I'll start with what most people don't do, is constantly measure the health of their website because they feel like they built it well and it's sitting there. But what people have to realize is the standards are the lens with which search engines judge the sites. And now with the AI engines have very tight [inaudible 00:19:45] so they’re judging the content in the sites with a very different lens.

Anil Aggarwal (19:50):

And so, what you have to do is really put in some tools to measure the effectiveness or health of your site. Like how competitive you're versus your competitors on speed and keywords and so on and so forth.

Anil Aggarwal (20:05):

So, that's one area that we spend a lot of time. We actually enable that as a standard ability because if the website is not healthy, it'll have a direct impact on what you're about to now measure, which is what a lot of organizations do.

Anil Aggarwal (20:22):

Now, what typically I would measure is the traffic and you can get very deep, where the traffic is coming from, what are the referral sources, what is being effective, which campaigns work, which didn't work, and the criteria.

Anil Aggarwal (20:36):

So, what I recommend to people is always have a goal. Whether I want to increase this much of deposits, so in the end it has to be a business goal. It has to be increase in deposits, increase in mortgage applications.

Anil Aggarwal (20:54):

One of the banks that we worked with, they wanted to sell more insurance. And of course, we ended up selling a lot of insurance, but we had to change the experience on the pages to make that happen.

Anil Aggarwal (21:06):

So, defining an end business goal, measuring that, how many leads you're getting, if you can actually tie it to the actual performance at the bank, that's even better. Which I would say about half of our customers are able to do, and the other half they don't have processes to do that.

Anil Aggarwal (21:25):

But still, nevertheless looking at how many leads you got and how many online signup, account signups you got, then you can keep getting more and more up funnel, which is looking into the traffic, your visibility, your impressions. So, that's what we do, Jim. These are the areas that we see customers mostly interested in.

Jim Marous (21:46):

Yeah, it's interesting. We see in our business, in the content business that ChatGPT, and AI, and generative AI are changing the way that search happens. That it's really impacting the way impact that traffic sees our site.

Jim Marous (21:04):

How can financial institutions make it so that even as these new tools come into use, that their organization's going to get a good positioning for SEO traffic and things of this nature? How is this changing the business? But how are you adjusting websites so that they get featured?

Anil Aggarwal (22:22):

It's a great question, Jim, because I think this is the biggest disruption that's happened in the digital's domain in the last 15 years, 20 years. Because over the last 15, 20 years, it's been just a Google show.

Anil Aggarwal (22:36):

And Google is fantastic, so this is not about Google, but I think what it is, is that there's going to be other channels other than Google that is going to provide the data. And when I say Google, I was talking about search, so Google, Bing.

Anil Aggarwal (22:52):

So, the biggest thing for the AI agents is that these AI agents, when they call your website, their budget is very limited. You know the GPU cost things that is causing the Nvidia stock to go through the roof. So, they're very limited on processing and compute resources. They want to make sure that they're very efficient.

Anil Aggarwal (23:15):

So, one of the things that you can do on your site is make sure that you mark up all your content with structured data. It really just helps the engine understand the content more efficiently, more quickly, but they don't have to interpret all the content, they can grab the structured data to figure out what content you have. So, that's one of the key things that you could do.

Anil Aggarwal (23:38):

The second is the quality of the content, because again, the resources are very limited, so they want to make sure they picking up high quality content. FAQ type of content, any content that is useful for the same criteria, which is for Google and other engines. Is this content going to help the consumer have a better experience? Whether on their decision making or whether on their process of buying and experiencing and learning.

Anil Aggarwal (24:09):

So, the quality of content structured data, how fast your site is so that the crawlers can crawl it very quickly.

Anil Aggarwal (24:17):

And then the last thing that is just in the search ecosystem, in local listings and other places, I don’t know if you saw last week at Foursquare, ChatGPT announced that they're going to pick up all the location information from Foursquare. So, you got to make sure your information is in Foursquare so that you can show up in ChatGPT.

Anil Aggarwal (24:40):

So, those are the few things that we're doing. We're seeing a very interesting phenomenon, Jim. We're seeing in the last four months, the traffic from the AI engines on our sites has doubled every month. So, if it keeps that trend, it'll become substantial by sometime in Q4, Q3 of next year.

Jim Marous (25:03):

So, it's interesting, it's very clear from our discussion that you can't simply build a website, even with a company like Milestone, and expect it to just be good forever. In other words, oh good, we fixed everything, we don't have to look at this for a while.

Jim Marous (25:22):

With your clients, it's obviously clear that you have to stay engaged because the marketplace outside of the company's website is changing so quickly. You have to adjust.

Jim Marous (25:34):

I mean, I know at Financial Brand, we have to adjust continually because things are impacted. It used to be just, you only had to pay attention to the Google algorithm, now you got to look at every algorithm and say, what do I have to do as a company to become more impresent when somebody's searching for something?

Jim Marous (25:53):

So, let's say I am a small, mid-size financial institution, and I know I got to fix my website. How do I engage with your company, and more importantly, how do you work with me to build a better website?

