Mastering AI-Powered Personalization for Long-Term Growth

Jim Marous (00:07):

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 (00:18):

Personalizing experiences across the entire customer life cycle has emerged as a critical strategy for engaging customers and driving growth in banking.

Jim Marous (00:28):

However, unlike retailers who focus on maximizing immediate transactions, financial institutions face unique challenges in leveraging personalization to build long-term ongoing profitable relationships.

Jim Marous (00:43):

We are excited to have Olly Downs chief technology and AI officer at Curinos join us on the Banking Transformed podcast. Olly will discuss the importance of personalized experiences and engagement in banking and what marketing executives must do now to prepare for the future of hyper-personalization.

Jim Marous (01:03):

Olly will also discuss the impact of AI and machine learning on customer engagement and the challenges banks are facing in implementing personalization at speed and at scale.

Jim Marous (01:14):

Banks must move beyond traditional bank marketing to create truly personalized AI driven experiences that foster deeper customer relationships and engagement. The question becomes, how can financial institutions of all size achieve this aspirational goal?

Jim Marous (01:33):

So, Olly, before we begin, can you introduce yourself to our audience and share a bit about your background in role at Curinos. Also, it would be great if you could discuss a little bit how Curinos helps financial institutions with their marketing efforts in such an amazing battlefield right now that we're all facing.

Olly Downs (01:49):

Yes. Thank you for having me, Jim. I'm Olly Downs. I lead technology and AI at Curinos. I've had a background in enterprise software data-driven innovation over the last almost 25 years, spanning a number of verticals, telecom, banking, real estate, e-commerce, retail, automotive.

Olly Downs (02:12):

I've had the good fortune of being able to ride the waves, at least three of the waves of AI that one might say have occurred over time, it's resulted in 42 U.S. patents. And I founded and co-invented a lot of the technology in Curinos' Amplero product that I know we're going to talk about a little bit today.

Olly Downs (02:35):

Speaking broadly about Curinos, we really bring together a unique combination of industry expertise, insights and analytical capability that really is intended to fuel a strategic and competitive advantage for financial institutions.

Olly Downs (02:53):

We have AI-based decisioning tools, predictive analytics, science-based software as a service platforms that are fed by a vast proprietary portfolio of data. And our goal is really to allow our clients to identify emerging opportunities and make informed decisions with those data and those insights that drive sustained important performance improvements in their businesses.

Olly Downs (03:18):

And we have 85% of the top 100 U.S. banks and credit unions. We have over 800 credit unions in community banks as our customers. And our data assets really span a huge domain. 7 trillion in North American deposit balances, 3 trillion in mortgage originations annually, and 9 billion in U.S. annual marketing spend.

Jim Marous (03:45):

It's interesting, in my work with the Curinos and its predecessor company over the years, it's been interesting how the company is really focused on the immediate problems that financial institutions are facing and solutions as to how to get there.

Jim Marous (03:59):

I know that we did a podcast recently with one of your team members on generating deposits because that was a very major thing, certainly at the beginning of the year, but also at the end of last year. You've done this in the loan area and now you're doing around personalized marketing. And what's interesting is there's not a financial institution that we talk to right now that doesn't talk about the importance of personalized communication and personalized engagement.

Jim Marous (04:25):

Yet your research shows that most banks, in fact, less than 25% say their marketing is personalized. And I would hazardly guess that even that 25% number is relatively high, because how do you define if your marketing is personalized? Is it all personalized? Is it part of it personalized? What are the barriers to really doing this in the banking environment right now?

Olly Downs (04:52):

It's an interesting question, Jim, and I think you probably know, we call this the personalization bottleneck. And it's really if you think of the transition over the last 30 or 40 years in banking from truly personalized relationships between a customer and their banker, in person in a branch to this proliferation of channels of engagement with the customer, it's put pressure on three major areas; analytics and audience, marketing, creative and creative development, and the ability to experiment.

Olly Downs (05:27):

And those three things sort of fitting together in an orchestrated business process that creates a personalized relationship with the customer that now has to span across many more channels than it used to.

Olly Downs (05:41):

And one of the challenges with this today that we see in most of our banks large, and is that the pace on which those three things can come together, analytics and audience, creative experimentation, it's at best a quarterly cycle.

