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How finance brands use Instagram

A mountain top view. A close-up of a hand-rolled pastry. These images, while almost pedestrian on Instagram, are hardly what you’d expect out of a finance brand.

But that’s exactly what American Express’ presence on the platform is all about: An effort to connect with an experience rather than a product. “Instagram is really about engaging — it’s so powerful because it’s so visual,” said Mark Arnold, a branding consultant who specializes in financial services companies.

With Instagram, finance companies are focusing on content that generates interaction, since peddling products outright can easily be shut out by users who may not want to see advertising on the platform.

“If you engage, the sales will come, but if you sell on Instagram, that will backfire on you in a heartbeat,” said Arnold.

Among finance companies, American Express is seen by many as a leader in Instagram outreach. With its 173,000 followers and average of over 1,000 likes per post, its content is an assortment of high-quality food and travel photos.

“That’s not surprising, because they have lived in the lifestyle arena for a long time,” said Mariana Rittenhouse, senior director of brand strategy for Instagram analytics company Dash Hudson. “All the benefits from being an AmEx member wrapped up in food and dining are niches that perform well on Instagram, and they had a natural relevance there.”

The brand is so closely intertwined with travel and fun that even images of its card are popular on Instagram.

Similarly, Mastercard, with 61,000 followers, also uses Instagram to drive interest through fun experiences. To Mastercard, the tools enabled by Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, offer the ability to focus on specific demographics.

 “Instagram enables us to micro-target content around consumer passions and interests,” said Jennifer Stalzer, vp and senior business leader for external communications for Mastercard. And who wouldn’t be interested in winning a trip to Paris, like this photogenic young couple? 

For retail banks, making the banking experience less impersonal is a common goal. Instagram can make a bank seem more like a community center rather than a necessary evil.

TD, with 6,100 followers, plays up the human aspect of banking.

“TD’s objective is to unite people around common stories,” said Arianna Orpello Lewko, head of brand of digital marketing at TD Bank. “Banking has traditionally been transactional, but we know money is very emotional, therefore our goal is to create social content reflective of that emotion to help build better relationships with people.”

TD’s posts have emphasized diversity and strived to spark financial conversations among customers. Others, including Citibank, build brand awareness by showcasing the company culture. Citi has four Instagram accounts with a combined following of over 42,000 followers.

Curating a positive company image is also important for recruitment, particularly for younger people who are more likely to be Instagram users. An important player in this area is investment bank Morgan Stanley. With its 10,000 users, a good portion of its feed is dedicated to recruitment. What’s unique about Morgan Stanley is its engagement rate, the percentage of the account’s audience that has interacted with the content by liking or commenting. According to Dash Hudson, Morgan Stanley’s engagement rate over the past 12 weeks was over two percent, more than double that of American Express.

“We want our Instagram presence to give our followers insight into Morgan Stanley’s community, culture and impact,” said Alison Garrett, executive director of digital strategy at Morgan Stanley. “We use Instagram to give people a peek into our offices and events around the globe. We share images of our employees exemplifying Morgan Stanley values, volunteering in their communities or leading with ideas at technology or leadership events.”

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Why banking’s ‘omnichannel’ dreams haven’t become reality

For years banks have been talking a lot about executing an “omnichannel strategy,” which is supposed to help them learn more about their customers by giving them a greater view into their needs and behavior through more channels – the mobile device, the tablet, the computer. But that dream hasn’t yet become a reality.

The reasons, as usual, are in the mundane details — and in the difficulties in executing sensible strategies within large, hidebound organizations while keeping up with new complexities that inevitably arise from tech advances.

For instance, an omnichannel strategy requires banks to be able to integrate each of the channels into a single, quality experience. But most haven’t gotten there. According to a report this week by researcher and consultancy Celent, half of the 112 institutions it surveyed haven’t even begun “substantive” efforts on their omnichannel delivery and just one in 10 institutions is actually executing a strategy.

