Putting Data to Work: The Move Toward User-Centric Innovation

Galileo Financial Technologies Chief Revenue Officer Seth McGuire writes in the PYMNTS eBook “Baseline 2022: What the Next Six Months Holds” that automation and personalization will work hand in hand to redefine the customer experience in financial services.

In recent years, payments and financial service providers have invested heavily in the digitization and enhancement of the user experience: everything was focused on how products look, feel and operate on the front end.

While those efforts have led to impressive apps and beautiful user interfaces, we’re now seeing an expansion of innovation at a much deeper level. Brands that are driving the greatest impact in the digital economy in the second half of 2022 (and beyond) are pursuing technology and infrastructure that puts data to work. And in doing so, these brands are enabling intelligent interactions that put people — not products — at the center of the experience.

But it’s not just any person, it’s really the end user who must be at the center of the experience — and ultimately to the exclusion of all others. In other words, the more intelligent the interaction we build, the fewer people will need to be involved in delivering better experiences and more adaptive solutions to customers.

This paradigm shift is requiring a fundamental change in approach, a reimagining of how products are designed and built on the back end, and a major technology investment from financial service providers, who are accepting that older tech stacks will not compete with digital-native core platforms going forward.

And it will be worth it.

Consider this: today, most financial institutions are able to make about 15% of their customer interactions “intelligent,” meaning they’re actually connecting the data they have back to the customer at the point of interaction to enhance the customer experience and remove other unnecessary people from the process.

To achieve a greater level of automation and personalization on any level, let alone at scale, financial service providers will put new emphasis on the data they already have: finding the most productive and efficient ways possible to use that data to inform customer-centric decisions that can be replicated on a large scale.

Remember — while most traditional financial institutions have been quite good at collecting data, they’ve consistently struggled to use it effectively to improve user experiences. And when you consider that the average turnaround for new technology at a major financial institution is just over two years (26 months), it’s no surprise that major players are now looking for new ways to make major progress as quickly as possible.

By contrast, teams working on a modern technology platform can turn out the same or better results in a matter of hours or weeks, delivering useful data from across a provider’s ecosystem. With this data in hand, more providers can shift away from the one-size-fits all financial products. Instead, they can build customizable solutions that meet the needs of niche communities, but do so in a way that is scalable.

As trendlines unfold in the balance of 2022, we’re watching how companies are making better use of technology to put data to work and maximize the use of human resources to better connect consumers and businesses in the digital economy.

The new baseline is all about building user-centric solutions that connect people and their money in ways that improve everyone’s financial lives. That baseline, of course, is no longer about the product itself, it’s about the customer experience.