Olly Downs (05:48):

And the challenge with that quarterly cycle is it's about the speed on which the industry and the macro environment is changing. And particularly if you look at the last two years, golly, it's changed even faster than that and perhaps even faster than people were predicting over that period of time.

Olly Downs (06:13):

And so, to truly create a personalized engagement with a client, it's really pushing on a scale and pace of business process and ability to act with supporting technology that isn't really humanly possible with the teams that most banks have, and the tools that they have across these sort of three key dimensions of the context of a personalized interaction.

Olly Downs (06:39):

A personalized interaction is really about three things. It's about speaking to the right person in the right way over the right channel. And we sort of think of that as our three dimensions of context.

Olly Downs (06:53):

And you alluded to our study, the things that we sort of learned from the study that we conducted in the first half of the year here around personalization and banking sort of readiness for personalization. There's a very heavy focus on just one of those three dimensions of context, which is really around identifying the right customer and target audience. And that's a very analytics heavy part of the process.

Olly Downs (07:20):

And most of the banks we spoke to, over half of them said they had back backlogs on two of the key dimensions that data and analytics, identifying the customer, and then on channel and channel orchestration, and particularly we talked about this sort of ... now we're talking about many channels to which you engage the customer.

Olly Downs (07:37):

Putting those together in the right way and making sure you could orchestrate them in the way that makes sense and doesn't create discordant customer experience is very challenging.

Olly Downs (07:47):

And then also, it's hard to make a transition from batch campaigns. I have a new product proposition, or I have a new product rates and pricing, and I'm going to communicate those in batches and waves to I really need an ongoing dialogue with the customer that's always on, which again, puts pressure on these dimensions of business process and orchestration.

Jim Marous (08:13):

It is interesting because as consumers we're being inundated with more and more advanced abilities to communicate on a personalized level. I brought up quite a few times recently on the podcast that my Hulu TV I realized listens to me on a regular basis.

Jim Marous (08:31):

And I ask a question to my wife about, "Geez, I can't remember the Jeep dealer I went to the last time," and immediately a commercial comes up for one of the Jeep dealers in the area. And immediately after that, another Jeep dealer's commercial comes in, that isn't by chance.

Jim Marous (08:47):

We also are spoiled, I think, in the way that Amazon communicates with us. But these are spotty incidences of personalization, and in your studies, you've talked about how personalization really differs in banking versus what it does in retail.

Jim Marous (09:06):

Why is this distinction important? Why is it that we don't realize that we have to rise to a higher level of personalization in banking?

Olly Downs (09:14):

Well, as I mentioned sort of 40 years ago and still today, although the channels of engagement with the customer have proliferated the level of consideration and the timeframe of the relationship in banking is very, very different to retail and e-commerce. And there's really not a discretionary component to how we manage our financial lives.

Olly Downs (09:37):

In retail, we're talking about matching millions of people to tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands in Amazon cases of products, many of which they can decide on not to buy almost on a whim and incrementing the shopping basket one notch, comprises personalization to a certain extent.

Olly Downs (10:00):

But in banking, we're really thinking about creating the best relationships that last almost a lifetime and go through many waves of someone's financial life. And so, the structure of that relationship is very different. The value of the now is very different.

Olly Downs (10:17):

The understanding of when is the right moment is as critical and in fact, even more critical in banking than it is in retail because there's this much less discretionary nature, a much more consideration to making step function changes in accounts and planning and so on.

Jim Marous (10:34):

Well, it's interesting because when you talk about personalization and banking, you talk about the right time, the right place, the right product, and the right channel. What's interesting about that is all those elements are certainly in the financial service area, are very fluid.

Jim Marous (10:50):

What I need at a certain time is different than what I need later. At the same time, the environment around us continues to change. So, what is prompting my need for that product? Maybe it's the marketplace conditions changes, and even more importantly, the way I want to communicate with my financial institution is going to differ based on what you're trying to sell me.

Jim Marous (11:14):

I may want to go in a branch, I may want to use my phone, I may want to get on a computer, I may want to do all three in my consideration phase. This is where I think where AI really plays an amazing role because it really does somewhat fine tune the sophistication of personalization to the degree that helps you do what no human could do by themselves.

