Bank and insurance company customers trust their financial institution with their data and are comfortable with the data being used to provide more personalised offerings.
Greater “permission to personalise” is a key finding of a survey of 5000 Australian consumers by Bain & Co and Salesforce. The results are published in a new report, The Customer Imperative in Financial Services.
As has been noted in other recent surveys, consumers of financial services have a growing preference for digital channels, especially ones that can handle end-to-end interactions and transactions.
The survey also shows that the level of trust in banks has improved over the past couple of years, thanks in large part to the banks’ handling of payment deferrals and other forbearance during the pandemic.
Sixty-five per cent said they trust their bank or insurer to protect their data and 60 per cent are comfortable with their data being used to provide more personalised propositions.
These findings suggest that consumers will respond positively to the sort of services being developed to exploit open banking.
“Respondents express openness to many forms of personalisation, including pre-populated forms and applications, personalised pricing and propositions, and tailored services,” the report said.
The report cited one bank that developed “150 unique customer experiences” and then used the customer’s data when providing one of these experiences to personalise the communication and tailor the experience to suit the customer’s preferences.
Another bank uses data to identify when a customer is shopping elsewhere for a financial product and is working on a project to “optimise personalised engagement” to retain these customers.
When Bain and Salesforce spoke to bank executives, it found the things that were holding back implementation of personalised propositions were technology and data limitations, lack or resources, not having the right talent and the wrong customer metrics.
One banker said: “Too many of our customer metrics are measured based on what is important to us, rather than being able to get insight from customers on what’s important to them.”