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Chase is using its Warriors deal to beef up Chase Pay offering

Chase is making a play to get into the music and ticketing business and may use its Chase Pay product to interact with customers in new ways and get more of their data.

The largest U.S. bank by assets inked a multi-year endorsement deal with Golden State Warriors’ star player Steph Curry in March of 2016; on Monday, it was named the official bank of the Warriors and it also has naming rights sponsor to the future home of the NBA championship team, Chase Center, opening in 2019.

“[Chase Pay] is not only a different way to pay; there’s a lot more information on you as a customer that will help us be more targeted” that Chase can gather through the app, said Frank Nakano, Chase’s head of sports and entertainment sponsorships. Nakano said it will “allow us to know that if you’re at a game five times in a month, we should push a special reward to you because we know you indeed were in the building and what you bought. It’s on us to make [Chase Pay] more enticing to the customer.”

Until now, it hasn’t been clear what Chase’s plans are for its Pay product. It hasn’t published any user numbers and it’s not obvious why customers should use it instead of Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, or the mobile app of one of its quick service restaurants partners that probably offers them some kind of rewards or loyalty incentive. Chase seems aware of this; it sponsored a research report conducted by Forrester Consulting that says for mobile payments to take off, retailers need to offer value beyond the actual payment at the point of sale that will bring more convenience to the customer or make them feel they’re getting something out of it.

Nakano said the Chase Center experience for Chase customers could borrow from that of an airline in the sense that people entering the arena will be able to upgrade their experiences upon checking in — upgrading their seats at a show or a game, offering a chance to visit the players after the game, getting to arrive through a special Chase entrance, being hosted in a VIP-like room, pushing more discounts on more things.

“You’ve checked in, you’ve been there, you’ve been spending money, so we’ll know you are a fan because of your presence in the building,” Nakano said. “You might get there and not realize you want something until these offers pop up. It makes it feel like we know you better. I think people expect that now — partners being more additive and not getting in the way of the experience.”

Citibank has staked its brand on that, making music and entertainment access through its longstanding partnership with LiveNation and sponsorship of the Global Citizen music festival part of its strategy. Chief marketing officer Jennifer Breithaupt has said that music is “part of Citi’s DNA” and that having these initiatives as part of its brand has forced bank marketers “be on the front lines with consumers” as customer banking relationships are deepened more and more in digital channels than physical branches.

A year ago it might have seemed like an ambitious marketing pursuit to get everyday people to think of banks as go-to resources for shows, sports events or even restaurant reservations. But the evolution of digital and mobile channels allows big old financial institutions like Chase to compete in that space if they want to.

“Digital and mobile has allowed us to be more timely,” Nakano said. “Part of the reason we do this is it’s something else to connect with our customers on rather than just product.”

To celebrate the their new deal, Chase and the Warriors are sending a giant golden basketball around to different spots in the Bay Area beginning this week for fans to take pictures, meet some players and cheerleaders and participate in small giveaways (think T-shirts and tickets). The “Golden Ball” will travel around until the first game of season, when they’ll celebrate last year’s championship. It’s all part of the build-up to the opening of Chase Center.

“Part of our philosophy is that we’re part of the community and were part of the team before Chase Center opened,” Nakano said. “We are present in the Bay Area we’re just showing that more.”

As much fanfare as there is around the Warriors, however, Nakano maintained that the real value for Chase comes from the nightly engagement with a community of passionate, loyal sports fans at a venue that hosts 200 events a year. When asked how Chase measures the return on investment of a sponsorship like that of the Warriors, he said the analytics team has created a “score card” to identify the value of an engaged customer — a collection of all of a customer’s touch points with the bank, from charge volume on tickets to concessions.

It also accounts for “brand lift” and community effect. There’s a community component to each of the bank’s sponsorships, he said.

“Sports and entertainment gives us an opportunity to engage customers with something they’re very passionate about,” Nakano said. “We use that passion as the core of everything we do and then we try to look at it as a fan.”

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Inside Citi’s nostalgia marketing strategy

Citi is trying to win over customers by making a push into music.

