Marketing financial services with GenAI
How banks are and should be using ChatGPT, Gemini and other artificial intelligence models
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Banking and artificial intelligence have a long history. Some AI concepts go back to the 1950s and banks have been using pattern recognition and machine learning almost as long. Risk analysis, fraud detection, predictive customer behavior – the list of applications is long in which crunching large data sets has yielded a competitive advantage in financial services. I have outlined the importance of quantitative AI for banking today and tomorrow in more detail here.
The use of Generative AI, on the other hand, is still poorly understood in financial services. GenAI empowers machines to create entirely new content in the form of texts, images, videos and audio, mimicking human creativity. It is no wonder why it has rather rattled media agencies, translators, and graphic designers.
Yet while other industries have so far taken center stage in the AI race, more and more case studies of well-known financial brands are popping up. They impressively demonstrate the value GenAI can bring to the marketing departments of banking and finance. Let’s dive into some of the most thrilling ones.
GenAI in customer service – a proven profit-driver
The BNPL-specialist Klarna recently precented its innovative AI assistant, powered by OpenAI, which is the company behind ChatGPT. Launched this February, the project has so far resulted in a $40 million profit improvement. The AI chatbot handled a staggering two-thirds of all customer service chats, effectively taking the pressure off human agents and allowing them to focus on more complex inquiries. According to Klarna it “is doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents.” Customer satisfaction scores remained on par with interactions handled by human agents.
The AI assistant resolved customer inquiries in an average of less than 2 minutes, compared to the previous average of 11 minutes for human agents. The chatbot interacts in 35 languages, eliminates all kinds of linguistic barriers, and ensures seamless customer support for a diverse audience. The accuracy in resolving issues led to a 25% drop in repeat inquiries from customers. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the AI in providing clear and comprehensive answers to customer questions, preventing the need for follow-up interactions. Moreover, the AI assistant scales effortlessly to meet demand fluctuations. During peak customer service periods, the AI can handle a surge in inquiries without compromising service quality or response times.
Banks have been deploying chatbots for years, but Klarna’s assistant cannot just handle simple customer inquiries like checking the account balance; it can do much more complex tasks such as managing refunds. No matter how impressive, these results should be taken with a grain of skepticism as Klarna is preparing for an IPO and this is the kind of messaging investors love to hear. But even should the KPIs be polished, the potential is obviously very concrete.
Speeding up customer onboarding
Another case study comes from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), which used Document AI from H2O.ai to transform its sales and onboarding process. Extracting information from unstructured data can be a complex and time-consuming task. For banks like CBA, this challenge is particularly relevant in the Know Your Customer (KYC) process, where large volumes of documents need to be reviewed to verify customer identities. Manual processing of these documents is error-prone and inefficient. CBA used AI to automate the process of extracting data from KYC documents.
It was a booster to accuracy and automation. Document AI can extract data from IDs with an accuracy of 50-85%. This reduces the need for manual review and improves the overall efficiency of the KYC process. Furthermore, Document AI can process millions of documents per day. This enables CBA to keep up with the high volume of KYC requests they receive. By streamlining the KYC process, CBA is now able to produce payments 10 times faster.
Personalization and conversion
Other industries provide encouraging examples to be followed as well. The British optical chain Specsavers used the speech analytics tool by Infinity to monitor, transcribe, and extract key trends in calls to convert the conversations to sales. It resulted in a 32% reduction in the cost of acquisition.
E-Commerce retailer Farfetch joined forces with Phrasee to personalize the subject lines and text bodies of their e-mails. Open-rates for promotional e-mails went up 7%, those for reminder-emails even a staggering 31%. And the click-rate increased by one fourth.
These are just the beginnings of what GenAI can do to tailor content, messages, and pricing to each customer. In the next edition, we will look at what exactly such hyper-personalization means and what it will take for financial services providers to implement such a marketing approach.
Build AI skills for your company and your career
The more you dive into AI applications, the clearer it becomes that it will be a truly disruptive force in all marketing disciplines, whether that be campaign management, product management, digital customer acquisition, PR, customer service, sales, or business development. Though automation will alter the way strategies are drafted and marketing assets generated, the need for good marketing talent that knows how to deploy those new tools will be stronger than ever. Think of it like this: GenAI will be for marketeers what MS Excel is for accountants.
But make no mistake about it: Mastering GenAI is more than just typing prompts into ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. Using those tools without customization, without an understanding of prompt engineering, and without a deep expertise in your marketing field will make your communication sound and look bland. And using AI without a robust process will make you walk right into problems with data security, privacy, bias, regulation, information accuracy, and much more.
Because of the tremendous potential and risk of GenAI for financial services marketeers, I have teamed up with the Centre for Finance, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (CFTE) to create a certified online program for marketing experts and managers on all levels. Learn how to use AI in market research, content creation, and to drive a successful campaign even by using free tools. Also find out about successful case studies, possible use cases, and how to set up an AI strategy within your team.
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