Jim Marous (11:37):

We mentioned it, and when you reference the ability to get things done that were not previously humanly possible, what role does AI play today in the ability to build what I'll call sophisticated personalization?

Olly Downs (11:55):

The key to all of this, Jim, is to think about the real scale of a contextual interaction. You talked about the channels. You talked about different messages landing and being more appropriate and timeliness, mattering in different channels, and the preference that customers may have for particularly how they're notified and communicated with.

Olly Downs (12:16):

If you have 20 elements of customer or account profile, channel and creative that you want to explore the outcome of, people think that means you have to test 20 things. You actually have to test two to the power of 20 things, two, to actually explore that space properly.

Olly Downs (12:38):

And if you're on a quarterly campaigns and designing A/B test, you can do that on tens of dimensions. You certainly can't do it on two to the power of 20. To give you an idea of the scale of that number, the length of the universe in seconds is two to the power of 18 approximately.

Olly Downs (12:54):

So, if you could do one experiment per second, it would take you longer than the length of the universe today to do it. So, truly personalizing experiences really requires this very high dimensional exploration.

Olly Downs (13:07):

AI and machine learning algorithms have really been designed to distill vast bodies of information at the scale of which now our human brains can, and with a computational power that matches that representation capability. And so, you truly can get through the analytics, and pass through some of these bottlenecks if you put a few of the key underlying pieces into play that can enable it.

Jim Marous (13:37):

So, one of our previous guests in the podcast was Raja Rajamannar, the marketing director of MasterCard that wrote the book Quantum Marketing. And it talks about in the book all these amazing technologies that are out there today that weren't out there five years ago.

Jim Marous (13:54):

I talk about the fact if you went to school for a marketing degree five years ago, yes, you still need everything you learned, but I'll almost say two to the 20 degree of complexity since then.

Jim Marous (14:06):

On the other hand, though, the ability for organizations such as Curinos to provide composable solutions to make it so the personalization element of marketing is simplified and accessible by more levels of financial institution, more level of assets of financial institutions is amazing. Can you discuss a little bit about your Amplero platform and how this makes a marketer's job easier?

Olly Downs (14:34):

Yeah, so the key to it is with marketing technology, one size really doesn't fit all. And particularly, we sort of talked already about the distinction between retail and e-commerce and banking.

Olly Downs (14:48):

The key to what we've built with Amplero is it is highly focused on financial institutions and the use cases they experience. So, we've tried to make key use cases for retail banks out of the box cross-sell, helping core checking customers move into term deposit and loan products, onboarding and driving engagement and, and breadth of channel engagement.

Olly Downs (15:13):

Really finding paths to primacy for new or dormant checking customers and including driving digital engagement, direct deposit, and those things that lead on a path to primacy. And then deposit retention and optimization, which as you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast here, has just been so critical over the last, um, 18 to 24 months with rapid changes in interest rates and bubbles.

Olly Downs (15:37):

And even as interest rates perhaps begin to come down as we move late into this year and into next year, how term deposits should play into high yield savings, where there will be a variable interest rate over time and improved margins. Those sort of use cases we've been able to package up very specifically for retail banks.

Olly Downs (15:58):

And the other piece of this has been that we've built some key capabilities that solve the bottlenecks I called out. The first is really around putting together analytics and experimentation at scale. And the experimentation capability we've built with Amplero uses an advanced AI capability called reinforcement learning that allows us to adapt over time as experiments progress.

Olly Downs (16:26):

So, we continue to drill down on the earliest signals about which audience, what should be addressed over what channel, which elements of a value proposition for a particular product or offering or behavior that you're trying to achieve, really actually have an effect. And having that closed loop of feedback where we can drill down into things that work over time solves that very high dimensional optimization problem.

Olly Downs (16:51):

The second piece of it from a technical perspective is being able to manage the challenges around proliferating creative, particularly when you're in an omnichannel setting, and how you do that in a way that still honors your regulatory review and compliance processes, but allows you to drill down again on which elements of the value proposition are working, which graphical and layout components of my creative are really driving impact and engagement?