Its latest ad campaign, which began airing this week, includes three 30-second television commercials written to make customers feel all the feels. They’re all set to universally recognizable songs, no matter how old you are. One commercial features a little girl playing in a sprinkler with “Singin’ in the Rain” by Gene Kelly playing in the background; another, set to “Into the Mystic” by Van Morrison, features a group of young adults laughing on a beach boardwalk at sunset; the other portrays an older man joyriding a shopping cart to “Here Comes Your Man” by the Pixies.

It was Citi’s intention to mix up the ages of the people portrayed in these images, said Jennifer Breithaup, chief marketing officer of Citi’s global consumer bank during a fireside chat at this year’s Advertising Week in New York — as well as the music selection.

Each of the commercials ends with the slogan: “What if a bank could help you feel a little more of this?”

“Think about the soundtrack of your life… [it] creates an enormous amount of potential from the brand standpoint when you think about commercials and experiences like we had this weekend,” Breithaup said, referencing the Global Citizen Festival, the music festival founded as part of a movement to end extreme poverty, which takes place in New York and of which Citi is a partner.

Music is “part of Citi’s DNA,” Breithaupt said. Citi has built a ticketing platform, effectively, called Citi Private Pass, where customers can access 1,300 Citi-sponsored music, sports and theatre events in the U.S. It also has a longstanding partnership with NBC and the Today Show where it present a concert series on Today — and is moving to testing virtuality live streaming of those events.

“Allowing ourselves the permission to be an experiential brand and not just about the banking and the financial services we offer — what else does our brand unlock for consumers? Entertainment access … makes us look more human. If we can be part of those memories, that’s something you want your brand attached to.”

Citi is far from the first brand to use nostalgia in its marketing efforts but it’s a significant approach for a bank. Marketing financial services in the digital age has largely been about new online and mobile channels, finding ways to connect with customers and potential customers in those places and using people’s data if possible to tailor what financial products banks can potentially push them.

“Millennials are coming of age in an age of economic turmoil — a difficult job market,” Cassandra Mcintosh, senior insights analyst at Exponential, told Digiday. “They end up romanticizing simpler times much more – even those times they weren’t around for.”

That’s more true now than ever in the U.S., which is so politically divided that everyone — particularly millennials — wants to do business with a brand they identify with or whose value appear to align with theirs.

However, Citi is often ahead of the curve when it comes to keeping up with innovation. At the beginning of the digital shift it consolidated more branches than its peers and upgraded remaining ones to smaller and more digitally oriented ones first; it was the first bank to build an entirely mobile-first banking experience, for a certain set of clients, and get it to market quickly; and it’s one of a handful of banks that has made its application programming interfaces available to third parties to use.

But for many financial brands, technology isn’t just making interfaces prettier and faster. It’s turning banks into the “dumb pipes” of banking as institutions become the platform through which other financial applications operate, which means banks’ marketing armies need to, as Breithaupt told Tearsheet earlier this year, join the front lines of banking (which historically are in the hands of branch tellers.

So now, Citi is “leaning in a little harder on our advertising,” Breithaupt said. It has long used music and live music events to differentiate its brand from its industry peers. Now it wants to show customers it can connect with them in their everyday lives — not just when they need help with their money.

“Music has that emotive power,” Breithaupt said. “It is the universal language and allows a brand like Citi to reach and connect and reach a broad range of consumers regardless of where they are in the world, what life stage they’re in. Music has been an important tool to bring us that emotion we’re looking for.”

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Why fintech startups love advertising on the New York City subway

For the last two months, money transfer startup TransferWise has been trying to connect with people stuck on the train during the New York City subway’s “summer of hell.”

For a consumer fintech startup, it’s the perfect place to put some advertising dollars. TransferWise has built its business around the ability to let people send money overseas at a low cost. Sixty percent of its users are immigrants; 40 percent are American-born. Its employees represent more than 50 countries. Its user base and prospective customer pool looks a lot like the people of New York.

“We serve people who have a connection overseas,” said Kate Huyett, TransferWise’s North America growth lead. “New York has the densest population of foreign-born people.”

Even if they’re American-born, theres still a chance they moved to New York from someplace else. TransferWise wants to send the message that it celebrates that diversity.

“We wanted to show New Yorkers we understand them,” said Colby Brin, a senior writer at the company. “We had a message that resonated with people who weren’t native New Yorkers but had made themselves New Yorkers because they moved from a different state or different country.”

