The BFSI sector in the Middle East is an industry built and continually reinvented by asking what customers want. In the digital age, the answer may change from month to month, which is why banks’ marketing professionals have come to rely on first-party data. Banking gets a rounded view of customer behaviour more than any other industry since it regularly receives direct information about what people buy. Therefore, they can harness their first-party data to gain highly actionable insights, allowing them to optimise marketing campaigns for optimal impact.
First-party customer data has become pivotal in ensuring campaigns play to the right audience. However, while this type of data has great significance to prospects for business growth, challenges remain in monetising it. Banks must first aggregate the information. They may control it, but it does not necessarily reside in a common store. Then, stakeholders must collaborate on how the collated data is analysed to best effect. The ultimate goal is monetisation, but the immediate goal of the analysis is likely to be intermediate, like deducing the need for a new product or uncovering an opportunity to enhance the customer experience.
Throughout the process, marketers face risk. Governments in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and other Middle Eastern nations have established robust regulatory frameworks that mandate adequate privacy protections for customer data. Marketers at leading banks must always account for the compliance impacts of sharing sensitive first-party customer data with outside parties like content providers and ad agencies. Advertising that has the potential to drive revenues and build stock value is now a tough needle to thread.
The right stuff
For finance-sector marketers to add value, they must now deliver on both trust and measurement. If customers and media-network partners do not trust the brand, data sharing with the institution will diminish. Data sharing is essential for accurate targeting. And even assuming the right data is within reach, if measurement tools are not up to code, then insights from omnichannel campaigns are unlikely to be rich enough for monetisation, ROI calculation, or growing commerce media networks.
Such problems have given rise to data collaboration platforms (DCPs), which now play a major role in wringing value out of first-party data. The right DCP does much more than aggregate data. It enhances performance along the campaign pipeline, from ensuring data quality and preserving its security to delivering actionable insights. All of these things are essential for success. Data collaboration is pointless if the quality (accuracy, timeliness, and so on) is substandard; all parties will be subject to regulatory action if privacy is not upheld; and the exercise will be for nought if it does not yield suggestions on how to improve campaigns.
DCPs can be the foundation of robust data management – a new culture where aggregated data from disparate sources is routinely checked for accuracy and relevance. This ensures an ongoing real-time view of customers – their purchases and other behaviours – that subsequently allows more granular designs of marketing campaigns. However, DCPs can also be strongholds of security, thereby promoting trust in the brand from customers and network partners. To be this stronghold, the DCP must go beyond regulatory requirements like encryption and anonymisation. It must enable a governance-focused culture where data protection comes naturally to every employee and is integrated into every process.
The missing ingredient
The best DCPs are transparent and allow the organisation to share that transparency with others – to keep consumers informed, through easily digestible policies, about how their information is used. Data-sharing ecosystems build trust by being transparent. They also allow participants to have granular control over what they share.
Once the DCP has established a sharing ecosystem, it must then be able to empower its users to transform the accumulated data into actionable insights. Once again, effectiveness requires going beyond tradition. Fortunately, today’s measurement and analysis tools can call on machine learning and predictive analytics to dig deeper into customer behaviours and campaign performance. These advanced technologies allow marketing professionals to access real-time dashboards and multi-touch attribution models as standard features. This puts marketers back in the driving seat of value creation because they now have the essential tools to measure and impact ROI.
But success keeps relying on that company culture of “data first”. When we think of this culture where the bank’s people live and breathe data and work in an environment of continuous learning, what do we see daily? We see collaboration as a habit. We see data scientists, marketers, product developers, ethics specialists, and others working in perfect concert. The right DCP will be designed around these same disciplines, allowing each to contribute organically.
The bottom line
The best DCPs are bedrocks of security, guarantors of data integrity, and fountains of actionable insights. They empower banks to optimise the use of their existing resources, guiding stakeholders on how to uncover value gems within their existing infrastructure. With the right training and outside consultancy, bank employees can use DCPs to build data literacy and ensure that all-important information culture.
If the regional banking industry is to continue responding to what customers want, it must first come to terms with the new rules governing how it comes by this information. Banks can keep driving business growth and customer engagement in the region’s digital economy through the strategic, ethical use of data – supported by the right data collaboration platform that delivers data quality, security, transparency, and powerful results.