Olly Downs (17:18):

And how do I proliferate new creative that actually emphasizes those areas where we've been able to bring generative AI into the loop here, where we still have real review and approval process of creative, as if anyone else in your team as generated that content. We're able to generate content that emphasizes the elements that our reinforcement learning is discovering a resonating with a particular type of customer.

Jim Marous (17:46):

So, am I safe to assume that the Amplero platform is somewhat composable. In other words, if I have a challenge with deposits, I can utilize this platform to do a better job over time building relationships and dealing with my deposit issues. Is that correct?

Olly Downs (18:03):

Yes. If you have deposit issues, we have an out of the box set of data enrichments and a simple set of plugin data requirements that we then can operationalize very quickly to create the right dimensions of customer targeting and the right dimensions of measurement of impact and outcome to improve deposit retention and margin on deposits.

Jim Marous (18:28):

So, then also on the other hand, if I was to say I'd like to have this personalization engine driving all of my communications, the benefit to me is because you work many different financial institutes, because it's financial institution specific, you've answered about 80% of my questions upfront and are putting this into the implementation, allowing me to personalize it on that 20% that really is different between my bank and the credit union down the street. Correct?

Olly Downs (18:59):

Yes, very true. And many banks have done a great job of distilling their own unique value proposition, and being able to emphasize that, that's a key component.

Olly Downs (19:10):

The general data support and targeting dimensions that you need to understand what works and what doesn't work, and to appropriately refine and determine eligible audience, all of those things are out of the box onto which you can layer your brand identity, your unique value propositions, and then quickly get into optimizing that highly personalized set of customer engagement.

Jim Marous (19:33):

So, what is the differentiation between the Amplero system and let's say an offering of a typical AI model platform from another institution? What differentiates what you're doing at Curinos with what's being done elsewhere in the personalization field?

Olly Downs (19:52):

Really good question. I would say a few things that are sort of key in this area, one, rule-based customer journeys are very attractive when you think about your first one, and certainly when you think about having 10 customer journeys, really thousands of customer journeys are playing out over time.

Olly Downs (20:17):

Think about just an onboarding experience, the sequence in which a customer beyond initially opening the account, perhaps receiving and activating their debit card and funding the account where they go next across the portfolio of features and functions of that product, if it's very significantly by individual and their needs for that account.

Olly Downs (20:39):

And really, you get beyond that structure, again, you get beyond what's humanly possible in terms of being able to say, "Okay, well if the customer does this and they engage with this set of features, then the right way to add value to our relationship right now is this next sequence of actions."

Olly Downs (20:55):

It's very hard to determine and construct human rules for them. We've been able to get beyond that rule-based management and optimization of the personalized experience.

Olly Downs (21:08):

Part two of that is we're uniquely able to manage and measure outcomes and take the learnings from those outcomes to what I would consider to be downstream KPIs. We can really begin to drive towards customer value.

Olly Downs (21:22):

So, for example, you talked about the deposit retention use case, and I mentioned that this transition from term deposits to high yield savings is going to be very interesting transition as interest rates come down. Well, if you're able to optimize for a downstream of value objective, which is margin on deposits, then you can orchestrate between retaining customer deposits, but at a favorable interest rate that still makes sense for the customer.

Olly Downs (21:52):

So, our ability to measure marketing outcomes, not just to vanity metrics like did the customer click the email? Did they hit the banner in the online banking experience down to over the next 45 to 60 days, how did that marketing interaction play out in terms of deposit margin and expected future deposit margin?

Olly Downs (22:15):

That's a big difference in really the purpose of the personalization and you can't achieve good downstream outcome if you're not achieving mutually beneficial relationship with the customer, which is back again to this original banking relationship we had 40 years ago.

Jim Marous (22:33):

Well, it is interesting because I know the team at Curinos, they sometimes ask the uncomfortable questions among their meetings with clients where they're saying, yeah, we saw this initial response, but let's look at it over time.

Jim Marous (22:47):

Was the offer too strong where there's actually attrition in a post environment and downstream in the engagement? And they also apply the learnings that they've seen from other financial institutions towards making their program better. It's very much like the crowdsourcing that's done for a GPS system that you use in your car. So, what are some successes you've seen with your Amplero platform with some of your clients?

