Taking generative AI to market(ing) in financial services

In a world that does not wait for anything, if a promotional campaign takes months to design and execute, it is dead in the water. Fortunately, generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) looks set to transform marketing and communications within the next couple of years.

A leading research and advisory firm predicts that by 2026, the technology will automate 60 percent of the work that goes into designing new websites and mobile applications, as well as 50 percent of their code. For marketers who play it right, there is enormous value for the taking: marketing and sales is one of four areas that combined, will account for 75 percent of the $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annual value that gen AI is expected to create.

In financial services in particular, an exciting gen AI use case in marketing is campaign management. Gen AI tools can bring speed, cost efficiency and insight to the campaign management lifecycle to drive customer engagement, loyalty and business value. Payments platforms, which many argue have set the global benchmark for digital transformation in financial services, now can rewrite campaign management using generative AI.

Use cases to consider

Extreme personalization of campaigns: Gen AI can ingest massive datasets to granularize payment companies’ understanding of individual customers, down to the format of messaging they may like. The companies can then use specialized gen AI tools to generate personalized ad layouts and copy in multiple languages that will improve click-through rates and customer engagement. Gen AI also provides campaign performance insights, enabling marketers to make timely improvements.

Improvement in sales effectiveness: Sales teams, who would typically spend weeks or months in the market to discover new opportunities, can condense that timeline using gen AI, which can leverage data from client conversations to come up with targeted product recommendations. For example, payment processing services provider, Klarna, and some e-commerce platforms have included an LLM-based chatbot and virtual assistant in their applications to personalize the buying experience for online shoppers with curated product recommendations and relevant advice. Gen AI can further boost sales productivity by offering suggestions for product and pricing personalization, or by creating the documents required to respond to a Request for Proposal from a key account.

Substitution of costly field research: Historically, payment companies may need to invest sizeable time and money in field market research to discover emerging trends and opportunity spaces. But now, they can employ gen AI tools, in conjunction with other digital solutions, to gather, process and analyze vast structured and unstructured data for insights that can be deployed to improve marketing communications, engage customers “one on one,” and ultimately improve sales revenues. What’s more, all this can happen at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional market research.

The above use-cases are the low hanging fruit of gen AI, which marketers can gather by integrating off-the-shelf solutions within their campaign management processes. Payment companies can make quick wins – i.e. create designs and content much faster, shorten the feedback loop – and at the same time, rapidly build their own knowledge of gen AI. But they should also be looking beyond these applications for lasting competitive advantage.

Another possibility worth considering is to invest in customized gen AI solutions, such as off-the-shelf solutions trained to work on smaller, specific marketing tasks. For example, one can train a gen AI model to follow corporate brand guidelines and to avoid common branding mistakes, and then use it to generate “creatives.” It is also possible to train gen AI on the type of content preferred by different user personas and marketing roles. Once payment providers reframe a standard gen AI tool into a bespoke solution with their unique data and purposes, and update it constantly with new learning, they will begin to see exponential gains.

The future of gen AI is… human

Visionary payment companies will already be thinking about how they can leverage gen AI technologies to reimagine sales, marketing and communications in the next few years by deploying it across operations – from writing copy to generating long-format content to creating bespoke messaging and engaging brand experiences at scale.

However, they must never lose sight of the fact that the fundamental purpose of generative and other forms of artificial intelligence: to augment the human marketing endeavor.

It’s important to maintain and leverage the support of a trusted partner who combines technological excellence with human-experience expertise to stay on the right path to gen AI adoption.

Raghav Agarwal is Regional Head – Americas, Financial Services, at Infosys.