Challenge Board Confessions: Financial institutions get real about marketing challenges

Being a financial institution in today's market is grueling. Not only do you have to keep up with the rising level of compliance and regulatory burden, but customers are becoming increasingly demanding of the expectations they have from their FIs. Add to that pesky fintech upstarts that, while not winning away a lot of new business, are at least winning the PR wars, and you've got a challenging environment. At last week's Tradestreaming Money Conference in New York City, we asked participants to share their biggest challenges, giving them anonymity in exchange for their feedback. Here’s what they told us:

Embracing risk

"Banks don't want to try new things in this environment. We have lots of discussions about finding ways to innovate but at the end of the day, most senior leaders are caught in a CYA mindset and nothing really gets done. Innovation gets increasingly harder as organizations get bigger. People and teams tasked with trying to maintain competitiveness in the financial industry frequently push up against organizational boundaries when they try to change things. How do we embrace the unknown if we just cling to accepted practices?"

Marketing to millennials

"Incumbents have done a good job marketing to the previous generation. We got pretty damn good at it. But it's like the Innovator's Dilemma. We're doing an awful job making our institutions and products relevant to millennials. We need to look to other firms, like Google and Apple, as examples of brands embraced by the younger generation."

Making silky smooth experiences

"If there's anything B2C fintech firms have taught us is that there's a ton of runway to improve the way we deliver our services. The challenge is only partly regulatory. The other challenge is getting the right talent into our organizations and giving them the room to do things differently than we're accustomed to."

Marketing bang for the bucks

"It's still surprisingly hard to understand the full marketing lifecycle and how well our funnels work. The difficulty is compounded because of all the channels we now maintain. It's not just an analytics problem. How come we still can't measure the ROI of our marketing initiatives across all our channels?!"

Legacy systems

"Our reliance on our legacy systems is a big challenge for us. Systems have been built upon systems for decades. Now, when we want to make a change, we're forced to think and work through all the contingencies and dependencies of our platform. It's just really hard to be nimble if making seemingly small changes takes month at a time."