How to Create Cross-Industry Omnichannel Journeys for Financial Services

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The new paradox in marketing
2. Treating regulation as an opportunity
3. Customer Journey 1: Splitting the bill with zero friction
4. Customer Journey 2: Getting from A to B safely
5. Customer Journey 3: Pain-free holiday preparation
6. Stitching together a customer-driven world

The new paradox in marketing

The world of marketing continues to converge and connect, and just as we start wondering whether the customer landscape will finally settle, we’re presented with yet another point of inflection. It's not just about seamlessly integrating digital and real-world communications anymore – it’s also about hyper-personalization and open technologies across trusted partners and industries. It's about providing a better customer experience.

We see it every time we book a holiday, make a payment, or join a loyalty program. Across our chosen purveyors of utilities, facilities, transactions, and experiences, brands are breaking down barriers to offer seamless journeys across touchpoints and outcomes. But as customers gain more control over the buying process, they will naturally turn to the brands they trust to connect these sequences of related experiences without friction.

Introducing the trust equation for marketing

This new convergence means that more than ever, marketing leaders need to use their customers’ data currency wisely in order to nurture trust. We can use this equation to better understand how different pillars of value interact with one another. From functional facets like a consistent customer experience across channels to laying the foundations for delivering on more emotional and transcendent values, like trust.

In this ebook, we're exploring a set of concrete customer journeys based on building trust and centered on partnerships. From connecting with trusted technologies to offering only the most relevant services and products, let’s explore how you can create comprehensive customer-focused experiences that will attract, convert and retain loyal customers.

Treating regulation as an opportunity

There are countless external factors driving the need to build trust with customers: laws and regulations are responding to customer preferences at a quickening pace and introducing detailed regulations around data usage and marketing permissions.

But while the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) pushes marketers towards controlled, precise data usage and management, the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) opens up the entire payments market for financial services, nudging the industry to exchange data with trusted 2nd parties through open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) so customers can enjoy an enhanced end-to-end customer experience.

For banks, this is considered the single biggest change to the industry: but this isn’t just about banks. Payments, transactions, and journeys appear at every juncture throughout marketing.

It follows that the entire brand landscape must switch to a proactive strategy when it comes to addressing these seemingly ‘dueling’ demands. But despite the apparent flux of ‘protection’ and ‘transparency’ for marketers, for the customer, PSD2 and the GDPR are simply two pillars used to uphold and strengthen an extended framework of trust.

Both the GDPR and the rise of open APIs point to one marketing end-goal: earning and delivering on customer trust, critical to customer experience.

The catch? Open up to opportunities, and think beyond borders to add customer value responsibly — or fall behind your competitors.

How could this work in practice?

Open APIs and what they can really mean for marketing strategy

1. Opening up channels of communication with trusted partners in a carefully controlled tech environment.
2. Making way for innovative business channels and creating new synergies.
3. Expanding your customer base and adding value-based around customer outcomes, and a broader customer journey and landscape.

So the question is no longer whether you can afford to leverage APIs — the question is how can you afford not to?

Customer Journey 1:
Splitting the bill with zero friction

Splitting the bill with zero friction

Impending regulation changes can push innovative banks and fintech disruptors together to collaborate rather than compete. Banks possess a stronghold of customer data ripe for delivering personalized customer journeys. Meanwhile, emerging fintech platforms are creating new ways of processing and displaying payments, and in the following case, repayments in easy single customer interfaces such as chat apps. 

How banks can remain responsive to change

In partnering with agile technologies and embracing the opportunities found in open APIs and orchestration tools, this bank has created an outcome-based service centering on an entire experience. They do this by using a flexible platform that helps them stitch together agile technologies and existing infrastructure.

But what does this mean in practice for the bank’s account holders like Bill? Bill’s bank has removed the steps from his journey to repay his friends by partnering with a mobile that enables Bill to distribute payment requests through his online chat via a single link – and for his friends to pay him instantly in a single tap, regardless of who they bank with.

Make it happen

Financial Services can begin orchestrating customer journeys like Bill’s:

• New technologies can seamlessly connect with existing marketing architecture, without a need for an overhaul.
• With these basics in place, brands can launch intelligent customer journeys across the real and digital world so they can respond to their customers' needs in real time.
• With the setup to remain agile and responsive to change in a shifting landscape, banks can adopt a test-and-learn approach to marketing, while remaining GDPR and PSD2-compliant.

Bill’s bank connects him to the latest technologies, as well as their existing systems to build his customer journey.