Jim Marous (26:11):

Number one, what kind of investigation do you do? What types of things are things that I have to do as a financial institution on my side to make it so you can do better?

Jim Marous (26:23):

And then, and I'm going to put you on the spot here. In a normal situation, which is never normal, how long does it take to get something up and running? It's going to be impactful. It may not be final, but you're going to be the lowest hanging fruits can be accessible.

Anil Aggarwal (26:38):

Yeah, no, that's a great question. And instead of talking and theoretical, I'll use a example that we recently did. We built out the site for One Nevada Credit Union, and that's a little bit on the larger site.

Anil Aggarwal (26:52):

They have about 21 branches and they're the largest credit union bank in the Las Vegas, Nevada area. But they had 10 different sites for different elements. And what we said is, we don't need 10 sites, because a lot of people think they'll build a site for this, they don't think after building a site, how are they going to bring people to that site? So, it costs money to bring people.

Anil Aggarwal (27:21):

So, having 10 sites built out is not the problem. The problem is how to actually draw people to the site. So, it costs money. So, that's why we decided that we're going to consolidate all of those sites into a single site, fairly sophisticated site.

Anil Aggarwal (27:39):

And then how we work with them is, we help them build out a site. So, one unique characteristic for us is like I mentioned earlier, we're an agency and we are a MarTech platform.

Anil Aggarwal (27:55):

So, we can actually do the agency services. We did the entire design process of creating the personas, figuring out what the personas wanted, landing the customer journeys for each of the persona, for each of the product types. If you wanted to learn more about credit cards, what journey are we going to take you through.

Anil Aggarwal (28:18):

Then, in that particular case, we also actually created the content. So, we did the full content creation, design customer journeys, the user experience flows, and then once we get into the actual production, that's where the platform comes in. So, all the technology, the speed, the structured data, the testing across multiple platforms.

Anil Aggarwal (28:42):

So, we basically build the full experience for them, that project was very large. I would say most financial institutions should plan between two to four months.

Jim Marous (28:57):

And it's nice because that means that organizations then can relatively quickly see the results of what they've done, because you're building it, in sometimes a piecemeal, but a growing fashion, plus one thing that's really come out of this conversation with you is, this process is never done because the world's changing so much on the outside. You're testing things as you go along.

Jim Marous (29:19):

And because you do so much work in the financial services industry, it makes it so every one of your clients benefits from every test you're doing, any other client from the standpoint of how things work, how things integrate, how do you bring human and digital in together within a website experience. So, that’s interesting to learn that.

Jim Marous (29:39):

And with regard to the human versus digital aspect, we would've loved to have thought that this all could go digital, and we could hands off and not get involved very much. But the reality is that's not reality. And that we're seeing organizations do even better when they can integrate the human and digital perspective of what they do. How are you seeing the best organizations integrating human plus digital?

Anil Aggarwal (30:11):

Let me make sure I understood the question, Jim. So, is the question that everybody wants to push the interaction of the end customer to digital domain, and then how are they dealing with the human part, which is the branches, and how-

Jim Marous (30:30):

How do you bring these together in a digital experience? Yep.

Anil Aggarwal (30:34):

So, what I find is that and this is even from my personal life, I don't want full digital experience. I want to know everything possible, and then I still want to go talk to somebody. But that's me. I think there's different kinds of people, some of the younger people are there just happy signing on.

Anil Aggarwal (30:53):

But what we're seeing is that almost a resurgence of the number of branches. I think there is pressure to make them more efficient and streamlined, but we're seeing a lot of the customers we work with hone in on the branches and we're seeing a substantial amount of traffic. We can actually directly track how much traffic is being driven to those because of what we do. One of the data points that we track is how many people are seeking directions to the branches.

Anil Aggarwal (31:23):

So, we're seeing a lot of people flow in. Good organizations do a very healthy mix. So, you need to have your digital ... digital needs to be a reflection, it's two parallel paths but you want to make sure that you're not pushing one way or the other, you're giving consumer the choice. That's what we're seeing a lot of.

Anil Aggarwal (31:47):

Couple of years ago there was a lot of push to move full digital, and we've seen a lot of traffic come into branches now. And not just in banks, by the way. We've seen that in other areas as well. People are actually wanting to go into the stores, which is interesting. Which is sort of counter to what we all think.

Jim Marous (32:07):

As a final question, Anil, how do you see the whole business of websites and digital interactions and digital presence changing over the next three years? What do you see on the horizon that you're already working on so that you'll be ready when the marketplace says they're ready?

Anil Aggarwal (32:26):

I think the biggest change that I see Jim happening is AI is going to disrupt everything, and AI in multiple places.

Anil Aggarwal (32:37):

So, AI in how you get discover. Are you ready for your content to get discovered in ChatGPT? Because people are going to … from ChatGPT and say, "Hey, what's the best bank to get a mortgage loan near me?” That's a question that if you ask ChatGPT, you want to make sure that you're featured in that answer. And that's not a easy task, you have to start from where you started, in Google and other places 20 years ago.

