AI-Powered Personetics: Boosting Customer Engagement in the Digital Era
As a new decade begins, fintech trends are continuing to make significant inroads into the banking system, particularly among younger millennials and Gen Z customers. Whereas such digital transformation in the financial services sector has brought about positive changes, that’s not to say banks don’t encounter some growing pains. In fact, they must make continuous efforts to inform and guide customers while promoting digital engagement, boosting customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, winning market share for the institution.
Nevertheless, a myriad of those institutions rarely has the resources to establish their own digital engagement platforms. Unless those financial players wish to be left behind their competitors, it’s “must” that they seek out a capable partner to help modernize their operations.
Amongst several options available, Personetics may turn out to be a seamless match for these concerns. Adopted by the world’s largest financial institutions, Personetics remains the leading provider of AI-powered personalization, engagement, and advocacy solutions for banks globally. So, how does it empower banks to tackle the challenges of customer engagement and product adoption? Let’s read on to uncover!
Personetics: AI for Personalized Banking
What is Personetics?
Founded in 2011 by David Sosna and David Govrin, Personetics Technologies is a FinTech software company headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, with additional offices in New York, London, and Singapore. Up to now, Personetics has thrived to be the leading provider of customer-facing AI solution for financial services as well as the company behind the industry’s first Self-Driving Finance™ platform.
Harnessing the power of AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics, Personetics’ Self-Driving Finance solutions are employed by the world’s largest financial institutions to transform digital banking into the center of the customer’s financial life – providing real-time personalized insight and advice, automating financial decisions, and simplifying day-to-day money management.
Serving over 65 million bank customers worldwide, Personetics has the largest direct customer impact of any AI solution provider in banking today. Actually, the Fintech company now counts among its customers 6 of the top 12 banks in North America and Europe, together with other leading banks throughout the world.
“Our technology helps banks stay relevant with their customers,” said Michal Wachstock, Personetics Head of Global Marketing. “Since we started nine years ago, we’ve partnered with about 50 of the largest financial institutions in the world. We have a great presence in the U.S. and Europe, and we’re growing our presence in Asia as well.”
Approach to Solve Customer Engagement’s Challenges in The Digital Era
As the global financial industry navigates digital transformation, banks are challenged to differentiate their brand experiences in ways that replace in-person interactions with personalized digital approaches driven by data. Fortunately, Personetics can lend a helping hand, which enables bankers to transform those outdated interactions into experiential platforms that know – and act on – every single individual customer’s needs.
“It’s a struggle for banks to keep their customers engaged on the new digital platforms,” Wachstock shared. “We bring innovation to ensure they retain their competitive edge.”
Furthermore, Personetics embeds transparently within the bank’s branded mobile and web applications. For each online channel of communication between the bank and its customers, Personetics also offers push notifications that simplify the experience. And it’s all based on data the bank already has.
“Personetics analyzes transaction data along with other information the user has given the bank,” she said. “What’s going to make a customer come back and engage is knowing that the interactions we provide are fresh, relevant, and real.”
Once you’ve grasped the big picture, it’s time to take a deeper look over Personetics ‘s AI-Powered Engagement Platform – Self-Driving Finance. What is it and how it can help?
Self-Driving Finance: AI Power Takes Banks Beyond Personal Financial Management (PFM)
1. PFM and The Today Banking Reality
Compared to tech-aid management tools, PFM solutions to-date have gained limited traction – they not only deliver limited value but also require a lot of work. The reality is that consumers don’t want to “manage” their finances – they don’t have the time, patience, or knowledge to do it.
In fact, customer expectations from their banking providers in the digital age go beyond just access to data and ease of use. What individuals actually need are insights that can be highly-personalized, forward-looking, and require little to no effort on their part. Rather “theoretical” solutions, the modern banking customers wish timely and relevant bite-sized tips and advice that help them control of their day-to-day finances, make better decisions about their money and take small yet tangible steps towards better financial health.
To satisfy these needs, money management solutions need to be tightly integrated into the everyday banking experience – delivering personalized and practical guidance throughout the financial journey. At least, they have to:
- Know what happens and what’s coming (e.g. payments due)
- Avoid unnecessary expenses and fees (e.g. unused subscriptions)
- Stay out of trouble (e.g. running out of money before their next paycheck)
- Save more, reduce debt, and improve the overall financial wellbeing
In fact, accuracy is key to establishing trust and confidence with customers. What does it mean? It means that data has to be up to the minute and the cash flow forecast must be highly reliable. As confidence in the information grows, consumers are increasingly willing to trust the recommendations and advice provided and even let autonomous money management take charge and automatically move money on their behalf to help them save and invest.
AI-powered proactive money management solutions are already in use by several banks across the globe and Personetics’s Self-Driving Finance is amongst the most favorite ones.
2. Self-Driving Finance: Offering Insights, Automation, and Actionable Advice for Financial Institutions
Just like self-driving cars, Personetics’s Self-Driving Finance is “not an all or nothing proposition but rather a continuum of capabilities”.
From personal customers’ standpoint, Self-Driving Finance empowers them to improve their financial lives – safely and effortlessly – through a data-driven, holistic approach to day-to-day money management. From banks’ standpoint, it enables these financial institutions to provide retail, small business and wealth management customers with varying degrees of guidance in managing their finances – ranging from real-time insights to personalized recommendations and automated money management. Thus, banks will manage to boost engagement, establish credibility and trust, increases deposits and share of wallet as well as allows these financial institutions to meet the demands of digital-native customers.
