What chaos would ensue if we, humans, had multiple brains? As a being, humans are complex enough as it is without throwing in the physical and emotional problems that multiple brains would create, competing with each other while interpreting signals to send electrical and chemical messages to the body.
It really doesn’t bare thinking about, and that’s one single person. Banks need to interpret signals and serve experiences for millions of customers across hundreds of propositions in tens of different channels, making multiple brains more inherently complex than ever.
So how has this happened? What are the implications for the customer and business? And what is the solution?
"Six brains are better than none!”
Most banks will rightly defend just how far they’ve moved forward in the last 20 years.They’ve continued to adapt as consumer behaviors and the MarTech landscape have rapidly evolved.
Like most sectors, they’ve invested in a whole suite of personalization tools but, more often than not, the intelligence and logic within these tools is either restricted to a certain channel/bundle of channels, or it is constrained to a certain messaging strategy. In other words, one brain to personalize experiences when it’s time to service a customer, another brain when it’s time to manage debt or resiliency, and another when it’s time to sell or market to them.
“So you’re researching how we can help you form better financial habits… Ok great, but we really think you should check out our new credit card offer!”
Your customer may move in and out of different channels, real-time contexts and life stages, but they are still one customer, and the only way to show them that you are one bank who truly knows them and can engage them on a one-to-one level, is with one, single brain.
Marketing clouds have innate challenges with single brain strategy
Marketing technology started to explode around 15 years ago as levels of personalization moved forward at pace and channels of engagement continued to proliferate. The term “omni-channel” was first coined in 2010 and a couple of years later big tech players started to rapidly invest in suites of MarTech tools, before then attempting to stitch channel capabilities together into MarTech platforms.
But at their very core they were borne out of acquisition, buying best-in-breed marketing technology products that layered intelligence into the channels using multiple philosophies of personalization, not all of them fully complementary. Huge investments (and modest advances) have been made since then in connecting the data and logic to orchestrate across these stacks.
Some marketing cloud stacks are pivoting their strategy toward something closer to a single brain – albeit still hamstrung by their own legacy of acquisition, consisting of multiple clouds creating architectural complexity and a historical strategy of investment into multiple brains creating a stick-or-twist dilemma.
What about the customer?
For some sectors this is good enough, but Financial Services presents unique challenges and opportunities. For one thing, the stakes are much higher: higher value transactions, longer-term relationships, and more lucrative and sustainable CLV opportunities to reward successful cross-selling. The very nature of a customer’s relationship with their bank means they are investing, figuratively and literally, in a long-term relationship that will help them navigate all of life’s major events, alongside an ongoing daily series of micro-moments. Brand promise is so much more important in banking because it is directly connected to trust and empathy.
Furthermore, the explosion in digital banking interactions has generated so many more moments in which to reinforce this brand promise, in turn increasing customer engagement and loyalty. Just look at mobile, where year over year increases are not slowing down. Last year was an all-time high in the UK, with 106 million new finance app downloads and 246 million hours spent on these apps.
Most industries would kill to have just a small proportion of the volume of interactions that banks have with their customers in the mobile app alone. Billions of opportunities each year to say something meaningful, but only if they can arbitrate between all of the conflicting priorities, products, and services in their business, and then pivot in real time between selling, servicing, nurturing, educating, retaining, and providing resiliency support to customers.
For some banks, the exponential growth in volume of customer interactions has led to wastefulness at exactly the wrong time. Share of wallet from non-banking Financial Services providers is increasing. Now is not the time to miss opportunities through the lack of a single and coherent personalization engine.
And what about the banks themselves?
Disconnected customer experiences and missed commercial opportunities would be more understandable if this was a simpler and more cost-efficient way of running the business.
But it’s not.
In fact, Gartner’s Marketing Technology Survey found that while the number of MarTech applications in use has continued to increase year over year, MarTech stack usage has plummeted from 58% in 2020 to 33% in 2023. In parallel with this, Forrester’s Total Economic Study into Pega Customer Decision Hub™ gathered data from 13 Pega customers and calculated that they save an average of $1.3 million on MarTech license costs every three years by adopting Pega as their single personalization brain.
