Latest news with #hyperpersonalisation
Finextra
3 days ago
- Business
- Finextra
Win-win banking: Unlocking value through advanced product, pricing, and billing
0 This content has been created by the Finextra editorial team with inputs from subject matter experts at the funding sponsor. In today's fast-moving and hyper-competitive retail banking ecosystem, product and pricing agility is no longer a luxury for financial institutions: it is now a necessity. Innovation-first challengers, evolving customer expectations, and regulatory pressures have forced banks to rethink how they design, price, and deliver products. Advanced product, pricing, and billing capabilities are crucial for modern retail banks to overcome complex product management challenges, rigid pricing, and fragmented billing. Optimised product management, dynamic pricing and centralised billing allows retail banks to rapidly design, price, and deliver innovative and hyper-personalised products at scale. The result is a win-win: banks gain agility, better revenue control, and growth opportunities, while customers receive relevant products at attractive prices, greater transparency, and better rewards. Evolving market demands Today's retail banking market demands agile, customer-centric solutions that prioritise personalisation, transparency, and flexibility. Looking to the future, these demands will intensify as digital-native customers expect seamless experiences, innovative offerings, and value-driven interactions. Hyper-personalisation and value: Today's customers expect financial products aligned with their unique financial goals and lifestyles - from low-fee student accounts to high-yield savings for young professionals. There is a strong demand for convenient, cost-saving bundled offerings such as mortgage and insurance packages or credit cards with travel rewards. Looking ahead, this trend will accelerate into hyper-personalised products, that leverage AI-driven insights to create bespoke solutions at a micro-segment or individual level. This could mean dynamic, usage-based bundles that adjust features or pricing in real-time based on customer behaviour. Dynamic and transparent pricing: Customers are increasingly demanding dynamic and transparent pricing with no hidden fees. They expect benefits like lower interest rates or waived fees that reward their overall relationship and loyalty. This push for relationship-based pricing considers factors such as account types, balances, relationship length, and activity. Looking ahead, AI will increasingly influence or drive pricing models making relationship-based pricing even more sophisticated by analysing predictive behaviours for hyper-personalised offers with real-time adjustments. Streamlined and flexible billing: There is a growing market demand for flexible billing options, including usage-based models and tiered services that reward customer engagement. Looking ahead, the expectation will evolve into seamless and transparent billing systems that integrate across all products, providing a single, real-time view of charges and rewards. Customers today and in the future value being rewarded for their loyalty. Banks are expected to deepen these relationships through effective cross-selling and bundling, tiered programmes offering premium services and attractive pricing, all aimed at encouraging customers to consolidate their financial services for better overall value. Why conventional capabilities fall short Banks today face a critical imperative: adapt to the demands of modern business needs. The reality is banks can no longer ignore critical capabilities that help them manage the intricate web of today's product management, dynamic pricing and offers, and diverse billing structures. The lack of these critical capabilities can create significant roadblocks. They cannot accommodate diverse contract structures and nuanced pricing models that are essential in a highly competitive market. This inflexibility directly impacts a bank's ability to innovate, respond to market shifts, and capitalise on evolving customer expectations. Rigid product management: Complex or hard-coded product definitions for loans or savings with distinct data structures pose significant challenges. Inconsistent product offerings can confuse customers and bank staff, while portfolio bloat from outdated or redundant products increases costs. Additionally, rigid systems with poor interoperability limit innovation by hindering experimentation with new features or integration with third-party partners or ecosystems. Complex or hard-coded product definitions for loans or savings with distinct data structures pose significant challenges. Inconsistent product offerings can confuse customers and bank staff, while portfolio bloat from outdated or redundant products increases costs. Additionally, rigid systems with poor interoperability limit innovation by hindering experimentation with new features or integration with third-party partners or ecosystems. Inflexible pricing structures: Inflexible pricing rules create rigid and inconsistent pricing models, making dynamic or personalised pricing challenging. Banks also struggle to tailor pricing to customer segments, behaviours, or overall lifetime value. Adjusting pricing to respond to market trends or competitor offerings is slow and complex. Inflexible pricing rules create rigid and inconsistent pricing models, making dynamic or personalised pricing challenging. Banks also struggle to tailor pricing to customer segments, behaviours, or overall lifetime value. Adjusting pricing to respond to market trends or competitor offerings is slow and complex. Inefficient and opaque billing processes: Siloed billing or applying inconsistent fee structures, complicated consolidated billing, and transparency. This leads to a negative