Financial Services - Incedo Inc.

In today’s world, where the evolution of digital technology, AI and machine learning algorithms has influenced human lives, the concept of AI-driven, personalized experiences across customer touchpoints with the business has been gaining traction for some time.

“85% of businesses say they are providing somewhat personalized experiences to customers, and 60% of consumers agree with that.” – Twilio Segment Report

“72% of customers rate personalization as ‘highly important’ in today’s financial services landscape” – Capco research report “Insights for Investments to Modernize Digital Banking”

The application of personalization is becoming ubiquitous now – from the kind of articles that search sites show us, to the posts and reels that come in front of us on social media, to the kind of products that get recommended to us everywhere on the Internet. Personalized recommendations have become the smart marketer’s greatest tool and weapon for reaching out to their customers and creating a differentiation from the competitors.

For early adopters of personalization in the banking sector, the focus today is on investing in increasingly better and faster ways of personalization. Personalization today combines features bank customers want and are willing to pay for as inspired by digital banking with the human touch that still remains vital for effective customer engagement. Some of the banks, however, are still new in the journey and trying to formulate the strategy of AI-driven personalization.

Below we discuss some of the avenues where the CMO’s office has been able to unleash the power of AI-driven personalization and reap huge benefits from it.

1. Personalized Product & Service Recommendations

Retailers have been using personalization extensively to sell to and engage with their customers better. While e-tailers pioneered this space, we are starting to see companies across Banking, Telecom, FMCG & Electronics sectors, etc. using the power of personalized recommendations to enable their cross-selling and up-selling campaigns.

Banks look at factors like demographics, income & employment, transactional activity levels, spending patterns, debt worthiness & repayment, etc. to build a 360-degree view of their customers. Using this intricate knowledge of their customers’ financials and spend behavior, they are able to create extremely personalized offers aimed to provide the customers with the right financial tools suiting their lifestyle and needs. The level of precision helps the banks not just attract customers better, but also trim down the costs of traditional mass-reach channels like call centers.

Wealth Management firms are using similar techniques as well. As part of a more services driven business, these firms are helping financial advisors cater to investors with more personally tailored advice. Based on the knowledge of the investor’s behavior and life goals, advisors get access to the recommendations around the next-best-action to take to their clients. Also, by understanding the advisors themselves, the WM firms are able to offer them a suite of services more aligned with the advisor’s personal style of research and portfolio building.

2. Personalized Marketing Communication

Not only are companies able to tailor their products and services, but they are also able to personalize the way they communicate these to their customers. Measuring the effectiveness of past campaigns on customers, marketers can tweak some of the below levers for marketing personalization:

Messaging: Depending on the buyer segment, the messaging for a specific product can be focused on offering discounts for the discount-diggers OR for providing detailed product features for the heavy-research users OR for product comparisons for the more flexible early-stage users, etc.

Channel Personalization: Using Channel Affinity models, marketers run focus campaigns targeting the right customers on the right channels. Banks, for example, target customers having high lifestyle spends with credit card display ads on shopping sites. At the same time, the HNI customers get offered a more personal touch with the relationship managers calling them with special customized offers.

Communication Time personalization: Knowing a customer’s travel search history, Telecom companies can offer international roaming plans at the perfect time. Banks also use this strategy to offer instant lines of short-term credit to customers with a low account balance. Also, in general, based on an understanding of when a customer is most active on social media or their smartphones, marketers can run social media campaigns or send notifications to the customer for maximum impressions.

3. Personalized Digital Experiences

Beyond trying to influence the buying behavior directly, the most effective form of personalization to be offered is to update the way customers engage with the firm on a regular basis. By knowing what customers are doing on the company websites, the marketers can get a far deeper understanding of the customers’ needs and expectations. This particular vision led the CMOs to realize the extremely inadequate digital behavior tracking that companies have on their own portals and applications. What followed was a surge in digital data collection platforms like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. A few companies have managed to deploy these solutions effectively to understand their customers better than ever. This led them to build models for Journey Personalization, which aimed at providing the customers with the fastest path to conversions based on their interests and preferences.