Olly Downs (23:16):

I think about this in a sort of few key areas. Firstly we see a change in engagement, of course, from our customers. Often with Amplero, we double just the basic rate of engagement with marketing messaging.

Jim Marous (23:38):

Which is so important because we talk about experience, like it's something we can mess, like a satisfaction metric. But at the end of the day, what we really want is for our clients to be engaged with us. Because the more often they're engaged with us, the less likely they're going to try an alternative provider.

Olly Downs (23:55):

But the less active they are, the less times they click the button or engage and have interaction with us, the more likely it is they're going to tap someplace else. So, that's a major metric there.

Olly Downs (24:06):

Yes. That's like the first part, which is, although engagement is a vanity metric, if you don't have engagement exercising your channels for personalization just isn't working and you're not going to get the downstream outcomes. The cool thing is the impact we've been able to have on downstream outcomes through conversion and product adoption and cross sell and all the way down to CLV.

Olly Downs (24:30):

We have clients achieving eight to 10 x return on investment with Amplero that's been playing out and sustained over multiple years and quarters at this point, not just transiently. And if you think about most personalization solutions, because they're inspired by sort of the retail environment, they're very much focused on transactional outcomes.

Olly Downs (24:51):

And if you think about recent historical mistakes in the industry, there's been a very high focus on opening accounts and acquiring accounts, which isn't the same as acquiring a customer. And it's been proven to be completely disconnected at times with acquiring a real customer of high quality. And you're nurturing a relationship over time.

Olly Downs (25:13):

So, that ability that we've had to sustain ROI with the technology with our banks over quarters and multiple years at this point, is really unique in the industry, I believe.

Jim Marous (25:24):

Well, it's interesting too because — tell me if I'm mistaken on this, that your platform allows organizations to market by the moment. So, as opposed to saying we're going to do a equity credit program in the, in the spring, or we're going to do a car loan program in the fall, we're doing daily, every second, every moment impact to consumers based on what we see in the marketplace and what we see in their transactions.

Jim Marous (25:51):

So, you're no longer going programmed by program, it's just a process that goes from beginning of the year to the end of the year with higher results because you're actually hitting them at the right time, right place, right channel. Correct?

Olly Downs (26:04):

Yes. And when you're able to optimize for a business outcome like customer lifetime value, you can think about that across all the dimensions of the portfolio of products that the bank has, deposit products, loan products, fee and adjustments and those sort of things that come into the overall value of the relationship.

Olly Downs (26:24):

And it allows you then through the lens of a common downstream metric like that to truly arbitrate across many different types of program. Identifying that moment when a customer is in the market for a car, seeing that path over months and even several quarters where a young customer is preparing for buying their first home.

Olly Downs (26:46):

You can see those things happening and detect the right moment to interact and it's a value driven decision for you then and the customer. And you can see that value playing out.

Jim Marous (26:57):

So, one of the aspects of personalization, and you've talked about the measurement aspect quite a bit, which is an important concept, is that the inputs and outputs, in other words, we start with this many people we're going to contact, we get this kind of results, it tells us just about the customer.

Jim Marous (27:15):

How do you deploy the results as well as the assets you use in a democratized way at a financial institution, in other words, with your best clients, do the results of your programs and the success and targeting that's done, is that actually shared across the entire organization so that everybody sees what's going on as opposed to just the AI or the data department?

Olly Downs (27:43):

Yeah, it often for us, our relationship starts with the marketer when it comes to Amplero, but our relationships at the banks for Curinos really span almost every major function in the bank.

Olly Downs (27:59):

And it's been very interesting as we've sort of helped transition, particularly with the value-based personalization measurement or KPI, we've really begun to be taken into talking to the finance team, talking to the treasury group, talking to the different product teams where they're really beginning to think about this connection between the product dimensions and their appeal that benefit to the portfolio, whether that's loan or deposit portfolio, the overall impact to the financials of the bank.

