Data-driven financial products became a goldmine in this brave new digital world. Based on customer data insights, banks personalize their services and offers to create unique user experiences and gain market differentiation. While promising opportunities for business growth, financial products also have a weak spot – cybersecurity. In 2020, a data breach in the financial industry cost on average $5.9 million forcing some financial players to go bankrupt.

Given that, the main question now is how to develop a data-driven solution with the utmost business value and at the same time robust financial data protection. In other words, how to find that equal balance between personalization and privacy.

On 20th of May, Holland Fintech had a chance to join the panel discussion with the tech experts Roman Pavlyuk, VP of Technology at Intellias, Remco Jorna, Chief Technology Officer at FintechOS, and Roderick Simons, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Yolt to address that challenge and know typical traps and pitfalls. The hosts shared their experience in building financial products that allow for personalization and are secure by design.

Topic discussed and key points addressed:

Intellias is a trusted technology partner to financial services providers, offering a spectrum of consultancy, engineering, operations, and technology services. Over the past 19 years, we helped banking and FinTech leaders in Germany, the Netherlands, the US, and the UK deploy innovative customer-facing solutions and modernize their technical infrastructure.

Roman Pavlyuk, VP of Technology at Intellias: Most companies nowadays lack transparency in their policies. It is not only about the agreement and the consent on the website, but also the individual contract to specify how deeply they go into people’s personal life. In addition, the model’s algorithm might be inefficient if it has to deal with too many different sources of data that depend on a customer’s decision on how much they want to share. Some of them do not want to share any data, while others allow you to go as deeply as you can. At the same time, our goal as technology leaders is to enable the maximum level of personalisation for both groups respecting their privacy. We want businesses to engage with customers as much as possible, involving gamification, making it like an investment for them, such that if they give us their data, they are going to get benefits in return. When it comes to use of the data gathered from social media, that will be the main factor for decision making in the future. However, what we see on social media doesn’t necessarily reflect how customers behave and what they experience in real life. Therefore, we have to be cautious about these data since they can lead to a wrong assessment and as a result, wrong decision.

FintechOS is dedicated to building industry platforms and low-code frameworks that empower organizations to create truly personalized customer journeys in weeks, not months. The company is driving a paradigm shift in how banks, financial services and insurance companies engage with their customers.

Remco Jorna, Chief Technology Officer at FintechOS: The challenge for fintech companies is that most fintech transactions are one-and-done decisions. Thus, it is really difficult to engage with customers afterwards. Customer journey is so important that we have to take good care of it, especially the transition stage from prospects to customers. What we have to do is combine the information of the target group and the available data in our system, try out A/B testing, experimentation and present the captured data to customers and allow them to get an analysis themselves. It is not an easy process because for global companies, the model is not the same for all geographies. For example, you can’t apply the same learning for a model in the Netherlands and a model in Romania.

Yolt was born from ING Bank N.V. which means the company has both the strength and stability of a bank and agility as a future-forward fintech. Yolt builds a trustworthy and flexible app from the ground up, giving everyone the power to be smart with their money.

Roderick Simons, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Yolt: Data is a commodity. You need more than data combining different pieces such as personalization, which is about time and relevancy. The responses and feedback from people are very important to us because they are responsible for what we provide them. Therefore, we do experimentation on the website to test the impact of different messages from different ways of communication, different time of the day to send out the message, and even color scheme as well. The central part to focus on now for personalization is behavioral data. The shift in people’s behaviors gives us feedback, helps us build our models and improves our products. Once the model is completely built, it’s time to translate it into a real moment and push the message.

In case you missed this insightful event, watch the recording below: