Private bankers are one of our banking client’s biggest costs. Their time comes at a premium, but they know their customers personally and provide great service to them. This major UK private bank wanted to retain its bankers and better automate the  routine elements of their jobs. 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 next best action (NBA) prompts, created by ad-hoc scripts, already existed, but were not always adopted. This was primarily because they did not include enough insight, were not timely enough or were triggered multiple times (there was no history of what had been previously sent to them). The key challenge was to get the bankers on board – we had to demonstrate that if we used technology, data & AI correctly, then it could help them be even more effective in their role.

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. It was crucial for private bankers to deliver even more value and maximize their worth as a resource.

Our solution was to build a decision engine to sit at the heart of all the private bank’s communications, seamlessly connecting all customer touchpoints and feeding insight back in 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 communications
• Pushing the correct analyst insight to them at the right moments
• Using predictive modeling to ensure customer relevancy of suggested actions, making NBAs more reliable and thus encouraging banker 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 to give the AI-empowered single brain the power to deliver our new and enhanced suite of NBAs to each unique customer.

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 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 recognized in the  Best Use of Marketing Automation category at a The Data & Marketing Association Awards ceremony in 2019.