GFT Technologies : Banks missing out on extra custom due to lack of personalisation capabilities

Only 10% of consumers believe that their bank provides useful advice on their financial wellbeing, with 68% saying that their relationship is purely 'transactional'. The eagerness for more advice driven interactions is most prevalent among millennials, with 78% of those within the 16-24 age bracket likely to look to their bank for their other financial requirements if they were able to receive tailored advice.

Almost a quarter (24%) of those questioned say they have been denied access to a banking service or product without explanation, at least once. This experience almost doubles for those within the age bracket of 25-34 (40%), perhaps linking to the average age at which a UK adult looks to take out extra banking services, such as a mortgage.

However, if banks are clearer as to how they use customer data, relationships could be strengthened. Almost half (47%) of customers would be willing to share their data in exchange for lower prices, whilst 55% would feel comfortable with the bank monitoring their spending habits if it was then able to improve their disposable income through personalised offers, money saving tips, real time reminders and updates.

Christian Ball, Head of Retail Banking at GFT commented: 'With PSD2 soon to be implemented, the drive for greater competition will bring bank data, customer data and third party providers together. Ultimately, it will impact the current banking model in two key areas. Firstly, the relationship between banks and their customers, as banks move to identify how they can improve the customer experience through data. Secondly, there is the opportunity for banks to grow market share and improve cost efficiencies through access to new customers via 'marketplaces', and with greater flexibility for how banks consume services.'

Ball continues 'If banks are to thrive in this new banking ecosystem, they must focus on a wider range of data sources to enhance their understanding of the customer and their effectiveness in matching them to financial products and services. Top of the agenda for banks should be to improve customer segmentation through greater use of transaction metadata gained from a smart transaction manager and personal financial management (PFM) engagement, as well as considering alternative sources of insight, such as social media activity.'

GFT is developing a number of Know Your Customer (KYC) and customer analytics tools that will help banks to deliver the personalised benefits deemed to be lacking by consumers in the recent GFT research. Emerging GFT tools and assets include Friendlyscore a real-time credit scoring mobile app to enrich the retail store journey and Brandchats enabling a deeper KYC analysis from public social network content. In addition, GFT's partnership with Dexi accelerates the ability of clients to benefit from intelligent data automation.

Jacob Laurvigen, COO and Co-Founder of Dexi.io, a leader in intelligent data automation software also commented on GFT's findings: 'Banks stand to gain by building a detailed and accurate picture of each customer to inform the products and services they offer. To do this effectively, they must be ready to work with 'Fast Data', quickly gathering, assessing and overlaying data from different external, web-based sources in real-time. Automating this process will guarantee quality and consistency, as well as delivering significant scalability and capability benefits over human manual data gathering, checking and cross-checking.