Reimagining FSI Personalization in the AI Era

Personalization takes on a whole new meaning in the age of AI. Simple one-on-one greetings are no longer enough to create personalized customer experiences, particularly among the FSI providers.

According to the 2024 Adobe Digital Trends Report, 51% of FSI leaders stated that improving customer financial health is their top priority when offering personalization. Clement Quek, digital strategist for Asia Pacific at Adobe, added that enhancing financial wellness has been the number one priority for FSIs for three consecutive years as FSIs recognize the opportunity to engage customers by helping them achieve individual financial goals. Still, the rise of AI has elevated this expectation to a new level.

“It’s no longer enough to simply provide customers with the self-help tools to plan their financial future,” Quek said at the recent FSI & AI Hong Kong Summit. “Consumers expect FSIs to do the heavy lifting for them, coming to them with ideas and recommendations based on what you know of them. And we expect AI will supercharge customer experiences for FSI on this front.”

AI redefines personalization

GenAI is at the center of redefining personalization. Quek noted that 53% of FSI executives plan to use this technology to reshape client interactions and increase employee productivity.

FSI providers in Asia Pacific are also leading in the adoption, with 39% implementing GenAI pilots and 17% stating they have a solution in place using GenAI. One of these leading FSI providers in Asia is Manulife.

Joining Quek at a panel discussion during the summit, Leo Lau, director, MarTech lead Asia, Manulife, noted that customers have always expected their digital interactions to work easier, faster, and better, “but AI is driving such demand on steroids.”

To meet this changing demand, Lau added Manulife recently introduced a GenAI agent sales tool in Singapore. It allows agents to automatically create personalized engagement strategies to offer customers the right solution at the right time based on their needs. The insurance provider also uses AI to develop a propensity model based on website visitors’ online behaviors. He said these models aim to analyze their needs, deliver personalized offerings, and convert engagement into purchases.

Delivering productivity

On top of reshaping interactions, GenAI is also increasing productivity. Quek noted that Adobe’s study estimates that GenAI could save more than 40% of time spent across marketing processes.

It supercharges the ideation stage by creating content that aligns with brand standards. GenAI also helps the content delivery process by co-piloting with humans to refine the initial outputs and automate the delivery to ensure a consistent cross-channel experience for the customers. Quek added this process is particularly useful when conducting A/B tests. AI tools can generate testing hypotheses and create initial visualizations for marketing professionals to refine and optimize the content to fit the testing purpose.

Lastly, AI-powered insights also track and analyze each campaign's performance, providing feedback to humans and machines to optimize future campaigns.

GenAI as an unpredictable teenager

Nevertheless, offering personalization using GenAI is easier said than done. Quek noted that GenAI is sometimes compared with a moody teenager. Despite its great potential, GenAI is still finding its place in the business landscape and can “act out in ways you don’t understand or cannot explain,” he said.

According to Lau, one major challenge is the siloed technology architecture and data. AI operations require massive amounts of data, often generated from different systems running on multiple platforms. Connecting these systems and consolidating the data is more than dumping data into a data lake. 

“We are working towards building integrated suites to connect different components within Manulife’s ecosystem for more efficient and accurate AI operations,” said Lau.

Quek added that many organizations run AI with data from separate architectures and rely on weak connectors. Other non-technical challenges include copyright and content ownership, regulations, and data biases that could lead to discrimination.

GenAI as a natural extension

To help ease these problems, he said Adobe embeds GenAI capabilities across its tools, allowing marketers to quickly leverage these capabilities in existing applications and workflows safely and responsibly.

“AI is not new to Adobe,” said Quek. “GenAI is just a natural extension of the technology we have produced over the past 40 years.”

He added Firefly, Adobe’s GenAI image creator, as a good example. It generates images using simple text prompts from more than 100 languages. The tool is trained with over 300 million high-quality stock images to ensure they are commercially safe for customers, protecting them from third-party IP claims.

Personalization is more important than ever in the age of AI. It is driving the next wave of digital transformation, and the changes are happening fast.

“As the industry continues to evolve, organizations prioritizing AI-driven personalization will be well-positioned to thrive through superior customer experiences,” Quek concluded.

Image credit: iStockphoto/Supatman