1. Bill knows he can rely on his bank to store money and process transactions, for instance when he needs to split the dinner bill with friends. 
2. But this experience involves several steps: Bill has to remember the amount owed, and remind his friends to pay him back. 
3. Bill’s bank has removed the steps from his journey by partnering with an application, which enables Bill to distribute requests for payment, through his online chat via a single link. 
4. Bill's friends can pay him instantly in a single tap, regardless of who they bank with.

Customer Journey 2:
Getting from A to B safely

Connecting the Financial Services and Automotive industries

People don’t buy a car — they buy the ability to get from A to B. But this route involves several transactions, beyond buying the car itself.

Sam can travel in her new car with mitigated risk. Her credit provider has not only provided her with a financial safety net to facilitate this, but they offered an end-to-end customer experience that spanned an entire network.
 

How brands can differentiate by serving as a recommendation engine

This credit lender is going beyond the borders of their core product and delivering on their customer’s specific needs. They do this by partnering with trusted 2nd parties and orchestrating the disparate data sources with Intelligent Journey Orchestration.

What is Intelligent Journey Orchestration?

Intelligent Journey Orchestration is the data-driven marketing strategy that mirrors customer behavior across all channels to deliver true one-to-one personalization in real time throughout the entire customer journey.

Intelligent Journey Orchestration platforms work on several levels to automate this kind of personalization at scale. By activating customer insights in real time, they let businesses generate individually personalized customer journeys across online and offline channels. They recognize and remember individuals across a lifetime of interactions, and they allow businesses to apply industry-specific AI models to optimize unique journeys for individuals rather than segments.

With the Relay42 platform for Intelligent Journey Orchestration, customers get highly relevant, personalized messaging when it matters most: in the moment. As a result, businesses are easily able to deliver individual journeys that increase conversion, loyalty, retention, and growth.

Sam's omnichannel journey

1. Sam buys a new Mercedes on finance, with a payment plan via her trusted credit card. 
2. Her credit provider, CrediTech, is notified: Sam has opted-in for a full suite of product recommendations related to car purchases from CrediTech. She trusts them with her data, and as such, is interested in their relevant aggregated services. 
3. CrediTech leverages Intelligent Journey Orchestration alongside their connectivity with trusted partners to sequence relevant offers for Sam. 
4. Based on Sam’s transaction history and behavior, CrediTech adds car insurance with the most beneficial provider and premium, optimum breakdown coverage and roadside recovery — and a periodic vehicle inspection.

Customer Journey 3:
Pain-free holiday preparation

Connecting the travel landscape through payments

As seamless partnerships between payment providers, booking interfaces, and airlines become ubiquitous, travel and financial services leaders are under pressure to find the perfect combination of trusted partners, value, and technology. Direct- and second-party distribution must be synchronized, with each entity piggybacking on the other to stitch together the ultimate journey for every customer and account holder:

1. Jack has a Global Travel Plus credit card issued by his bank. The credit card is connected to a global airline, granting him rewards and discounts when he travels. 
2. The bank offers a Travel Plus app through which Jack receives relevant recommendations related to his journey and based on his behavior, orchestrated and aggregated by the bank’s Intelligent Journey Orchestration technology. 
3. Through intelligent cross-pollination of insights, the bank can deliver a suite of offers based on Jack’s loyalty and customer value as a Travel Plus customer, including frequent flyer points and special hotel rates. 
4. Jack's bank leverages contextual re-targeting to source recommendations and next-best-actions for his trip to Barcelona from the best insurance rates, to currency exchange. 
5. Jack arrives at the airport with his family an hour before check-in opens. 
6. Thanks to open connectivity and real-time journey orchestration between the bank, the airline, and select airport retailers, he is greeted with a push message offering him a discounted meal while he and his family wait.

Summary: Stitching together a customer-driven world

As humans, we are driven to find ways to simplify an increasingly complex world, and technology helps us do that. Particularly for marketers in Financial Services, the focus is shifting from a supply-led to a demand-led economy — the trust economy, where customer demands continue to diversify and the fastest business to deliver value wins.

For banks, payment providers, credit platforms, and other hubs of trust, the opportunities are endless. New industry regulations offer critical milestones for brands to truly become part of the trust economy and deliver hyper-relevant customer journeys across internal and external business silos.

Brands can use technology to diversify and transform into purveyors of customer journeys, making marketing more personalized, adaptive, and valuable by stitching together and orchestrating needs across trusted partners, their services, channels, and interfaces.

For some brands, this agile way of opening out to relevant partners and services will be a reality in the near future. For many, it's happening now.