Driving marketing success with AI-powered modern data architecture in Financial Services

Financial institutions today face heightened customer expectations driven by digital-first experiences, immediate responsiveness and hyper-personalization. Marketing teams within banks, insurers, wealth management firms and fintech companies should reorient their strategies around data-driven insights powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Central to this transformation is adopting a modern data architecture (MDA) integrated with sophisticated customer data platforms (CDPs) and composable systems to enable personalized marketing at scale.

Legacy data systems characterized by fragmented data stores and slow analytics hinder marketers from achieving real-time, personalized engagements. An MDA powered by AI allows marketing teams to gain instantaneous insights, refine customer journeys dynamically and deliver hyper-personalized content and product recommendations. This effectively leverages solutions such as advanced CDPs, which complements in-house-built data management capabilities.

AI is integral across each component of your capability stack and business functions, enhancing both employee and customer experiences. The effectiveness of your AI initiatives hinges on the resilient nature of your underlying data foundation and the technology architecture underpinning its development. Future-proofing your data architecture requires careful consideration across the five primary components.

• Harness all data assets, including unstructured data across the organization, to develop a thorough knowledge graph and feed AI models with holistic information signals. Over two-thirds of the data collected and managed within an organization is “unstructured” and there is potential for an incremental value unlock if that data is harnessed properly.
  Furthermore, the data size is one of the key inputs (along with compute and parameters) that directly influence the performance of language model. Studies show that the language modeling performance improves with an increase in dataset size. It’s essential to harness all available data assets within the organization.
• Establish a strong data governance framework, enforcing stricter standards for the responsible and reasonable use of data and confirming that any sensitive data is not exposed to AI models.
  

^{(Source: IDC’s Microsoft — Responsible AI Survey, March 2024)}

• Unify customer data using a common source of truth, embracing a federated data architecture approach to create a unified and consistent understanding of the customer’s behavior and needs across each touchpoint.
• Build real-time data streams for the timely availability of data across the organization, faster insights and the ability to experiment as you harness the value from customer’s key moments in real time while honoring the latest consent and preferences updates. This also promotes that AI agents are leveraging up-to-date information.
• Build strategic data collaborations, both internally within the organization and with external partners (i.e., 2P or 3P) to gain extended insights into customers leveraging data collaboration relationships (beyond the boundaries of the organization’s proprietary data).

• Real-time, AI-powered personalization: Integrate composable architectures and CDPs to harness diverse data assets – such as transactional data, online behaviors and market signals – and enable real-time, personalized customer interactions.
• AI-driven content automation: Utilize GenAI within composable marketing systems for rapid content creation that remains compliance-ready and drastically accelerates marketing execution.
• Unified customer data view through CDPs: Create a unified and real-time customer profile across all channels (i.e., branches, digital platforms, contact centers, etc.), enhancing the consistency and effectiveness of your interactions.

“Make it feel like you know me”

Today’s Experience

• Emma uses her banking app, but the promotions and offers feel irrelevant
• She is a jetsetter, seeking a travel-friendly credit card, yet she’s bombarded with car loan ads
• A one-size-fits-all marketing approach makes her feel unseen

Better with AI

• AI analyzes Emma’s spending habits and interactions to understand her
• Curates offers for a travel rewards card, exclusive partner discounts, and savings plan tailored to her trip
• A chatbot proactively reaches out with insights on optimizing travel expenses

Impact

• Higher Engagement: Personalized offers increase interaction rates
• Retention: Timely, relevant interactions build trust and loyalty
• Revenue Growth: Boost conversions on financial products
• Real-Time Relevance: Dynamic and in sync with customer needs

AI integration within an MDA frees marketing teams from routine tasks, enabling them to focus on strategic growth initiatives such as:

• Predictive and proactive engagement: AI anticipates customer financial milestones, allowing marketers to proactively deliver personalized financial advice and targeted products.
• Automated lifecycle marketing: AI-driven automation orchestrates personalized interactions throughout the customer lifecycle – from onboarding and nurturing to upselling and retention activities – improving customer satisfaction and increasing lifetime value.
• AI-powered compliance assurance: Composable architectures combined with AI help confirm that marketing content consistently adheres to brand standards and regulatory requirements.

“Free yourself from the routine”

Today’s Experience

• Sophia, oversees routine email campaigns—birthday greetings, early-month-on-books check-ins
• These emails are essential for relationships but highly manual
• Timely and personalized outreach is a logistical challenge, leading to inconsistencies and missed opportunities

Better with AI

• Agentic AI fully automates routine and more routine engagement, personalization, timing, and content variation
• AI sends birthday emails with tailored offers, personalizes EMOB check-ins based on activity, and adjusts anniversary notes for milestones
• AI continuously refines messaging to maximize engagement

Impact

• Effortless Personalization: Messages feel customized, not robotic
• Consistent Engagement: No missed touches from manual oversight
• Time Savings: Eliminates need for marketers to do mundane repetitive marketing tasks

Financial institutions should adopt a structured, phased approach to AI integration as part of a modern data architecture structure.

• Crawl: Start by establishing foundational data quality, data governance practices and basic, rule-based automation. Integrate essential CDP capabilities to unify data sources.
• Walk: Implement semi-autonomous, AI-driven marketing solutions, enabling adaptive learning and real-time analytics to deliver personalized customer experiences.
• Run: Transition towards autonomous, self-learning AI systems deeply integrated with composable architecture and advanced CDPs – ultimately enabling the continuous optimization of customer interactions across channels.

Marketing leaders should prioritize the following actions to capitalize on AI-powered MDA and gain a competitive edge by adopting new innovations.

1. Strategic alignment: Align AI and data architecture initiatives with broader marketing and business objectives to secure executive sponsorship and facilitate cross-functional collaboration.
2. Technology investment: Proactively assess and invest in AI-enabled CDPs and composable technology stacks to streamline integration, facilitate scalability and support real-time data analytics.
3. Talent development: Build teams proficient in AI analytics, data governance and real-time marketing automation to help the organization leverage the new capabilities.
4. Governance and compliance: Establish strong data governance policies, processes and AI compliance practices to safeguard customer data and maintain regulatory adherence.

Given rapid advancements in AI and intensifying market competition, financial institutions should promptly evaluate and implement MDA. Early movers will likely capture substantial competitive advantages, deliver exceptional marketing outcomes, drive customer loyalty and achieve sustained business growth.

Is your organization ready to leverage the potential of AI-powered MDA? The future of marketing in financial services starts today.