Anil Aggarwal (33:00):

So, I see AI in discovery, I see AI in content creation. How do you actually generate a lot of content which is human like when it's still generated by the machine.

Anil Aggarwal (33:14):

The other big area that we're seeing is images and videos, they're going to become very important in the next three years. So, utilizing short videos, optimizing them, making sure search engines understand, getting them into your site, I think is a very big area of investment for us. We're spending a lot of time with our customers in banking segments and other segments on images and videos.

Anil Aggarwal (33:44):

Again, then, in terms of being able to measure, predict results, we're going to see proliferation of artificial intelligence into a lot of different areas. That would be the biggest disruption that I see.

Anil Aggarwal (34:02):

Before we wrap up, I've talked about all of these things that you can do, but I do want to talk about ... we talked a little bit about One Nevada Credit Union, and I sort of want to give you their idea of the customer journey of what we're doing, because it exactly answers the question you're asking, how do I keep moving forward?

Anil Aggarwal (34:23):

So, we started with consolidating 10 sites putting it into one. The results were beyond phenomenal. They saw a 20% increase in mortgage loan applications. They saw an increase in deposits Jim, in a market where everybody in their market was going down, they actually saw an increase in deposit. So, that's huge money.

Anil Aggarwal (34:46):

So, all of that they got, and now we're onto the next generation. We're looking at how to personalize. We're looking at how to actually make the branch pages and other pages more sophisticated and more dynamic.

Anil Aggarwal (34:58):

So, it's a constant process. Good organizations constantly budget for some things every year. And now we're also working on AI agents for them. So, it's just a whole process, so it exactly is what you just said. It's not a finish it and-

Jim Marous (35:17):

It's not a project, it's a process. And it's very interesting because I come from more than four decades of banking experience and the website was always, I got to keep on updating, and what you end up doing was putting more pages in as opposed to making it a better website, you end up having brochureware.

Jim Marous (35:37):

And what's very interesting today is, and it's interesting in talking to you, is that we don't talk about websites all that much, but there's so much potential. And as I said earlier in the podcast, moving in from a cost center to a revenue center is a big deal, because what happens is I know from your side of the business, the more you can make it so that a financial institution can make money off their website, the more budget that becomes available to continually enhance the business.

Jim Marous (36:07):

So, it's self-serving, but the bottom line is, it's kind like the splitting the profits. It's one of these things you go, "Hey, we can bring this much money of new business into your financial institution if you do this, this, and this, which will help fund the next stage of revolution in the website."

Jim Marous (36:25):

And I think it's important to recognize too, because of the kind of business that you do, I'm going to give a number and it's probably not right, but who's going to know what the actual difference is. But about 80% of what you provide can be very similar from financial institution to financial institution, get the basics right that aren't currently right. It's that 20% that really pushes it even further and makes it so it's specific to the financial institution.

Jim Marous (36:52):

So, if you worked with two organizations across the street, you'd be able to know that because the foundation is what's similar, but not the way it presented itself. But I think we get too passive when we look at improving our websites.

Jim Marous (37:06):

We keep on talking about the mobile experience. Well, the mobile experience many times is part of the website experience. Because when I visit a website, it's through my mobile device, not through my computer in most cases.

Jim Marous (37:15):

But I think this is really exciting and I look forward to discussing with you again what the advancements on the AI agents is. Because we've had a couple interviews with people that have talked about AI agents.

Jim Marous (37:29):

What's interesting is it kind of works against what financial institutions feel comfortable with, which is making recommendations without all the T's crossed and I's dotted. But the reality is, there's no risk in that. There's no risk when Uber tells me possibly are you interested in this, this and there so on. Or Amazon puts recommendations. There's no risk there because they've already built the trust.

Jim Marous (37:51):

But as we build better websites that provide more tools for a customer to get to their answer and maybe not even the answer they were looking for initially, but to a better solution, you've built the trust so you have more leverage in how to provide that heavier level of personalization that customer will actually want as opposed to being afraid of.

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Jim Marous (38:11):

Anil, really appreciate your time. It's been great talking to you and learning about Milestone. And I think it's interesting because you made it clear that organizations of every size can benefit from what you are doing in the marketplace. And if you can't do it all now, at least get started because the process of evolution won't stop. So, thank you very much, Anil.

Anil Aggarwal (38:32):

Thank you, Jim. It's been a pleasure like always.

Jim Marous (38:37):

Thanks for listening to Banking Transformed, the winner of three international awards for podcast excellence. If you enjoyed today's interview, please give our show a five-star rating. Also be sure to read my recent articles on The Financial Brand and check out our research on The Digital Banking Report.

Jim Marous (38:52):

This has been a production of Evergreen Podcasts. A special thank you to our senior producer, Leah Haslage, audio engineer, Chris Fafalios and video producer, Will Pritts.

Jim Marous (39:02):

I'm your host, Jim Marous. Until next time, remember, a website can no longer just be an online brand builder, it must be the workhorse for new business development.

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