Olly Downs (28:34):

It's typical historically for marketing and particularly marketing technology to be viewed as a bit of a sunk cost activity. You kind of feel like you should be doing it. But we talked about sort of the bottlenecks make it very hard to measure and act in a way that truly feels personalized and even harder to measure financial and even fiscal benefit to the bank.

Olly Downs (28:56):

We've been bringing that to bear and that's what's brought us into that broader set of discussions even through the lens of our marketing technology offering with Amplero.

Jim Marous (29:05):

So, you talk about the bottlenecks, and I'm a marketer by trade, worked in bank marketing from the banker's perspective for 15 years of my career and helped marketers for the next 20 years of my career. So, basically, I've either been a marketer or been helping marketing the majority of what I've done in the banking world.

Jim Marous (29:26):

But when you talk about bottlenecks, number one, there's always a personnel issue. But bigger than that now, because a lot of this stuff can be delivered from an outside organization, the ability to maintain a content library that allows for the speed and scale of, of distribution. How do banks do that? Because at the end of the day, I need to talk to the right person, right time with the right message, which means differentiation among different consumers, but I gotta do it quickly, immediately. How do financial institutions you work with build their content library?

Olly Downs (30:04):

That is a critical piece, Jim. And we found that, and through our study too, that it's common for banks to think about these things as big bang that need to happen of campaign development and creative development. And you're trying to cover all dimensions in one effort. It becomes monolithic.

Olly Downs (30:23):

You can't cover all the dimensions because as you point out, things are changes so quickly. You want to make changes quickly. We found an emphasis on rapid iteration is really key. And the power of this irrespective of whether you're one of our clients or not, is to leverage some key technology developments.

Olly Downs (30:42):

One, when it comes to creative is really being able to leverage dynamic templates for messaging. We often encounter our bank's marketing teams. They have static messaging, essentially static templates, but it's really one template, one message.

Olly Downs (30:58):

And that keeps you trapped in this, if you want to respond quickly to a trend, you have to literally develop a new message template, literally develop a new creative for leverage dynamic templating.

Olly Downs (31:09):

Our best clients with Amplero have less than five dynamic templates in play. Usually, we start them with one or two. And what we focus on is, well within this template, what are the pieces that can, can be modified? What are the pieces that can be dynamically inserted in? Different subject line content, different graphics, different layouts, different formatting.

Olly Downs (31:35):

And those things can be modified programmatically. And if you think about sort of going from batch and blast, the actual campaign pieces to the always on pieces, you can be always on. And when you are adding, I can add 10 subject lines in the next 30 minutes. And they can flow into the testing in that dynamic template at any time once they've been reviewed and approved, and then can be launched very quickly.

Olly Downs (32:00):

Same with graphics. I don't have to generate all of my graphics for the campaign for this quarter. In one go, I can start saying, "Okay, well these first few messages I've developed, these are the graphic components that are working. Now let me develop five new graphic elements here that play to the value proposition."

Olly Downs (32:17):

So, using the technology that exists, the dynamic templates and having a view to rapid iteration, which is sort of changing the day-to-day of how a marketer might think when they wake up. "Okay, today I might actually do a portfolio of things. I might work on a few bits of copy, I might work on a few bits of creative, I'm not hitting a big milestone, but I'm going to continue to augment and iterate, much more dynamically than in the past."

Jim Marous (32:45):

So, it's interesting because when you are working with finance institutions, we tend in almost everything we do to get in our own way. You're coming at Curinos with a lot of experience. You have a lot of financial institutions you work with, which you talked about at the beginning of the podcast. Therefore, you have a lot of examples of what works and what doesn't.

Jim Marous (33:06):

How often do your client's marketing team or whoever your contact people are sometimes get in their own way and overthink the process to the point of negatively impacting the ability for speed and scale.

Jim Marous (33:22):

So, I mean, I remember a client I had back in the day of direct marketing where we spent five months talking about the visual on the outside of the envelope, when at the end of the day that had so much less to do with what the results were going to be than getting that program out there nine months earlier. So, what are some of the challenges you see in being able to deliver at speed and scale and the personalization matrix?

Olly Downs (33:49):

I would say, number one is sort of the perfect as the enemy of the good in the sense that-

Jim Marous (33:56):

Huge, huge comment by the way. We, we laugh about it, but we can get buried in the talk about a bottleneck. Yeah, exactly.

