Banks are increasingly using your data intelligently and effectively. Let’s find out how far they can go. Julius Abensur, Head of Industry and Financial Services at Relay42, explains.

Technology has advanced at a rapid pace in banking and our demands have changed, making our data – and banks using it properly to benefit us – more important than ever.

Through various utilities, facilities, transactions and experiences, banks have more opportunities to break down traditional barriers to offer us a more seamless experience across channels and outcomes, rather than products and functions. By using our data effectively, they can deliver us a unique journey, based around our personal interests and most frequently-used channels. The benefits to banks are clear; customers who are fully engaged bring an average of 37% more annual revenue to their primary bank than customers who are disengaged.

To achieve the levels of engagement and loyalty we now expect, banks need to ensure they are using our data wisely and responsibly in order to nurture our trust. If banks aren’t using our data to provide us with a better and more valuable user experience, it won’t be long before we stop sharing it altogether. This will only be made easier in light of regulations such as GDPR and PSD2, which are placing stricter rules on how banks use our information.

So how can banks use our data more effectively, while maintaining our trust?

Merging the real and digital worlds

Impending regulation changes are slowly pushing banks and disruptive fintech start-ups to collaborate, rather than compete, and this is opening up a whole new world of opportunities for us as customers. Banks possess a stronghold of customer data ripe for delivering personalised and useful experiences, and by partnering with fintechs who specialise in innovative, agile technologies, they can deliver true value.

For example, let’s say that a customer (we’ll call him Bill) has just paid for dinner at a restaurant with his friends, and they all want to split the cost and pay Bill back. By partnering with the right fintech and sharing customer data across platforms with a smart data platform, the bank can make this repayment process easier by enabling Bill to distribute payment requests through an online chat service via a single link. By using this link, Bill’s friends can then repay him instantly regardless of who they bank with.

By using data management technology to responsibly share data across different platforms, banks can launch intelligent customer experiences and solutions relatively quickly across both the real and the digital world. This offers clear advantages for customers, who can now use more intelligent services to increase convenience. And this is just the beginning.

Connecting with other industries

When it comes to delivering truly beneficial experiences, banks need to be looking beyond the industry they serve. We all have a vast range of interests that can be capitalised upon through the sophisticated use of data, and this can be achieved by connecting with other industries.

Take the travel industry, for instance. As seamless partnerships between payment providers, booking interfaces and airlines become ubiquitous, travel and financial services leaders need to take a sideways glance to carefully choose trusted partners, value propositions and technology.

To translate this into a practical example: Let’s revisit Bill. Bill has a Global Travel Plus credit card, which is issued by his bank and connected to a global airline, granting him rewards and discounts when he travels. The bank has also created a service called the Travel Plus app, which offers relevant recommendations related to Bill’s journeys and behaviours, and is orchestrated by the bank’s customer journey technology.

Through intelligent cross-pollination of insights and data, the bank can deliver a suite of offers based on Bill’s loyalty and customer value, including frequent flyer points and hotel discounts. Then, through contextual retargeting, Bill’s bank can send financially-related recommendations for his next trip to Barcelona, from the best insurance rates to lock-in forward Euro rates. This kind of data-driven personalisation is what we now crave, and simply would not be possible without banks connecting with other platforms and industries.

Stitching data intelligently

Data is undoubtedly the key to delivering the innovative, highly personalised banking experience that we are all seeking. For banks, the benefits are clear - customer retention is around 14% higher for companies that effectively apply big data and analytics to deal with velocity.

However, if banks are to achieve this then they need to make sure they use our data intelligently. As we have explored, using data management technology can go a long way to effectively stick data together to create a single customer view — the foundations for orchestrating right customer experiences — for the right people. Additionally, partnering with companies both inside and outside of the financial sector can open up new opportunities for next-generation loyalty and engagement.