The Pandemic-Driven Digital Boom is Slowing – What Next for Financial Services Brands?
2022 will be a year of transition for financial services brands as they look to maintain the level of digital interaction with customers they developed during the pandemic, while also putting the foundations in place for more sophisticated use of data across their entire customer journey.
These are the most significant findings of London Research and Movable Ink, the leading content personalisation software, in their new report, Financial Services Marketing Trends and Priorities 2022, published recently.
The past two years of lockdowns and self-isolation have seen an explosion in the numbers of consumers dealing with their financial services providers through digital channels. Now, as the sector starts to think about the ‘new normal’, the report finds companies have four clear priorities for the next 12 months:
Renewed growth. The pandemic has seen a boom in the number of people dealing with their financial services providers via digital channels. Companies in the sector are now looking for where the next wave of growth might come from.
Increased customer focus. Customer behaviour has changed at an unprecedented pace over the last two years. Understanding these changes, at increasingly granular levels, is crucial to business success.
Improved responsiveness. Companies must be able to respond ever-more-quickly to meet, or even anticipate, opportunities emerging from changing customer needs.
Continued digital transformation. All of this is underpinned by the need to keep rethinking the organisation for the digital world, eradicating manual ways of working, and replacing them with automated, integrated processes built around the customer.
Three Key Challenges
The report also identifies three key challenges where financial services companies need to focus their attention in order to achieve these goals:
Organisation. Businesses need to replace traditional siloed structures with agile, cross-functional teams.
Technology. Sharing data across the entire organisation is the foundation of both personalisation and an omnichannel strategy. This requires an integrated technology stack and a clean, compliant and unified set of data.
Staffing. Recruiting in-house staff with the right digital skills continues to be a challenge, particularly for organisations outside the digital hubs.
All these challenges are interlinked and can’t be addressed in isolation. For example, breaking down silos to increase responsiveness should also result in greater sharing of data across the business, while only organisations with the right skill-set and culture will be able to take full advantage of a sophisticated tech stack.
Technology Outpaces Companies’ Implementation Capabilities
Almost everyone interviewed for the report recognised the importance of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence in delivering sophisticated personalisation across multiple channels.
However, everyone also recognises how much work they need to do – particularly around data – in order to implement these new technologies, and how much value there is to be unlocked in the process. Many admitted they were still in the earliest stages of bringing their data together to build a single customer view.
According to Dominic Wren, Head of Brand Partnerships at brand/agency intermediary GO!, even six to 12 months ago, there was a degree of naivety about the complexity involved in sorting out an organisation’s data, particularly for established brands and those that have grown via rapid acquisition.
“It’s very costly, and it’s very complicated, not only from a logistics point of view, but from a GDPR point of view too,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of work that needs to go into it, and that will be going on in 2022 without doubt, but people will have to do it whilst also executing their day jobs.”
Environment Issues Yet to Gain Traction
Another striking finding in the report is the lack of consideration of environmental issues given by consumers in their financial services decisions, particularly in mass-market areas such as insurance. One interviewee described a significant gap between what customers say they want, and what they actually buy. Another predicted that sustainability would not be a major concern for customers in the coming 12 months.
Mark Evans, Managing Director, Marketing & Digital at Direct Line Group, argued that this doesn’t mean financial services marketers should ignore these issues.
“Within insurance specifically, for now, the importance of environmental issues is greater for investors, our executive committee and our staff than it is for consumers,” he said. “Our electric vehicle insurance product launch was intended to accelerate the broad switch towards electric vehicles. As marketers, we need to be at the heart of these conversations.”
The full Financial Services Marketing Trends and Priorities 2022 report is available for download.