Businesses that have managed to leverage the power of personalization, have consistently been able to create a differentiated positioning from their competition. This has allowed them not only to attract customers away from competitors but also command a premium price at the same time. The clear business advantage has led them to invest heavily in more use cases and enhance their models from good to great.

Incedo Lighthouse^TM – A platform to natively support personalization use cases

With our proprietary platform Incedo Lighthouse^TM, we help clients successfully deploy multiple use cases for AI-driven customer personalization. The platform brings together Big Data (millions of customers, daily updated, across several dimensions), data engineering and data science in an efficient use-case centric manner in self-serve mode. The platform can serve multiple use cases for personalization together, e.g. cross-sell offers with the right channel for right customer cohorts at specific times of the year. This leads to faster and automated implementation of the journey:
– From data to critical insights: e.g. identification of cohorts of customers that would respond to deep discounts
– And, From insights-to-actions recommendations e.g. evaluating statistically the required level of deep discounting to optimize ROI

Significant success of AI-driven, personalized recommendations has not come without its fair share of speeding tickets. Couple of examples include:
– Compromising Personally Identifiable Information (PII) inside the machine learning lifecycle, thus jeopardizing customers’ privacy
– Inadvertently introducing biases into the recommendation algorithms, leading to discrimination and unfair business practices

Incedo Lighthouse^TM helps in protecting against these issues in a very direct manner – more on that in the next blog!

About the Customer

BSI Financial an industry leader providing mortgage solutions to consumers. In addition, it provides Digital platforms to independent mortgage servicing companies to drive operational excellence and intelligent customer experience. BSI had decided to pivot the enterprise to “Cloud-first” and “Ai-first” strategy, focus resources on customer engagement and innovation, and enable greater agility.

Platforms modernization and operations transformation were identified as a priority to create capacity for growth, lower operating costs, and allow for scalability. This encompassed loan servicing, MSR portfolio due diligence, Internal and External reporting, and Mortgage Operations.

What Incedo Did

BSI chose Incedo as a partner to re-imagine and engineer cloud native SaaS Platforms on AWS cloud. This encompassed:

Impact

The client, a mid-market specialized mortgage lender with their business portfolio comprising origination and servicing for MSRs was looking for a strategic partner in their growth journey, to uplift customer experience, and digitally transform the overall loan servicing operations. The strategic priorities for the client were – Significantly increase digital self-service, improving customer NPS, and improve mortgage operations productivity.

Incedo’s modern and intelligent SaaS solutions based on cloud, automated workflows, and AI-driven personalization have helped the client achieve improved efficiency, agility, and scaling while being able to respond to new opportunities and unanticipated situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Incedo’s solution benefitted the client with:

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wealth Management industry was experiencing unprecedented change and disruption with – changing customer and advisor expectations, revenue and business model disruption and unyielding pressure on costs. Going into the pandemic leveraging new and emerging technologies was a primary driver for change in the industry. What have we learned these past six months and how is it altering plans for the future. Is leveraging technology still the way forward for the Wealth Managers navigating into a VUCA world?

How can you build disruption immunity with Digital Transformation for your wealth management business and make it Pandemic proof?

Get powerful insights from Top Global Wealth Management CXO’s on the disruptions in the wealth management ecosystem and the emerging trends. The discussion includes:

About the speaker

Nitin Seth is an accomplished industry leader with a unique combination of experiences – of an entrepreneur, a management consultant and a senior executive. Prior to Incedo, Nitin was the Chief Operating Officer of Flipkart, where he was responsible for customer and supply chain operations, strategy to execution capabilities and corporate functions for the company. He has also headed Fidelity International as the M.D and Country Head for India. Prior to Fidelity, Nitin was the Director of McKinsey’s Global Knowledge Centre in India (McKC). He has been elected twice to the NASSCOM Executive Council and was also the Chairperson of the Nasscom Regional Council (NRC) in Haryana. He is an avid speaker in the areas of entrepreneurship, business transformation and technology.