Skyline

 

The company didn’t specify the size of its marketing budget, but Huyett said it needs to stretch those dollars as wide as it can — and subway ads are the best way to do that. TransferWise bought the smallest package that the MTA offers, which gives the company 1,000 cards that are distributed across the trains. With that option, she said, the MTA doesn’t give the company any say in how the ads are placed or distributed.

TransferWise did, however, choose whether to run the ads on the trains or along the platform walls.

“We felt on the platform, the ad would be behind people,” Huyett said. “When you’re in the car you’re a captive audience for a longer time, so there’s the possibility that someone sees them and pays closer attention to them.”

The subway is a hot destination for startups in general, looking to stretch their marketing budgets. E-commerce startups like Thinx and Casper both love advertising on the subway, calling them “conversation starters” and a way to be in a city where “trends are set.” They’re also effective, say these companies: David Zhang, Casper’s CMO, told Tearsheet’s sister site, Digiday that subway ads are highly effective to target local audience because when riders get stuck on the train, they have nowhere to look except at those ads.

Three years ago Venmo ran an ad campaign around the New York subway featuring an everyday millennial called “Lucas” (who, it turns out, was a Venmo engineer). Venmo’s message to subway riders was the same (although less nostalgic and bittersweet): we do the same things you do, we understand you. The campaign sparked a lot of frustration and confusion for consumers — but the company was engaging with them. Venmo was unavailable to comment for this story.

Earlier this year SoFi, the financial everything provider for millennials, also ran an ad campaign on the New York subway for its SoFi at Work product.

“The subway is a really cost-efficient medium from a reach and frequency standpoint,” said Margi Brown, SoFi’s vp of marketing and media. “It has allowed us to amplify our message to a commuter audience with a very specific message — keeping it simple and easily consumable.”

TransferWise, based in London, has raised about $117 million in funding to date from VC heavy hitters like Andreessen Horowitz, Ballie Gifford and Peter Thiel. Earlier this year it launched its “Borderless” online bank account for businesses and freelancers.

TransferWise’s language and tone have changed a lot since it first launched its U.S. operations, in 2015. Back then, its subway ads were more combative against the banks.

transferwise2014-1

 

The change is in keeping with the broader shift among consumer fintech startups, which initially came out charging toward the legacy banks with the intention of disrupting them. That attitude has since calmed as both sides embrace a more collaborative approach bringing banks and fintechs together.

transferwise2014-2

 

When asked to comment about the change in tone, TransferWise highlighted the changing political environment in the U.S.

“Given what’s happening in the U.S. right now, we want to show immigrant communities that we empathize with their journeys,” Huyett said. “And more generally, we feel it’s important to begin communicating one of our core values, which is that we believe the world is a better place when people, money and ideas move freely. It’s something we will talk about more and more in the future.”

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A Poughkeepsie bank is putting on its own morning show

It’s like “Good Morning America,” but it’s produced by a bank.

Every Monday at 8 a.m., the “Wake Up with Rhinebeck Bank” online video show targets Hudson Valley residents, highlighting interesting people and issues in the area. Episodes run from five to 15 minutes, and topics include a profile of a millennial chef, a trip to a local distillery and a chat with the head of a mental health nonprofit. It’s a way the Poughkeepsie, New York-based bank is marketing itself as a community partner.

“It’s really helped build a buzz, with businesses and nonprofits sharing the videos on their social media channels and websites,” said Michelle Barone-Lepore, svp of marketing. “We want to tell people what’s going on in the community and give them something shareable.”

The show launched in May 2016 and gets posted on Facebook and YouTube every week when it’s not on summer hiatus. Barone-Lepore, who co-hosts the show with vp and area sales leader Mark Malone, said Facebook is the primary distribution channel, garnering around 10,000 views a week.

A handful of staff members at the bank brainstorm ideas and guests for the show every week, which local online television station Hudson Valley News Network films, Barone-Lepore said. The videos are relatively inexpensive to produce, costing between $650 to $700 per episode. The bank has experimented with different types of content, and it’s learned that compelling stories rather than product promotions drive viewership.