And license costs are just the tip of the cost and resource iceberg. It’s true that adopting a single brain strategy requires investment, but in the mid- and long-term a single always-on brain creates a far more cost-efficient and coherent business strategy.
Instead of trying to build hundreds of pre-scripted journeys and campaigns which require ongoing resource to create rules, exceptions, and exclusion criteria, a single brain can arbitrate on all those potential experiences and journeys in any moment, always putting the customer first.
Instead of campaign-driven personalization, which caters to the short-term needs of a specific product line or business area, a single brain can balance the needs of all stakeholders with an automated always-on strategy that balances customer propensity with outcome value and uses short-term levers to boost certain experiences when it’s necessary. End of tax year? Upweight all ISA messaging by 15% across all channels for one month. Launching a new credit card? Upweight all related sales messaging by 10% for six weeks. End of stamp duty land tax? Upweight mortgage messaging for a short period. You get the idea.
With a single brain decision logic, banks can stay agile and responsive while still adopting a consistent strategy that puts the customer first and manages all their respective internal stakeholder interests.
And instead of multiple different pockets of AI and analytics capabilities, which struggle to operationalize the efforts of your data scientists and lack the transparency and auditability needed in the banking world, a single brain brings data science and marketing together to collaborate in one place; combining the best of your predictive analytics with automated machine learning at scale, all with complete responsibility and transparency.
NatWest use one single brain to power customer experiences across 37 channels and three franchises, personalizing every single customer on a one-to-one level in real time by selecting the best individual message from an omni-channel library of 6,000+ experiences. Consistency and efficiency do not come at the cost of commercial targets; NatWest attributes 60% of all retail sales in the business to this single brain.
Is “good enough” really good enough?
If it is, then there are workaround solutions which may create fewer questions to solve over the next 12 months. Unpicking the complexity of legacy is never simple.
But customers and shareholders will never be quite as happy either. In UK banking in particular, one single brain for one-to-one customer engagement is increasingly becoming table stakes.
How would you approach it if you were house hunting?
No estate agent worth their salt will tell you that the house you’re looking at cannot be everything you’re dreaming of if you’re just prepared to make a few minor amendments. Yes, admittedly it was not built with your wish-list in mind but as long as you knock through these three walls, re-wire the electricity upstairs, extend the utility room, and convert the garage, then this house can be perfect for you.
The problem is that once you move in, those “minor amendments” don’t feel so minor, and more fundamental plumbing issues reveal themselves. Time, cost, and complexity begin to spiral.
What about the house that was built for your exact requirements? From (underneath) the ground and up it was only ever built for one purpose. The house builder has specialized in catering to all the elements of your wish list for years, taking feedback from hundreds of other customers very similar to you and making continual improvements to each new build, both foundationally and functionally.
Looking forward
One centralized personalization brain will not take as long as you’ve been told, whether you’re talking about the speed of initial impact and payback or the time taken to actually scale that impact across your business.
“As soon as we plugged the brain in we saw a 40% lift in customer engagement.” (Jess Cuthbertson, Executive, Customer Decisioning & Data Science, National Australia Bank)
Forrester calculates that, on average, Pega Customer Decision Hub pays for itself in six months or less. And that’s just the start. National Australia Bank went from 0% to 75% of all customer interactions being governed by their single brain, in less than 24 months:
“We’ve got one enterprise-wide platform. We are the only game in town. If a decision needs to be made and it needs to go to the customer, it goes through the brain. Lots of different systems communicating to your customers can lead to a very fragmented and disconnected experience for the customer. It feels disconnected for them.”
When it comes to personalization, one single brain is the only way to deliver a fully scalable one-to-one experience for your customers, and the only way to stay agile and future proofed.
References:
- PegaWorld iNspire 2024: National Australia Bank keynote - Left Brain. Right Brain. Customer Brain.
- Accenture. Global Banking Consumer Study: Reignite human connections to discover hidden value
- Gartner. CMOs: Here's How to Drive Value From Martech
- Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) of Pega Customer Decision Hub
- SensorTower. State of Mobile 2025