Personalization is king when it comes to consumer banking services and fintechs. With the myriad of products and services resolving customer pain points at different elements of their financial journey, it is hard for banks to keep up in resolving these issues as specifically, or as well. Fintechs who are able to identify specific consumer issues and solve them beyond compare become unicorns. Because of this, personalization has catalyzed the world of fintech, making it the consumer preference in financial services.
Today, personalization is equated with care in customer service. With so much choice around, customers are able to be as choosy as they like when adopting financial services. They are no longer bound to the few age-old institutions that dominate the banking market and they now seek highly personal services offering bespoke-feeling, empathetic experiences. Customers seek tailored recommendations that are easily adopted or taken on. Companies who succeed in this space are required to leverage data, advanced analytics, and modern technologies to provide insight and intelligent decisioning in real-time, personalization, and understanding of the entire journey both within and beyond the financial institution.
Customers also want effortless experiences with financial institutions without stuffy and lengthy processes for adoption and servicing. This puts further pressure on physical and digital channels to deploy modern technology that can remove obstacles to service in the customer journey while capturing important data every step of the way to optimize relationship management. Here, fintechs dominate as they set out to simplify and offer the best possible solution to a financial issue such as simple payments, effortless money management tools, low-fee savings, and education. In this regard, fintechs outpace banking institutions in delivery speed, simplicity, and specificity.
Achieving personalization results in trust in technology and its automations, increasing engagement with the companies who achieve it. Doing so requires intelligent leveraging of data, AI insights, machine learning, and predictive analysis. Traditional institutions lag behind in providing this to their customers. Intelligent CRM is crucial to identifying where to create personalization for customers through their needs and wants. Where financial institutions are rigid in how they serve their customers, fintechs can be much more flexible to adapt to and morph with the customer’s needs as they interact with products.
The impact of not achieving personalization of services will become very severe for financial institutions who cannot offer customers what they need specifically. This is where fintech has been winning. If banks cannot keep up, they may lose their share of customers sooner than they think.