customer experience or even attrition due to opaque or unexpected fees, eroding trust. Disparate systems also cause revenue leakage through difficulties in tracking and reconciling fees. The lack of a holistic view of customer activity prevents relationship-based billing. Reconciling billing data across systems is labour-intensive, increasing operational costs. Siloed billing or applying inconsistent fee structures, complicated consolidated billing, and transparency. This leads to a negative customer experience or even attrition due to opaque or unexpected fees, eroding trust. Disparate systems also cause revenue leakage through difficulties in tracking and reconciling fees. The lack of a holistic view of customer activity prevents relationship-based billing. Reconciling billing data across systems is labour-intensive, increasing operational costs. Scalability challenges: Traditional systems often lack the scalability to handle high transaction volumes or new product lines, leading to performance issues and downtime. Driving innovation with advanced product, pricing and billing capabilities Advanced product, pricing, and billing capabilities can help power innovation and future-proof a bank. Banks can roll out new and innovative products, promotions, or pricing models more rapidly without the need for extensive and time-consuming overhauls of their existing systems. Banks can create dynamic and compelling bundled offerings, significantly aiding customer acquisition and retention. These bundles can take various forms, including cross-product packages (e.g., mortgage, insurance, and loyalty programme), lifestyle-based bundles tailored to demographics (e.g., student accounts with travel rewards), tiered services for premium customers, and dynamic usage-based bundles that adjust based on customer activity. With the right pricing capabilities, banks can quickly adapt to market changes, customer demands, or regulatory requirements. Dynamic pricing strategies based on various factors like customer segments, behavioural patterns, or lifetime value help offer new value to customers and establish competitive advantages. Relationship pricing can be elevated with tiered programmes, product bundling that incentivises multi-product usage, and personalised offers. Streamlined billing helps banks eliminate revenue leakage. Integration with existing CRM, ERP, and accounting systems, helps provide a unified view of customer data and sales processes. With quote creation, pricing calculations, and offer management being automated, sales teams can dedicate time to close deals and manage customer relationships. This improves customer experiences and allows banks to adapt and scale. The data and AI advantage Key considerations when evaluating solutions with advanced product, pricing and billing capabilities include seamless integration with existing bank systems through robust APIs and data synchronisation. A well-defined data migration strategy for accurate and complete data transfer, supported by strong governance and security is essential. Solutions must also be highly scalable and performant to handle the bank's full transaction volume with low latency, while strictly adhering to all relevant compliance regulations. AI can help banks identify profitable segments, understand customer needs, and predict future behaviour, leading to the creation of more relevant and personalised products. For pricing, AI can facilitate dynamic strategies by analysing demand, competition, and customer willingness to pay. A win-win: What is in it for banks and customers? Faster time-to-market: Banks can roll out new products, promotions, or pricing models more rapidly. Personalisation: Advanced capabilities make it easier to implement dynamic, customer-specific pricing, or tailored billing models, enhancing customer experience and competitiveness. Flexibility and agility: Banks can quickly adapt pricing and billing structures to market changes, customer demands, or regulatory requirements. Improved portfolio analysis: Banks can collect and analyse granular data on pricing, billing, and product performance. Dynamic product adjustments: Banks can experiment with pricing models, bundling strategies, or new product features. Customer-centric optimisation: Banks can better align their product portfolio with customer needs by leveraging data to design personalised or segmented offerings. Streamlined rationalisation: Banks can rationalise and optimise complex product portfolios by reconfiguring or discontinuing products reducing costs and risks. Scalability: Solutions that scale across the banking enterprise can more easily handle increased volumes or new product lines. Innovation enablement: Easier integration can power innovation in product offerings and enable partnerships with fintechs or other third parties. A strategic imperative for the future Advanced product, pricing, and billing capabilities help banks move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach. Granular product definitions, flexible pricing, targeted offer creation, and precise billing help banks tailor offerings to specific customer segments' needs and preferences. In a digital-first world, where expectations are measured in milliseconds and loyalty is won through experience, such capabilities are not just an operational upgrade, it is a strategic imperative. Retail banks that embrace these capabilities are positioning themselves to thrive amid disruption. Those that do not risk being outpaced by nimble competitors who build with agility at their core. As customer expectations rise and the pace of innovation accelerates, banks must rethink what it means to be product-driven. The answer is data and dynamic personalisation. And advanced product, pricing and billing capabilities are how modern retail banks get there.
