Personalization is the key to people’s hearts: A new Bain report shows that people want their primary bank to use their data to tailor banking experiences – and that they’ll be more loyal customers if it happens. 

Highly personalized banking experiences win people over and stop them from churning to other financial providers, according to a new report from Bain, which surveyed 30,000 consumers.  

Nailing personalization is a multi-step, tech-infused process:  

Banks need to be able to understand and anticipate a customer’s needs, engage at the right time with the right content, and measure outcomes so that personalization can improve over time.  

For many banks, the biggest challenge is breaking through their own silos to scale the necessary capabilities and technology across their org, according to Bain partner Maureen Burns.  

“The best personalization utilizes all of a customer’s interactions across products so that at each touchpoint, the bank is providing the content or offer that the customer will most value,” she told Distilled.  “New capabilities, including generative AI for language and images, accelerate the possibilities and expectations. Traditional customer engagement has largely been based on single-campaign ROI’s with some loose processes to negotiate across different products. This transformation is the biggest challenge to banks providing personalization at scale.” 

As Distilled has covered before, banks are finding creative ways to use automation, artificial intelligence, and even quantum computing to personalize their offerings for clients. Bain’s study shows that getting those experiments right is crucial for customer loyalty.  

The report’s findings align with a proof-point from Bank of America, which just announced that over 10 million clients have used its personalized banking platform, Life Plan.