“We’ve done three episodes where we talked about products — they did badly because of the content,” said Barone-Lepore. “People care more about building a community or telling a story.”

Through interest in the stories and social sharing of the videos by influential locals, the bank hopes customers will stay tied to the brand, which will drive business back to the bank.

Barone-Lepore said it’s difficult to know for sure whether increased interest in the bank’s product offerings is directly attributable to the show, but the number of deposit account openings have edged up since the show’s launch. From January to April 2016, before the show started airing, the bank would open 162 to 172 new accounts per month. After the show started running in May, that number increased; from June to December of the same year, the number of new monthly deposit account openings ranged from 188 to 287. Commercial loan volume was up 29 percent in 2016 compared to the previous year.

Financial services marketers have been increasingly drawn to video in recent years. As Tearsheet reported in April, they have strived to create authentic enough content to forge a human connection with customers. Examples include T. Rowe Price, Charles Schwab, Bank of America and TD.

“They are not putting themselves front and center. … They are pitching themselves as enablers of other people’s dreams and desire to do good,” Dan Latimore, svp of Celent’s banking practice, told American Banker.

The use of Facebook as a distribution channel suggests the show may be more about customer engagement rather than acquisition, said Jackie Brown, principal at financial services marketing agency JB Communications Group.

“If they are mainly using Facebook as the means to distribute the show, I would say their uptick in certain products is likely coming from existing customers, as most people who engage with a financial institution on Facebook are already using that bank or credit union.”

Rhinebeck said its preference for prerecorded rather than live streaming video is to ensure its compliance team can review the content while allowing the flexibility to add b-roll and other finishing touches. Brown said this type of content may appeal to particular demographics.

“Prerecording certainly helps to manage the message much more tightly than streaming live,” said Brown. “The polished videos probably appeal more to an older crowd than the streaming events.”

Still, Barone-Lepore said the bank intends to move into channels more frequently used by younger people and plans to post shorter versions of the videos on Instagram and launch a Snapchat channel this fall. The challenge, she said, is keeping the content interesting.

“We’re working on making the content flow better and working on different formats so people will be interested — different angles and camera cuts will help,” she said. “As video changes, we’re going to change; as long as we keep on top of that, we’re going to be in a position to win.”

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#Pride: How banks are reaching LGBT customers

As cities across the world mark LGBT Pride Month this June, banks are using these events as opportunities to reach new customers and employees.

Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, banks have been sporting the rainbow flag at Pride Month. All major North American banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citi are pulling out all the stops in their LGBT-inclusive marketing and participation in Pride Month. But LGBT marketing efforts go beyond just pride floats and bank-branded paraphernalia; they are elements of banks’ strategies to attract and retain customers and talent.

“We recognized that a lot of our customers are not traditional white families with about two kids,” said Ann Dyste, US Bank’s LGBT strategy manager, a position that was created eight months ago. “They are modern families of all varieties — we want to make sure all the services we provide are reflective of the community.” The bank has sponsored 33 festivals across 25 states, and was ranked a “best place to work” for the 10th year in a row by the Human Rights Campaign on Tuesday.

US Bank found in its research that customers want to do business with companies that have an authentic interest in the community and its organizations. “We needed to take a step back and make sure we have the right kind of experience and there’s a person focusing on that end-to-end experience — it’s data driven.”

In addition to visibility on bank products (the bank launched a debit card in rainbow colors last month) Pride Month is an opportunity to draw attention to outreach materials geared at LGBT customers, including an LGBT customer-focused website that the bank launched two months ago. The website includes financial planning articles tailored to LGBT audiences, with recent headlines including “Modern Legacy Planning — Getting Started,” and “Is a joint bank account right for you and your partner?”

“A lot of it has been since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2015 leveled the playing field,” Dyste said. “People are going through a series of firsts, and the lived history of going through that is much shorter than the general market and we’re trying to help them navigate.”

Affiliating a bank’s brand with inclusivity is important for customer retention and employee morale.

“It’s such a key celebration — we want to be there as a brand celebrating with them,” said Claudine Dupont, vice president of global brand and corporate sponsorship at TD Bank Group. “We are there year-round, but we also want to demonstrate our commitment for key celebrations for the community in general.”