The Independent
21-05-2025
- Business
- The Independent
The future of marketing: a conversation with Dario Debarbieri and Raj Iyer
HCLSoftware is a Business Reporter client AI has radically changed the game for marketers. How is the marketing environment changing, and what does the future hold? Dario Debarbieri: For marketers, the first lesson of the global pivot to artificial intelligence is that data is more vital than ever. AI is only as good as the data that fuels it, which makes data quality and data management critical, in marketing as elsewhere. And to manage data effectively requires platforms that are agile, flexible and resilient—platforms that can adapt without breaking, that are solid yet versatile. At a business level, these capabilities will mean the difference between success and failure. To thrive in a world of pervasive AI, your data and your platform must be ready for a future of living marketing systems. A brand in the future will evolve like a living organism—because in an AI-powered world, nothing is static. The perception of your brand will depend on the data that fuels those AI tools and frameworks—dynamically, even metabolically. That means your marketing systems must ensure consistency in the data captured by AI tools and systems in order to influence the output they generate. You must be massively consistent in the way you manage your data, for your customers as well as your brand. Hyper-personalisation—an AI superpower for the next-gen marketer—also depends directly on the data that fuels it. The customer experience lifecycle will be transformed by an infusion of data-driven context and insights—allowing AI-generated, dynamically crafted and curated messaging, stories and transactions. In every instance, data will be the lifeblood of these systems. What does all this mean for human marketers? DD: None of this makes humans obsolete. The marketer of tomorrow will pivot to providing the human insights that make campaigns more effective, the ethics and brand culture that inform them and the emotional intelligence that brings them fully to life. This new marketer will be a complete storyteller—while being, in equal measure, a marketing system designer. What will that future marketer need? DD: New tools—better, faster, more focused and flexible—and a clear knowledge of how they work and how to use them. Without that, marketers simply won't survive. This creative industrial revolution will feature a fusion of technologies that will shape the profile of every marketer: a convergence of GenAI, data, quantum-powered market simulations and blockchain-enabled brand trust—enabling secure, transparent transactions à la Web3. Turning to the present, where are we with marketing technology today? What are our current capabilities? Raj Iyer: The web browser made the internet accessible to everyone back in 1993-94, but from a business perspective, email was the first killer app. Marketers saw instantly that email gave them a powerful tool to reach a very large audience. Unica capitalised on that trend and redefined marketing technology in the process, making catalogue marketing electronic while creating the martech space as it is today. Thus was born the idea of segmentation at scale, using email to send the most prodigious campaigns cost-effectively. Today, AI too is a killer tool for marketing—but at an exponentially higher level. Until now, marketing has been all about the attention economy, relentlessly seeking better ways to rack up eyeballs and clicks. In fact, the whole idea of a marketing funnel came from the math game that results. But as channels, digital technologies and social media proliferate, people are inundated with messages. The result is attention fatigue—and plummeting engagement, which worsens as AI-based content adds to the clamour for users' attention. So how can we respond to this dilemma? RI: As marketers, the goal is to build trust with customers and earn loyalty by delivering value—in short, a trust economy. The attention economy isn't going away, but if you can build trust and loyalty with customers, attention is a given. So, how can we get there? In our view, the bridge to trust is the intelligence economy —an infusion of intelligence and intention that cuts through noise and distraction with data-driven context and deep insights into customers' wants and needs. Whereas digital experiences are often generic and irrelevant, brands can use the power of intent to deliver memorable experiences that build trust and strengthen relationships. To achieve that, we need platforms and tools that can capture that intention, turn relevant data into useful insights and make marketing workflows manageable through intelligent orchestration. AI, data, quantum, blockchain – all these technologies belong to this intelligence economy. This is what we mean by Digital+. What capabilities is the intelligence economy built on? RI: We've touched on the what of the intelligence economy: the deep customer knowledge and data-driven insights that establish intent. Next is the how: the dance of engagement, the contextual customer journeys—guided by HCL Unica+ and the technology stack that powers it. Then comes the why: the memorable feelings and experiences that make customers choose you over competitors. Now, these elements—insight, engagement, and experience—rely, in turn, on other key capabilities, one of which pertains to technology architecture. Tech architects today face a false choice between monolithic and microservices approaches. What the intelligence economy demands, however, is a composable architecture based on packaged business capabilities (PBCs)—modular software components that perform specific business functions and can be seamlessly integrated and removed. Meanwhile, AI feeds into all three of these elements—feeding into insight, for example, with auto-segmentation in the customer data platform; engagement, by dynamically matching channels to customers; and experience, by crafting hyper-personalised journeys based on deep customer knowledge. DD: The marketing platform of the future has other core attributes—data and AI, analytics, hyper-personalisation, security and scalability are all 'must-haves' when implementing the martech of the future. The key takeaway for today's marketers, though, is simple: the platforms, tools and technologies of the intelligence economy are available now—and we're here to make that easy. The future of marketing may lie ahead, but the Digital+ future is now. Click here to learn more. Raj Iyer Raj Iyer is the Executive Vice President and Portfolio General Manager at HCLSoftware, where he leads several product lines and played a key role in scaling the business from a few hundred million in revenue to $1.5 billion. With prior leadership roles at DXC and IBM and experience at three Silicon Valley start-ups, Raj brings deep expertise in enterprise software, AI/ML and global business strategy. Dario Debarbieri Dario, who studied Law and Economics at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, has more than 20 years of global leadership experience across technology and financial services, including roles as CEO, CMO and VP at firms such as IBM and Enterprise Outsourcing. Since August 2022, he has led Marketing at HCLSoftware, bringing deep expertise in AI, cloud, data, CX and emerging technologies, with a strong record of driving performance and international brand growth.