Mukesh (Muk) is responsible for Assetmark’s technology strategy and implementation with a specific focus on creating systems and solutions that help advisors achieve success. Additionally, he identifies and incorporate systems enhancements to improve AssetMark’s service and operations capabilities that support advisors. Previously, Muk was the Chief Information and Technology Officer at Cetera Financial Group, the second-largest network of broker-dealers serving over 9,500 independent advisors. Prior to that, he was a Managing Director and Corporate CIO at TD Ameritrade and was also SVP and CIO of Schwab Institutional. Muk has been featured in Barron’s, InvestmentNews, RIABiz, and Marketwired. Muk received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics and Economics from Rutgers University and is a graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Executive Program. He holds series 7, 24 and 63 licenses.

Mike brings extensive experience delivering high-volume critical systems including online commerce, SaaS/API-based middleware, contact center, fraud and claims platforms, store/branch technology, and data center infrastructure. Mike most recently served as chief technology officer for Payfone, Inc., a leading provider of mobile network-based authentication and fraud avoidance solutions—protecting mobile data as well as call center interactions for large financial institutions and other clients needing mobile security solutions. Prior to joining Payfone, Mike served as chief information officer for Fanatics, Inc., a leading online retailer of officially licensed sports merchandise.

He has earned numerous professional recognitions throughout his career, including being named to InfoWorld Magazine’s “Top 25 Most Influential CTOs” as well as Computerworld’s “Premier 100 IT Leaders”. Mike has also been awarded multiple patents for technology and business process innovations.

Jason is the Chief Technology Officer at CA and is responsible for leading the information technology organization and functions. Jason has more than 20 years of industry experience and has been with the firm since 2014. Prior to joining Cambridge Associates, Jason spent 15 years at Sapient Corporation. Most recently, he led Sapient’s Global Capital Markets practice where he was responsible for setting strategy and leading critical engagements with clients. Prior to taking on the practice leadership role, Jason was responsible for several key relationships with leading asset managers and hedge funds. His background includes leading IT and business consulting initiatives across multiple functions within the investment management process. Prior to joining Sapient, Jason worked for PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Accenture.

With accentuated pressures due to the Covid pandemic on revenues and calls for cost optimization & prudence on middle-back office functions, the wealth management firms are facing multiple external and internal challenges. However, certain firms are winning post-Covid leveraging Next Generation Operations Transformation.

Watch this webinar to understand how Next Generation Transformation can help you drive maturity and bring efficiencies to manage challenges for your firm in the current times.

Agenda

What are the key forces impacting the industry especially wealth management operations: We will be covering the key trends in the wealth management industry including fintech disruption, cost pressures, regulatory requirements, emphasis on advisor & client experience, etc.
How did COVID accentuate the issues wealth management firms were facing: We will cover how COVID-19 accentuated the ongoing issues and trends in the wealth management industry and how firms have traditionally dealt with these issues
Approach for wealth managers to begin their next generation operations strategy: We will go over the key objectives of wealth managers and outcomes they are looking to achieve (e.g. tackling seasonal market volatility, real-time compliance alerts, etc.) and go over the approach for next generation operations transformationApproach for wealth managers to begin their next generation operations strategy: We will go over the key objectives of wealth managers and outcomes they are looking to achieve (e.g. tackling seasonal market volatility, real-time compliance alerts, etc.) and go over the approach for next generation operations transformation
Use case: We will review a use case covering the current implementation and the difference made by using next generation operations transformation

About the speaker

With more than 25 years of robust experience in service operations, dedicated project-based team organizations, induction of newer technologies along with required certifications and data security, Pamela is well adept in designing and spearheading digital transformations in diverse process areas or business units for the clients. She follows an innovative, analytical, adaptive and integrative approach to develop and deliver consistently improving outcomes for the clients that reflect in their capabilities and performance. She believes in clients to be partners for growth irrespective of their size and scope. Pamela heads the business operations and automation business at Incedo.

Experienced Financial Services leader with a demonstrated history of working in the IT Strategy & Operations space, she is an IIM Calcutta MBA graduate and helps Incedo’s Financial services clients with their Data , Analytics and Business Intelligence problems.