When it comes to such a platform’s process, Personetics builds stages of guidance – on top of a foundation of bank data.
The very first stage in the process is the Personetics Engage solution – a new breed of banking solution – that is based on more than 300 distinct insights. After comprehensively analyzing the insights obtained, real-time predictive analytics technology will help banks educate their customers, suggest and initiate steps for improving financial outcomes as well as offer positive reinforcement.
“We’re understanding the context of where customers are in their financial lives and ensuring they’re comfortable with their financial performance and status,” Wachstock said.
After that, Personetics takes insight a step further with an actionable financial guidance chatbot solution that’s contextual and predictive based on the customer’s record. “We go in and analyze transactions and accounts and make recommendations for optimizing performance,” Wachstock shared. “We look at everything from shifting money to savings to securing better rates on products, ensuring they’re not double-charged, and pointing out ways they can do better.”
With insights and advice also comes automation tools – Personetics facilitates customers to handle the routines of their financial lives in two ways.
“Millennials, especially, trust technology. They want to know the algorithms are working for them, and they expect things to just work,” The Personetics Head of Global Marketing said. “They don’t want to have to go in and make adjustments. They assume their bank knows more than they do, and once we’ve established that kind of trust, they can then put it on autopilot.”
More than that, the Personetics automation solution also accompanies customers on their financial journeys. Based on changes surfacing in a customer’s transaction record, Personetics can even recognize when someone graduates from college, moves to a new city, gets married or becomes a parent, amongst other scenarios.
“We can actually take customers through multiple stops and conversion opportunities and eventually help them reach a successful endpoint,” Wachstock said.
Personetics’ AI-Powered Engagement Platform for SMBs Adopted by Leading Banks
Within such an ever-evolving digital age, almost all small and medium business owners have high expectations from financial services providers… Beyond survival, they need forward-looking insight and advice to ensure adequate liquidity and be well-positioned for growth.
To be more specific, a survey conducted by Personetics has highlighted a significant gap between the needs of small businesses and their current banking experience. Some of the key findings include:
- As many as 90% of small business owners would like to conduct their banking activities digitally, but only 41% do it today.
- Two-thirds of the respondents want online cashflow management, forecasting, and budgeting tools from their bank.
- Only 14% are currently getting financial guidance from their bank.
“AI is increasingly enabling banks to bridge the gap between small businesses’ needs and their ability to meet these needs,” said Alenka Grealish, Senior Analyst at Celent Banking Practice. “Historically, delivering value-added services to small businesses has been cost-prohibitive for banks. AI allows banks to customize service and provide advice digitally, thereby lowering costs and democratizing services that were only available to large businesses in the past.”
Plus, when asked about their financial challenges, the majority of small businesses ranked cashflow issues at the top of their list, followed by making payments and ensuring timely collections. Adopting the power of AI and predictive analytics, banks can help businesses address these challenges, improve financial control and simplify money management:
- Proactively highlight payment and receivable issues to provide greater visibility
- Predict future cash flows and suggest corrective actions to preempt balance shortfalls
- Recommend relevant financing options to address liquidity and growth needs
- Provide a holistic view of actual and planned financial activities using bank and accounting data
The reality is that small business banking has long lagged customer banking in digital investment, opening the door for fintech players to “chip away” at critical profit centers such as lending and payments. According to industry analysts, disruptors have stepped into the small business banking gaps left by traditional and they’re building ecosystems that will forever shift the SME landscape. Unless banks wish to be left behind, they must act quickly to stave off competition in small business banking.
Actually, to “ride on the crest of a wave”, the ability to adapt the solution to their unique customer engagement strategies is critical for banks. Furthermore, those financial institutions must employ appropriate tools to continuously adjust the solution in accordance with ever-changing customer and small business needs. But which tools should they use?
Once again, Ai-Powered Personetics is the answer!
In fact, the Personetics solution comes with a rich library of over 50 prebuilt insights tailored to business users’ needs, allowing banks to significantly shorten time-to-market. “Those insights look different,” Wachstock said. “If all of a sudden, we see a ton of Office Depot transactions in a personal account, for example, we’ll recommend moving those to a corporate account. It’s a different look and understanding of the different milestones in that experience.”
“Most of the time, bank marketing departments don’t have access to the kinds of insights we give to end customers,” Wachstock said. “That’s why a customer will end up receiving a generic text message offering a loan when their account looks fine. Why are they even offering that?”
Understanding that, Personetics helps bank marketers respond deftly to changing business strategies and diverse customer needs by replacing disjointed, impersonal marketing with actionable data integration.
“With our CRM integration, we give those insights to the teams that are managing the relationships,” Wachstock said. “It could be the marketing department; it could be the telephone operators or branch workers who interact with the customers. Everyone relevant to business growth gets a full, actionable view of the customer’s life cycle.”
David Sosna, Personetics co-founder, and CEO, also added “The small business solution is a result of our work with banks around the globe to address the shifting expectations of business customers as they become more digital-savvy,” he said. “Banks that act on these emerging needs have an opportunity to turn online and mobile banking into the go-to places for businesses to manage their day-to-day finances and stay ahead of the rapidly evolving needs of their small business customers.”
The Bottom Lines
Featuring a unique combination of built-in financial intelligence and advanced cognitive capabilities, Personetics solutions are bank-ready, allowing financial institutions of all sizes to make AI-powered banking a reality for millions of customers. With its marvelous engagement Platforms, Personetics proves itself to be a trusted partner for financial institutions and businesses to handle their inefficiencies – as well as wisely respond to the fast-pacing digital transformation in the financial services landscape!