TD is sponsoring 63 Pride events across North America, 30 of which are in the U.S. To banks like TD, Pride Month participation is an effort promote itself as a company open to both LGBT employees (TD has a 3,000-member LGBT pride network) and customers.

“You’ll see our efforts demonstrated through some of our marketing pieces,” said Dupont. “We were one of the first banks to advertise using same-sex couples in our mainstream advertising — it’s part of who we are.” The company has featured LGBT individuals in advertising and marketing products since 2008. 

Money conversations aren’t easy, so keep it low-key. #FinanciallyFit

A post shared by TD Canada (@td_canada) on

LGBT customers are a segment banks can ill-afford to ignore, said one analyst.

“Not so much support out of philanthropic reasons, but it’s one that has real business case reasons because of some of the distinctive characteristics of the market,” said Mike Wilke, founder of AdRespect, a nonprofit that promotes inclusivity of LGBT representations in advertising. “It’s a competitive and developed business sector,” he said.

Beyond overt community support and customer outreach, attracting and retaining talent is also an important motivation. The Royal Bank of Canada, a major supporter of pride festivities across Canada and in the U.S. through RBC Capital Markets, said maintaining a welcoming workplace place brand is an important objective of pride efforts.

“In terms of strategy, we focus on talent, clients and community,” said Norma Tombari, senior director of global diversity and inclusion at RBC. “For the LGBT segment, we’re looking at how we make the environment more LGBT-friendly and inclusive, and how can we communicate externally to attract top LGBT talent.”

Among the target demographics, RBC said younger people may more be more drawn to a company that aligns with their values.

“A lot of millennials are interested in working for an organization that has expressed values as it relates to inclusion in a way that’s not just general talk or general speak — they want to know what the organization is doing.”

 

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Inside BNY Mellon’s marketing strategy

There’s an intriguing innovation race taking place among legacy banks in which everyone wants to be second to market. Except for BNY Mellon.

The 233-year-old bank prides itself on its history of firsts. It provided the first loan to the U.S. government and was the first stock to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Later, it became the first bank to create a mobile trading app for its clients. Today, it has nine innovation centers around the world learning about new technologies to be able to educate and inform its clients, which make up 78 percent of Fortune 500 companies, on how to use them to keep up with changing business models.

This “pioneering spirit,” as Aniko DeLaney, the bank’s global corporate marketing head calls it, is deeply integrated into the bank’s culture as part of the legacy of Alexander Hamilton, founding father of the United States, the U.S. financial system and of BNY Mellon itself. It’s DeLaney’s job to carry the legacy, but with a view on innovation. To do so, she and her team feature a Test Your Knowledge of Our Founder quiz on the website, as well as short videos (less than two minutes) on BNY Mellon Then and Now, Hamilton’s Impact and The Buck Started Here. The bank also sponsored the now Peabody Award-nominated PBS documentary, Hamilton’s America.

It also publishes an annual People Report, which highlights how the firm’s investments in people have been the key to success and showcases the work of more than 50,000. It’s advertised in seven parts on the bank’s YouTube channel.

Tearsheet recently caught up with DeLaney at NewsCred’s #ThinkContent Summit on BNY Mellon’s mission to educate through storytelling. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

As one of the oldest U.S. banks, BNY Mellon appears the least shy about new technology.
Today, we have nine innovation centers around the world and one of the key topics they’re all talking about is a distributed ledger, which of course we know as blockchain. That’s where our employees are really being challenged to say there are interesting technologies that are disruptive, new business models. We’ve kept these beautiful handwritten ledgers and we have account information from Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Back in the day, that was very advanced, to keep track of accounts and information. 

So you’re on a mission to educate?
My role is to share what the evolution of our services are. For example, what are we going to do about blockchain? We really do want to work collaboratively with our clients because as they’re changing their business models, we want to help them operate in an agile manner — and part of that is learning what’s offered out there. Again, we’re a well established firm so I get the benefit of having that foundation and being able to share our brand story.

Where do you connect with clients?
In this quickly evolving [content and information] arena, people use various channels: social media, they may be checking Twitter, which is a constant news feed, LinkedIn for talent, Facebook for connections, YouTube for education. We’re focusing on those channels, where we believe more and more of our constituents are looking for that expertise and good content.