Covid-19 has introduced a new set of challenges to the Wealth Management industry. Already it was battling with advisor attrition, changing client preferences, disruption due to fintech, lack of scalability, and mounting cost pressure due to no commission fee. COVID-19 has accentuated this need for wealth management firms to address this challenge and have a personalized approach to acquiring and retaining the right set of Advisors and enabling them to service their clients better. AI-powered insights and experiences can be a great enabler.

Watch our webinar to hear from our experts on how Incedo’s AI-Enabled Advisor personalization framework can enable the wealth management firms to segment the advisors better and drive better results, curating contextual & personalized experiences through the advisor Journey.

This webinar covers how Wealth Management firms can optimize the Advisor Engagement using AI & Analytics

About the speaker

Gaurav is a leader in Incedo’s wealth management practice . He has been with Incedo for the last 9 years and has led multiple engagements for our wealth management clients focusing on technology solutions for Streamlining Advisor and Client experience, Digitizing Operations, Data & Analytics.

Afrozy is a Data Science leader with Global experience in partnering with Fortune 500 clients to deliver significant KPI movements leveraging Analytics & AI. She brings in multi domain experience with expertise with Wealth Management, Life Sciences and Telecom Clients She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and enjoys hiking and writing, along with her passion for all things Data.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a breakdown of Risk models across banks. The global economic crisis of this magnitude has led to a sudden shift in the credit profile of the customers. It has also unearthed the flaws in the underlying risk assumptions by banks based on a stable state.

To cope up with this volatile scenario banks needs not only advanced AI and ML algorithms-based models but support agile services which can take care of high-frequency data. Our risk offering combines our proprietary AI and ML based platform, with a agile risk mitigation framework to maximize risk-adjusted returns for banks.

In this webinar we have covered different dimensions of our data science and analytics-driven approach for accelerated credit decisioning, which includes:

About the speaker

Divey is seasoned analytics professional with strong experience in leading teams, responsible for designing impactful data driven solutions for banking domain across multiple geographies, businesses and functions.

Over the last few years, the independent broker dealer industry in USA has seen a lot of churn. Many large broker dealers grew their book of business and registered representative base inorganically, by taking over their smaller counterparts. What came as legacy was a host of disparate systems and operational teams, all doing similar tasks.

The broker dealers were still grappling with the problem of integrating the systems of their new found entities, when the Department of Labor (DOL) threw them another curveball in April 2015. This curveball has since come to be called as DOL fiduciary rule and threatens to alter the entire dynamics of the industry, which has operated on a variable compensation model for decades. It will force the industry, which has long regarded its role as transaction facilitators, to wear the hat of the advisors and discharge all the onerous responsibilities that come with it. But what exactly is the DOL fiduciary rule and what will be its impact? This white paper is an attempt to demystify the ruling and aims to propose what broker dealers should be doing to prepare for this seismic event.

When the GDPR became a law in Europe, American companies not doing business in Europe heaved a sigh of relief that they did not have to comply with the stringent requirements laid out in the law. However, as Arab spring showed us, movements have a way of spreading beyond borders. Privacy spring has now come to USA in the form of CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act). CCPA provides protection to all California residents and lays down markers on how the consumer data can be used by various businesses. THE ACT PROVIDES THE CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS THE RIGHT to know what kind of data is being collected for them and for what purpose it is getting used.

In this whitepaper, Mr. Gaurav Sehgal (VP, Financial Services, Incedo) explains the impact of CCPA on wealth management industry and more narrowly on the impact of legislation on wealth managers. Learn about how wealth manager should approach the legislation and be prepared for its implementation.

As the race for top financial advisor talent heats up, Broker dealers are increasingly setting aside higher recruiting budgets to attract top financial advisors from their competitors. Any given month, AUM north of 500 mn dollars is moving from one broker dealer to another. The financial advisor’s first interaction with the prospecting firm is via the advisor onboarding process.

A good workflow driven Online onboarding process can deliver a transformational experience to the advisors and the home office teams can drastically cut down on the affiliation cycle times. Leveraging from what has worked for our clients (broker dealers, banks, TAMPs) in implementing workflow driven processes, the whitepaper distils the key tenets of a good onboarding system from various engagements.

Download this whitepaper to get insights into:

Recruitment Fraud Alert

1. Personalized Product & Service Recommendations