“There’s a huge disconnect,” said Bob Meara, senior analyst at Celent. “Everyone agrees omnichannel is important but they haven’t actively executed.”

One reason is that artificial intelligence is driving a proliferation of new channels – like Alexa or connected cars – that make it impossible to build experiences for individual channels well and in a scalable way. So while many banks still struggle to perfect their mobile strategy, the ones that are nailing the “omnichannel” idea are now having to move along pretty quickly anyway as new technologies and therefore, new experiences, emerge, said Meriah Garrett, chief design officer at USAA.

“Our members just expect us to be there wherever they are,” she said. “That’s not always in this pure mechanism of traditional channels as we once thought of them – mobile, web, voice, physical. Those things are blurring together at such a fast rate.”

To keep up with the constant change, banks need to implement AI into their interactions and services, and that’s how the “channels” expand beyond what people traditionally consider a channel to experiences like a Facebook Messenger conversation or a mortgage profile in Zillow.

“It becomes less and less about any individual’s channel and more about different distributions of experiences that aren’t necessarily owned properties anymore — that’s the part we as an industry have not even reached yet.”

Most financial institutions have invested a significant amount on the front end of their banking portals – the parts that interact with customers. Some might say they’ve over-invested in that experiences when they should be pouring more into the middle- and back-end – the areas that actually connect with other experiences, other parts of the business and improve seemingly boring efficiencies that actually make a world of difference to the customer.

For example, getting approval on a personal loan has traditionally been about a 72-hour process – unheard of for customers living in an on-demand world where you can get a car at the tap of a button. That kind of thinking is what makes digital lending startups like Prosper, Avant or Kabbage so attractive when they advertise decisions in minutes. If banks invested more in this stage of the experience, customers wouldn’t just be happier, they would probably engage more consistently.

It’s how Amazon rose to dominate retail. Jeffrey Brown, global banking and financial services leader at consulting firm Genpact, uses Amazon as an example when advising his bank clients, he said.

“You want to create Amazon Prime in your banking experience for your customers,” he said. “You wouldn’t use Amazon if it took 10 days to turn around a delivery. You get the Best Buy experience when you do your banking.”

Using mobile or online banking as a reference for account balances and activity is more common than ever. But actually executing on more complex things like credit applications is still a sticky spot for banks and their customers. The user interface of complex activity may be enjoyable, but the parts of the experience that follow need to meet the same standard to keep customer satisfaction levels high.

“Just like they shifted from retailers and other people who couldn’t get them the goods they wanted quick enough and thats why amazon took share.

“Being able to actually deliver, execute or fund is going to move market share over the next 12-24 months, Brown said. “People want speed. They shifted from retailers and other people who couldn’t get them the goods they wanted quickly enough and thats why Amazon took share.”

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Inside USAA’s new 120-person Austin design studio

Finance giant USAA is amping up its customer experience focus with a new design studio in Austin to house the 120 people it has focused on improving digital experiences.  The goal is to make financial planning, applying for a mortgage or choosing insurance coverage as easy as ordering up an Uber or buying something off Amazon.

“It’s time to turn up the discipline, the capacity, the way we partner and do the actual work,” said Meriah Garrett, the bank’s chief design officer. “A big part of that is hiring. The Austin market is to really able to scale up at pace… there’s a tremendous local talent pool.”

Among U.S. banks, USAA has a reputation for innovation. It was one of the first banks to get into mobile check deposit and online banking, for instance. It chose to locate its design operations in Austin, a tech hotbed, versus its home base in sleepy San Antonio.

The studio looks like a modern office, but with a lot of collaboration spaces. There are no office cubes, but a lot of stand desks. 

“Designers are a little bit obsessed with vertical working space and being able to ‘externalize,’” Garrett said, whether it comes in the form of work sketches, Post-Its scribbled with research quotes and findings, or marking up work in red pen.