How do you tell that story?
Our teams are not only thinking about optimizing the actual channel but designing the content to be easily digested; more snackable, more videos, more infographics. It’s hard to have all the key messages in the right format based on the channel. It’s a fun challenge to figure out how to bring those messages in the most appropriate manner to the audiences out there. The level of sophistication has grown so much.

Suddenly it seems like banks are tech companies that employ technologists. Is there a language barrier with the “traditional” bankers and clients?
Our business models are evolving. So the way we interact with clients, our marketing, the language is evolving. We are definitely focused on the evolution of our technology in our innovation, so we’re using robotics to really enhance some of our operational processes. But this marrying the best of man and machine — just trying to explain its capabilities requires some new language and new examples. And I think that also gets to the stories.

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Citi CMO Jennifer Breithaupt: Marketing is joining the front lines of banking

When it comes to legacy banks, Citi has been one of the front-runners in tackling new technologies.

It was one of the first to transform its branches to “smart branches,” offer a mobile-first banking experience for high net worth clients, and has been a mobile banking innovator, introducing functions like charge disputes, and card replacement tracking in the app. It now claims to have online users that exceed the population of Mexico City and more mobile users than the population of Hong Kong. (It declined to give specifics, but the population of Mexico City exceeds 8 million, while  upwards of 7 million people live in Hong Kong.)

As technology has changed consumer expectations, and perhaps lowered their attention spans, banks are having to meet their customers in different channels. That means the onus isn’t just on bank tellers anymore to create deep personal connections with customers, marketing is working hard to do that in the branch, on the website, in the mobile app, on social media and everywhere else the customer spends time.

Tearsheet caught up with Jennifer Breithaupt, Citi’s recently appointed global consumer marketing chief. She joined the bank in 1999 and has held a number of key senior positions, driving engagement and long-term brand loyalty with its customers. She spoke to Tearsheet about creating customer connections, collaborating with other parts of the bank and her personal goals moving into a new role.

How do you measure a campaign’s success?
Awareness and preference are key indicators for us as it pertains to the more traditional marketing channels. Website traffic and natural search, people looking for and searching our products is important for us because it leads to card acquisition. All this work were doing above the line is leading folks to want our products and services. So we do track card applications and we’re also looking at if they’re increasing their engagement with us and, are our products “top of wallet.”

How has technology changed how you work, where you meet your customers?
It’s being on the front lines with consumers really. They expect to seamlessly interact and self serve — that means the ability to not visit a bank branch or store front, or not make a phone call. It’s important for us to think not just about “mobile and” but mobile in general because that’s where customers are.

What’s something you’re testing collaboratively that your team gets to lead?
Virtual reality. The rise of VR is really starting to take hold and how we test in VR is an important place for us to be. By 2025 the market could reach about $692 billion. It’s early days with VR. Down the road, could VR be part of what our consumers experience in a bank branch or other places? Certainly.

How do you test that for engagement?
We have a longstanding partnership with NBC and the Today Show where we present a concert series on Today. We did the first ever VR concert livestream on the Today Show with one of the bands. We took requests from consumers and had 30,000 requests for VR headsets. We gave those away and people were able to experience that show live from Rockefeller Plaza but also experience it from home as if they were there. That was one of our first forays into VR.

What’s a goal of yours as you assume this new role?
To create a shared voice for a consumer business globally. We do quite a few things at Citi to talk about our products and services individually, but haven’t had the time or ability to create this consumer brand platform that we have in the works right now. To create an overarching halo brand voice and positioning is really exciting.

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Investopedia now wants to ‘match’ financial advisers with readers

Far from just a how-to guide to financial and investing terms, Investopedia has evolved into a media brand in its own right. With coverage ranging from bigger economic stories, advice on investments and budgeting, and entertainment with a finance lens (“Investopedia’s Guide to Watching Billions“), its reach is growing.

Now, the publisher is looking to drum up more interest with a new service that will match some of its contributing writers, mostly financial advisers, with readers.

“After talking to a lot of advisers, clearly building the brand is important, but what they really care most about is driving leads and new client acquisition — their goal is to grow their practices,” said David Siegel, Investopedia’s CEO, in an interview with Tearsheet.

