Private bankers are one of our banking client’s biggest costs. Their time comes at a premium , but they know their personal customers well and provide great service to them. This major UK private bank wanted to retain its bankers and better assist them in dealing with routine elements of their jobs that could be automated. In addition it wanted to help them to overcome the growing challenge of dealing with a more diverse set of clients and needs – from succession planning to commercial interests and beyond.

Some manual NBA prompts (created by ad-hoc scripts) already existed, but these were not always loved by the bankers – primarily because they did not use enough insight, were not timely enough or were triggered multiple times (there was no history of what had been previously sent to them). A key challenge was thus to get the bankers back onside – we had to demonstrate that if we used technology, data & AI correctly then it could help them be even more effective in their role & create an even better service for clients, rather than being a distraction or wasting their time.

To sum up, we needed to help private bankers support client conversations at the right moment with the right content and provide a more seamless way to get analyst insights to the front line, helping the PBs deliver even more value and maximise the worth of their resource.

Our solution was to build a decision engine to sit at the heart of all of the private bank’s communications, seamlessly connecting all customer touchpoints and feeding insight back in true real time. The decision engine shapes each customer’s experience with their bank at an individual level and uses AI to predict for each person what the next-best-action will be. This helps the Private Bankers in several ways:

• Relieving some workload thanks to auto-send of certain comms
• Pushing the correct analyst insight to PBs at the right moments
• Using predictive modelling to ensure customer-relevancy of suggested actions, making NBAs more reliable and thus encouraging PB engagement

To get the decisioning capability up and running, we needed to make customer experience, data architecture, solution architecture, analytics and BI, customer strategy and staff experience work together in a way they’d never done before. Internal silos had to be bridged and data linkages created to the central Pega decisioning engine so as to give the AI-empowered single brain the power to deliver our new and enhanced suite of next best actions to each unique customer.

All the data-powered comms in the world wouldn’t make an impact without also considering the format in which the messages were being delivered, though. Mindful of the need to grab attention not just through relevancy but through content and visuals, we also used compelling creative to deliver the bank’s new customer messaging, where needed, and tailored it precisely to each recipient in terms of timing, frequency and format – making certain that each unique customer felt seen, anticipated and understood by their private bank.

Taking a channel-by-channel approach ensured that we constantly made improvements and enriched the insight available to the single AI-enhanced brain at the heart of the decision engine. Starting small and then building on successes brought internal staff along on the journey, allowing them to see concrete results that inspired each next step.

Decisioning today allows our client to manage a level of complexity in its contact strategy that would not otherwise be possible. Next-best-action prompts to front line staff and to customers are now automated and assessed in true real-time, across five channels (with more rolling on all the time) and with responses effortlessly captured and used to feed the next interaction. The bank can now engage clients on timely, topical matters as these develop in the market as it never could before.

Our solution allows our client’s staff to be even more effective in looking after clients and their families.

This work was recognised in the Best Use of Marketing Automation category at a major UK awards ceremony in 2019.