Creating a hyper-personalized banking experience

By Bhavin Turakhia, co-founder and CEO of Zeta

The demand for digital is increasing, and financial institutions need to keep up and work with consumers to provide the advanced features they require. Cardholders demand the ability to access secure but also hyper-personalized banking features that are available 24/7.

This adjustment to high-touch digital capabilities has become a challenge for financial institutions, because banking is one of the few industries that has not seen a significant technology upgrade in decades. To this day, a lot of financial institutions are using legacy systems that were written back in the '80s and remain the same. This stagnant system has caused delayed innovation and prevents consumers from accessing modern digital technology that they have become accustomed to in other areas of their lives. Consumers not only expect these advancements, but they deserve them when managing something as pivotal as their finances.

Embedded finance and in particular embedded banking technologies are becoming readily available to organizations, big or small. These advancements enable financial institutions with legacy systems to compete with modern banks like neobanks that have broken the traditional mold. Prior to these advancements, updating payment technologies was a major undertaking that required lots of time and money. In the amount of time it took to update systems, cardholders had already jumped ship to financial institutions that had the updates up and running.

Today, financial institutions have the opportunity to compete without a complete technology overhaul or uprooting their legacy systems. There are technology service providers who have built their technology with the ability to streamline the process for financial institutions, enabling more financial institutions to modernize their payment solutions. Providing next-gen cloud-native platforms is no longer a 6–12-month roadmap; these upgrades need to happen now. Cardholders need capabilities that are faster than what legacy systems can offer.

For cardholders, despite the wide variety of fintechs and organizations available to promote advancements, there has not been a massive change in original credit cards created back in 1958. This means over 50 years have gone by with little to no change.

Cardholders want programs that are superior and create a hyper-personalized approach with features unique to the individual. Similarly, cardholders want more control, especially when it comes to fraudulent activity. With features like the ability to block merchants and set location-based spending limitations, cardholders have the access to limit risks on their own terms. These types of features can be added to current legacy systems to retain customers and their loyalties without major downtime and changes to the systems they already know.

As technology expands, so do the needs of consumers – especially when it comes to managing their finances. Today’s world is hyper-personalized. Social media feeds, advertisements, shopping recommendations, and more are customized based on each person’s individualized data.

Consumers utilize payments as a way to reach long-term goals. It is critical that financial institutions work alongside them and provide them with the tools they need in order to assist in meeting those goals. Not every financial journey is the same, and financial institutions need to have options to offer unique features for every unique individual.