The move could help solidify the publisher’s Advisor Insights platform’s reach among a specialized community of advisers and investors, making it even more valuable to advertisers and ultimately generating additional revenue.

“Our aspiration is to have every one of the 300,000 advisers [nationally] work with Investopedia as part of their daily workflow,” he said. “If we have hundreds of thousands of advisers who are using Investopedia, and if we have tens of millions of users who are asking questions of advisers, there is significant monetization in being the intermediary,” he said.

Siegel, who took over as Investopedia’s CEO two years ago, has been working to build a more socially-inclined, specialist audience for the site. It’s an approach that draws 27 million unique monthly visitors and a ranking of 6th among the world’s top investing sites globally, according to SimilarWeb. The site has also beefed up original news content, including video.

IAC-owned Investopedia launched the Advisor Insights section of the site a year ago as a platform to allow accredited financial advisers to answer questions from users, for no fee. While Investopedia doesn’t pay the advisers for answering questions, it said it offers perks and exposure to help them grow their reach — after 25 answers or articles, Investopedia staff will shoot a marketing video about the adviser, and after 50, Investopedia gives them additional visibility by letting be the sponsor of the term of the day.

“They’re not paid and they don’t pay us, but by publishing content, they get tremendous digital exposure and traffic,” Siegel said. “But what they really care the most about is driving leads, driving new client acquisition.”

The new matching service (called Priority Leads) is available to advisers who have contributed at least 200 articles or answers. In response to requests from clients to connect with advisers, Investopedia staff will tap into its pool of top contributors to find a suitable match. Only 50 to 100 of the 25,000 advisers using the platform today have access to this service, but Siegel said he expects it to grow quickly.

Investopedia has quadrupled its staff over the past two years and now has 115 employees — 12 of whom focus on Advisor Insights. Siegel said he intends to keep the online advisory service free, as the site generates revenue from advertisers. The move to offer free curated advice from accredited advisers is one way for Investopedia to distinguish itself among a family of sites dedicated to personal finance and investing, including NerdWallet, Kiplinger, credit.com and others. It’s just one step of a larger strategy to drive audience engagement, he said, and future plans include the launch of Adviser Insights as brand on its own; continuing education content for financial advisers; and the creation of a online community for advisers who could discuss industry issues such as succession planning.

“Our focus is how we can create content in a differentiated way, and engage with users such that users are coming back on a more frequent basis and are engaging much more deeply with our content — Advisor Insights has proven the answer to that for us.”

 

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‘Toes in the water’: Banks play around with chatbots

Bank phone trees are dreadful experiences, so many banks are turning to chatbots in the hope to spruce up the experience.

Take Capital One’s chatbot text message “Eno,” (“One” backwards) which allows customers to text to get balance, transaction history and pay bills. Customers can even communicate with emojis — a “thumbs up” means to confirm and a “money bag” will prompt Eno to list a customer’s account balance.

Capital One’s approach to Eno may offer some clues why traditionally risk averse banks are just taking baby steps. Capital One is only rolling out the product as a pilot for the time being, and the bank is careful to manage future expectations.

“There’s a lot of hype right now about what chatbots are going to be able to do, and at this point, we’re just satisfied getting our toes in the water,” said Ken Dodelin, vp of digital product development at Capital One. “Eno has a long way to go before it can handle all the things that more mature systems can handle.”

While Eno can handle simple requests like balance inquiries, Eno may need a little help dealing with more complicated issues like lost cards, Dodelin said.

Mastercard is also taking a cautious approach with its yet-to-be released chatbot, Mastercard KAI.

“Once the pilot ends in summer, we will be able to determine what capabilities, channels and functionalities it needs to have for launch,” said Kiki Del Valle, vp of commerce for every device at Mastercard. “Right now, we are piloting on Facebook Messenger and SMS but we would look to bring it to a number of other platforms.”

Developers say that while chatbots offer opportunities to improve customer service, banks should be concerned about early missteps.

“When Facebook opened up its messenger platform, people could create bots and run them on Facebook messenger — that created a lot of opportunity for people to create some very bad chatbots, ” said Eran Livneh, vp of marketing at Personetics, a software company that develops chatbots and other cognitive applications for major banks.

