Personalising the banking experience

Third part in a four part series about meaningful engagement in digital banking

Personalisation is a great way for companies to drive conversions, boost engagement and improve loyalty. Arguably, it’s more important for banks to personalise the customer experience than most, given how people have very different relationships with their finances. Yet, most banking apps look more or less the same.

For banks to truly enable people to manage their finances better, they need to develop digital environments that cater to different needs.

This means personalising the banking experience — which forms the third theme in our series on meaningful engagement in digital banking. Following on from building positive financial habits and catering to long-term relationships, we now look at how banks can make their customers feel like their bank actually knows them and understand their needs.

Applying some psychology

Historically, banks have broken customers down into demographic groups by age, income etc. in order to offer them a more personalised experience. However, we believe that by applying some psychology, banks can achieve a better understanding of the motivation of different groups of customers.

The Big 5

The Big-5 personality traits theory dates back the 1800 hundreds, with the most recent model developed by personality researchers, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae. The theory can help us better understand why people react so differently to their financial situations. Psychologists believe that the five broad personality types are strong predictors for particular kinds of behaviour. The five traits are:

• Openness
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeable
• Neuroticism

At the extremes, people displaying the ‘conscientiousness’ personality type tend to have a higher motivation level and are more organised — and good with money. In contrast, people who display ‘neuroticism’ are sensitive to unpleasant feelings and tend to be reactive with low measures of impulse control. People with this personality type tend not to be good with money and avoid getting to grips with their finances. However, they do respond well to support with their financial situation.

Meniga’s ‘super users’ belong to the first group of ‘conscientious’ people, but those who have a tendency to experience negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, or depression tend to be less actively engaged in their personal finance. Based on this insight and the fact that most online banking apps look the same, we have taken an approach that caters for different personality types.

For example, Meniga’s Money Monster is designed to help those who don’t usually like to engage with their finances (Neuroticism) save money. The Money Monster ‘steals’ small amounts of money from customers’ accounts and moves it to their savings accounts. Another example is Meniga’s Profile feature which is a personalised snapshot of customers’ financial profile — in info-graph format — and an easy way for customers, who might normally not be interested in engaging with their personal finances, to digest their financial life.

Meanwhile, to help serve the different groups of customers, we have built an environment called Meniga Dialog, where banks can develop content and functionality campaigns to provide a highly personalised digital banking experience.

Making the most of what you’ve got

Banks are able to acquire a whole host of customer data — data which can be used to drive a personalised customer experience.

One way banks can use data to provide a personalised customer experience is in the shape of card-linked offers — working with merchants to provide discounts, based on past spending behavior and financial profiles, that offer real monetary value via their digital banking app. The beauty of this approach is that the merchant funds a new revenue stream from merchant commission, while at the same time driving increased customer loyalty for the bank. A win-win-win for banks, merchants and customers.

This technology is set to have a real impact on society. Banks can help millions of people gain insight into their current financial situation and motivate them to improve it. People that have experienced this life-changing impact will become brand advocates for the bank’s services.

However, to get to a point where you can accurately predict what your customers do (and do not) want to receive from their bank, you have to put the work in — testing and retesting user responses to what you’re providing, trialing new features, and so on.

The end goal is meaningful engagement — breaking through the noise, beating the social media platforms at their own game and capturing people’s imagination with a personalised user experience that grabs their attention.

For further inspiration on how to leverage meaningful engagement to win and retain customers, check out our full Insight Paper: Meaningful Engagement in Digital Banking.