Olly Downs (34:04):

Yeah. We've certainly seen clients that have spent a year working on creative improvements because they view them as being in market for a very, very long time. Again, sort of embracing this iterative approach is key.

Olly Downs (34:18):

The other piece of course is how you manage the relationship with regulatory and risk. And in that area, I think there are a few sort of philosophical things that you can think about that help unshackle the ability to move. And the first is sort of from the start, which we sort of have a hundred percent compliance with this, with our clients from Amplero is we eliminate regulated data from consideration for personalization at the beginning except for to the extent that it affects eligibility.

Olly Downs (34:55):

And we then encourage a mode of thinking that separates eligibility from targeting. And the notion that once you've defined everyone who is eligible, they will at some period of time in an always on dynamic messaging setting, they will receive a message about that proposition. How you talk to them, when you talk to them and over what channel is the thing that will become refined.

Olly Downs (35:20):

But essentially, you're separating eligibility and the compliance components there from what it means to target and truly personalize.

Olly Downs (35:28):

And then the third part of that is if you moved your thinking to think about feedback signals, we talked about iteration. I've done so much work in startups and product development, I found the other thing can happen, again, perfect is the enemy of the good. You can spend lots of time iterating, but you're just within your own microcosm.

Olly Downs (35:52):

The best person to give you feedback is the customer. And if you have a compliant communication that meets the right eligibility requirements, the best person who's going to tell you about whether that resonates is the customer.

Olly Downs (36:05):

And if you have a mode of closed loop feedback and experimentation you can learn very, very quickly about where should your bigger efforts go? Where should your bigger bang efforts as you're iterating, really go and they'll keep you on the right side of creepy when it comes to personalized interaction.

Jim Marous (36:23):

Okay. So, I'm going to do a make-believe moment here and say, okay, you're now going to move from where you are sitting there on the west coast and I'm going to put you in charge of a mid-size financial institution that basically has data, but they haven't really developed a mature marketing program.

Jim Marous (36:42):

You're now in charge of marketing and product for the whole organization. What is the first thing you are going to do to build a strong personalized communication process? Where do you start?

Olly Downs (36:57):

We need to talk about the customer. I would say nine times out of 10 we encounter a focus on accounts, not a focus on customers. The customer are the ones who make the decisions, and the customers are the one who have the needs that we're trying to meet with products including accounts.

Olly Downs (37:16):

I think first consideration is how can we think about the customer because they're the one we're interacting with and they're who makes decisions and a frame of reference there.

Olly Downs (37:26):

Secondly, for marketers, do I have accessible analytics data that I can get to and really start understanding my customer base? Before I have elaborate and sophisticated technologies, do I have accessible analytics and a reasonable understanding for marketers of how I engage with my customers?

Olly Downs (37:47):

I think there's a real opportunity there actually with sort of what we might call conversation or analytics solutions in the future where you don't have to be able to code in SQL and those sorts of understand databases to really get access to meaningful data and insights that can help you craft the first dimensions of a good set of campaigns and really think about the portfolio of considerations for the customer.

Olly Downs (38:13):

The third I would say is can we do experiments. If we can't do experiments, even rudimentary ones, we really won't be able to get feedback on what we're doing, and we can't get going. So, what is the most straightforward way I can begin to do experiments?

Olly Downs (38:29):

Can I just design simple holdout groups where I can differentiate the and understand the incrementality of my efforts compared with doing nothing or compared with doing what I usually do? My business is as usual.

Olly Downs (38:42):

Then you can start pushing increasing levels of sophistication. But I would say those three dimensions are key. One, beginning to think about the customer, two, access to analytics to really understand them through a lens that the marketers can see. And then three, finding ways to do experiments.

Jim Marous (39:02):

Yeah, I'm going to add one more because you probably wouldn't have said it because you're sitting where you are today. And I'm going to say, going to the free agency, I'll use a sports analogy, going into the free agency market immediately and find a partner that can play with you and bring you as much of what you just said you needed as you can.