Last week, Facebook announced that it was pulling back on its artificial intelligence efforts after its bots had a 70 percent failure rate — a cautionary tale for banks looking to quickly deploy the technology.

Livneh said that for a banking chatbot to be effective, it should be able to answer general questions that aren’t linked to any customer data, along with the capability to delve into a customer’s personal data to offer notifications and advice. Unlike IVR, it should be able to react to the way people actually talk, and be ready for twists and turns of the conversations. The tool should be also be trained to operate in the financial services context.

The industry has high hopes for the technology. In a Personetics survey of over 200 banks and financial institutions earlier this year, about 75 percent of respondents viewed chatbots as a “viable commercial solution” over the next one to two years. Despite this enthusiasm, analysts say it should be released in a way that doesn’t actually take away from the customer’s experience.

“Customers usually prefer to speak with a knowledgeable person who has the quickest, most accurate answer,” said Sanjay Srivastava, svp and chief digital officer at Genpact. “Financial institutions need to be concerned with delighting the customer and not losing that personal touch and communication they have with their clients.”

Delle Valle agrees, noting that customers will still seek personalized treatment regardless of how it’s delivered. She envisions a model where bots and humans will co-exist as part of the customer service experience.

“We foresee a more blended environment for customer service going forward, where consumers will look at bots in some cases for quick, real-time information but in some complex situations will look for human intervention.”

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Chase has a 10-person ‘newsroom’ delivering financial tips and advice

When searching for advice on planning a trip, funding a triathlon or finding back-to-school deals, a Google search may send you to usual suspects such as Forbes, Money or BuzzFeed. But would you be willing to go to a bank website for news and advice?

Big banks are now getting into the game of offering customers news-like content, aware there are an increasing number of apps and websites competing to influence people’s spending.

Chase is no exception. Its 10-person newsroom, as the bank calls it, creates its own stories and uses freelancers to create articles and videos on topics that include personal finance, retirement planning and life advice. Recent headlines include “Why you should stop comparing your finances to your friends,” “Can money buy happiness?” and “The best times of year to buy a car” – the type of service articles that could easily be found on any number of media sites. Chase branding is heavy. While many of the articles cite government data and external articles and quote external sources, the stories usually link to Chase products and services.

Chase created the unit three years ago, coinciding with the rise of social media and other web-based platforms for personal finance advice. The newsroom is made up of former journalists and marketers. The bank has partnered with media outlets including Business Insider, Time Inc. and theSkimm to run its content on their sites and vice versa.

For Chase, content marketing is a way to build connections with customers and enhance interest in its products and services. The site posts six to 10 articles per week.

“We really want to deepen relationships with customers,” said Brian Becker, executive director and head of the newsroom at JPMorgan Chase. “There’s a lot of competition in those areas, and where we try to be different is using data we get from the JPMorgan Chase institution and using people internally who have perspective. And we also use external creators as well.”

Chase’s partnerships with recognizable media brands and personalities add credibility to its content and help it access hard-to-reach customer segments, the thinking goes. For instance, posting theSkimm content on its site and featuring Chase material in theSkimm’s newsletter has allowed it to reach the startup’s millennial female readership.

“We were an early partner of theirs and were attracted to working with them because of the demographic of their audience the trust that they had built,” said Becker.

One reason marketers have struggled with devoting resources to branded content is because it doesn’t fit the traditional ways marketers measure campaigns’ performance. Chase says one measure of its newsroom’s effectiveness is that it keeps visitors on the site longer, but it wouldn’t provide specifics. According to comScore, Chase.com — the landing site, not the “news” portion, which comScore doesn’t break out — got 33 million monthly unique visitors in December, roughly on par with Bloomberg or CNBC.

Other big banks have jumped on the content-marketing trend, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, American Express and Citibank. The move toward branded news content invariably results in a clash between what’s news and what’s marketing or promotional material.

For the marketer, branded content is less disruptive than a commercial interruption or a pop-up ad, said Carolee Bennett, senior social content manager at health care and financial services marketing company Media Logic. But the line between branded content and real journalism can be blurry.

“The onus is on the consumer to verify information,” she said. “We’re living in a time where the best practice as a consumer is to always check the source of information that you’re reading, and it may be true that consumers may take branded content with a grain of salt.”