Bank of Me: How Can Banks Keep Pace in the Race Towards Hyper-Personalisation?

Technologies like GenAI have a crucial role in helping traditional banks keep pace with online-only players in the race towards hyper-personalisation. However, as Qodea’ Howard Glynn explains, to really capitalise on these technologies, banks must get the foundations right.

From Deliveroo, to Uber, to Netflix, today’s ‘one-click’ society expects and demands a level of personalisation and convenience inconceivable to previous generations. For the financial sector, things are no different. Bank customers expect their money to be safe, secure, and available at the click of a button, anywhere in the world. A 2022 report by McKinsey & Co found that 71% of customers now expect banks and companies to deliver personalised interactions.

How can banks - once a staple of every high street up and down the country - meet the relentless demand for hyper-personalised digital services? Innovative technologies, such as GenAI, will certainly play a crucial role. For banks and their customers to enjoy the full potential of these technologies, however, they must be built upon solid foundations. Let’s take a look at what these are.

Reach for the Cloud and unleash your data

Online-only players like Monzo are rapidly establishing a new gold standard for the digital banking experience. They’ve done so by successfully exploiting the enormous potential of the Cloud, which enables them to revolutionise how they manage their data and deliver a personalised experience for every customer.

‘Traditional’ banks can do the same, but they face challenges that must first be addressed. Many banks have legacy systems that may once have served the high street well, but are now costly to maintain and lack the agility to deliver the type of personalised service customers expect. Moving to the Cloud frees banks from these legacy constraints. Cloud-based systems enable far greater agility, the ability to respond quickly to changes in the market, and - crucially - deliver vital data-driven insights. For customers, this translates into a more personalised, frictionless experience, which serves their needs today, and anticipates those of tomorrow.

Security and peace of mind

Given that banks manage our wages and life savings, it’s hardly a surprise that they rely upon the absolute trust of their customers like no other business. As high-profile cyber attacks and scams become an almost daily occurrence, people are—quite rightly—paranoid about the security of their money and their personal data.

As citizens, we crave peace of mind just as much as convenience, and Cloud has a critical role to play in helping banks deliver both. Cloud providers, like Google Cloud, offer banks a level of security and resilience, for themselves and their customers, which cannot be replicated through on-premises infrastructure.

Cloud also has a critical role in helping mitigate against security risks, before they’ve even occurred. Regulators across many jurisdictions require banks to evidence the specific steps they are taking here. By integrating data analytics with security measures, banks can not only detect and respond to threats in real time but proactively identify vulnerabilities before they are exploited. In doing so, they can progressively reduce their ‘attack surface’, offering ever greater confidence to customers and regulators.

Computer says… Yes!

With these solid foundations in place, banks can harness - with greater confidence - the full potential of tech like GenAI to deliver a truly personalised service for their customers.

When it comes to a simple but vital task like answering customer queries, for example, GenAI can quickly harness the right information from huge corpora of data. It can summarise its findings, helping a human customer service agent solve a customer’s problem more quickly and efficiently by offering a solution that is the next best action with the best anticipated results. This means the agent will have greater confidence that the decision they’ve made is the best one.

These same tools can enable banks to create an ever improved, more intuitive experience for their customers. By leveraging data insights, they can create tailored product recommendations and targeted campaigns based on behaviour and preferences. For the customer, this means that annoying ads are replaced with relevant, useful information that could make a real difference in how they live their lives.

For banks and indeed businesses across all sectors, the insatiable demand for personalised services will only continue to accelerate. By harnessing technologies like AI, built on a secure, agile, data-driven, foundation, banks can reap the rewards and be at the forefront of the digital revolution in customer service.

Howard Glynn is Vice President - Technical Directors at Qodea, Europe’s largest Google technology transformation partner.

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