Jim Marous (39:19):

So, pick Curinos. So, pick another provider that's going to say, I've gone down this road already with several clients, not just one or two. I'm going to bring you all the insights I've learned and I'm going to make it so you're going to have this position five months from now.

Jim Marous (39:36):

Because I'm going to bring you success from the low hanging fruit that I can do immediately to build some market presence and to build an ROI that satisfies the finance department that says, "By the way, marketing's not a cost center, it's a revenue center. And the better we do with our data, the more we hit the marketplace with what we have, the better it is."

Jim Marous (39:57):

But I would say, and it doesn't matter how big the organization is, it doesn't make any sense to do it alone. When you can get the culmination of experiences that a third-party solution provider can give you immediately, no matter if you're Chase or if you're ABC Bank with two branches, the reality is leverage what's already been found, especially as things are changing so fast, otherwise you're never going to catch up because why do we use GPS systems?

Jim Marous (40:27):

Because it's easy to use everybody's information that's driving ahead of me than it is to use just my information, what I'm seeing on the road today.

Jim Marous (40:33):

So, finally, Olly, there's a lot going on in generative AI. There's a lot of talk about digital twins. There's a lot that's really being discussed as it relates to personalization, better communication, open banking, you can go to customer centric communication as opposed to product centric.

Jim Marous (40:53):

What excites you about what's going on today in the marketplace that as you play around in your head and look at everything you've done in the past and say, "Man, I can play in the sandbox a little longer."

Olly Downs (41:09):

Boy, I would say for me it's the fact that we're really democratizing the ability to act on knowledge and synthesize data and improve experiences. I view generative AI as an additional tool in the box, but boy, it makes interaction human.

Olly Downs (41:32):

And if you think about this relationship that it has between language and concepts, being able to leverage that into the experiences we create and how we work is absolutely fascinating to me. And this ability to synthesize data, recommend action, and then take and learn from that interaction very quickly, it just has so much promise in so many different areas.

Jim Marous (42:02):

Well, you're exactly right. And you don't even have to get into this deep legal area that you want to do it to the hundredth degree. If I do it to the 50th degree or the 25th degree, I'm going to blow my customer away by being able to have ongoing interactions where I learn about Jim Marous, if I'm the consumer and my bank learns more and more about me and stores it in a little compository that is different than your compository.

Jim Marous (42:30):

And every time I talk to you, I'm talking to you based on the last conversation we had. And as that builds, we get more and more free with our information and say, "You know what? You can make a better decision for me than I can make for myself. I'm going to open up my information in my head and say, this is what I want to achieve."

Jim Marous (42:52):

And the ability to do that for every single consumer is right now at our fingertips. It really is there. And I don't think we have to go into the realm of pushing limits of legal and compliance and all that. There's so much there just for the taking, especially when you look at outside data and all that.

Jim Marous (43:09):

It's just, I hate to look back and say that we've let go of this opportunity the way we did, letting go of all transaction data on purchases when we gave up as bankers, the little pin pads that we thought were so stupid out there.

Jim Marous (43:24):

And now the retailers and the Amazons and the Googles of the world have all this data that I sure would like back again, but we still have lots to work with.

Jim Marous (43:33):

Olly, it's been a pleasure speaking with you. It's really exciting to see how Curinos is expanding the ability to take all the insights they have about products. I mean, talk about an organization that's moved from product to consumer centric and has always built these product solutions with a customer in mind.

Jim Marous (43:51):

But now it's really doubling down on the ability to personalize the communication and to work with your clients to truly bring results almost immediately.

[Music Playing]

Olly Downs (44:00):

Thank you, Jim. It's been really fun chatting with you today.

Jim Marous (44:04):

Thank you very much. You have a great one.

Olly Downs (44:07):

You too.

Jim Marous (44:08):

Thanks for listening to Banking Transformed, the winner of three international awards for podcast excellence. If you enjoyed today's interview, please take some time to show some love and form a review. Also be sure to catch my recent articles on the Financial Brand and check out the research we're doing for the Digital Banking Report.

Jim Marous (44:27):

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 (44:37):

I'm your host, Jim Marous. Until next time, remember now, more than ever, financial institutions must personalize experiences to create a better overall value proposition for the consumer.