In banking, the focus on design and customers’ digital experiences came recently, with the rise of financial technology and the growth of the mobile channel. Many banks have invested more heavily in design in the last two years – take Chase, which opened new Manhattan headquarters for its digital team almost a year ago – but it can take years to see a real impact, Garrett said.

The reality of user experience design is businesses and executives don’t experience the brand the way customers do and as a result, all this work around customer experience falls short. For example, people in finance treat finance like it’s a well known entity, Garrett said. They know it’s been around for years an years, understand the vehicles, mechanisms and why to choose one account over another.

“In reality, most people are operating their regular lives and finance happens to be a part of it,” she said. “One of the things that has really struck me is how much people are missing the 101. That is a tremendous weight for design practice at USAA, an opportunity to change conversation and emotion we all have about money.”

To drive that conversation, USAA is using new technologies and different types of artificial intelligence, but Garrett said making sure it’s the right conversation often comes down to the designers and team members themselves – the humans behind the products.

The bank doesn’t have a universal measurement for impact, Garrett said, and that’s something that’s challenging the whole industry. She sees it as an opportunity to really identify or detail a given customer experience in a way that gives insight and understanding to the designers. She also said she tries to avoid hard measures like numbers or clicks.

“You have to do detailed visibility testing but also understand emotions that bring someone to an experience. If it’s an in-and-out transaction, like trying to make sure you get your bill pay right, it’s all about speed and clarity,” she said.

Appropriateness is the key design principle.

“It comes down to how you apply things appropriately… That drives me to why we have to have really good people. What keeps me up right now is hiring – hiring quality and pace and making sure we grow the right talent at USAA in order to be able to fulfill on this vision.”

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‘Customers love the new fresh look’: Bank of Hawaii pursues a better UX with its Branch of Tomorrow

Earlier this year, Joe Salesky suggested that the physical structure of the teller-customer relationship was long overdue a makeover. “At the Apple Store, no one sits across the counter from you. They sit side by side,” the CEO of CRMNEXT noted. “Anybody at the Apple Store can tell you about any product, it always feels very collaborative, and you’re really not hurried in or hurried out.”

Bank of Hawaii seems to grasped this change in customer experience preferences. On November 12, 2016, the bank launched its Branch(es) of Tomorrow, which has basically done away with the great teller/customer divide.

“From a customer experience standpoint, there was a desire to create an open and welcoming space like you would see in a hospitality or retail setting,  yet also providing for privacy for conversations when necessary,” said Kevin Sakamoto, senior evp for branch delivery at Bank of Hawaii. Sakamoto said customers “love” having the employees out in front instead of trapped behind their desks.

Somewhat surprisingly, fintech isn’t a goal so much as a means at these new branches. Instead, the Branch of Tomorrow is built around three customer elements: Connecting with customers and understanding their needs, educating and empowering customers to take advantage of new banking conveniences, and personalizing financial solutions to give customers financial peace of mind.

Technology, in the form of WiFi, tablets, and digital marketing, does come into play in the branch’s daily operations. The bank also has plans to expand its online and mobile offerings, and to move towards a paperless workflow environment.

However, what actually played a larger role in designing the branch wasn’t technology — it was localization. Each Branch of Tomorrow has local branch elements, such as employee name tags with their hometown and a unique, proprietary scent that welcomes customers upon entering the branch.

“A key objective at the start of the project was to have a branch experience that is ‘of Hawaii,’” explained Sakamoto. “The branding elements tell a local story and we consciously incorporated facets unique to the market including the map and art work.”

Localization, combined with moving the tellers out of hiding and making technology more ubiquitous, has made a real impact on the levels of customer engagement BoH is able to provide. According to Sakamoto, customers are really excited about this new breed of branch. With more tech titans like Google, Facebook, and Amazon eyeing financial services, we’ll likely see more tellers moving into the light, armed with technology and inviting premises.