AI and the Future of Banking

CHAPTER 6AI and the Importance of Brand in Banking

SUMMARY

At face value, this chapter might be more appropriate to a book on marketing rather than AI. It's an easy mistake to make. As the development of AI occurs to a point where banking is increasingly automated, customers will interact through self-help capabilities and robotic ‘chatbots’, and products and services will be customised.

The need for hyper-customerisation is unlikely to be achieved other than through advanced and cognitive analytics and through AI. The chapter will consider some of the specific expectations of Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z customers in terms of both banking and brand.

The differences between competing banks will get smaller and smaller. Perhaps the only difference will be the qualities of the technologies used, and in many cases the back office of the bank may be using the same tech as their competitors.

What then might differentiate one bank from another? The clunkiness of the banking app will affect user experience, but this is arguably a superficial element of the entire value chain. What might distinguish one bank from another is quite simply that of brand, and more specifically how the brand is perceived by the user base.

This section will consider what is meant by ‘brand’ in the context of banking, the specific impact that branding has on Millennial and post-Millennial customers, and the linkage of both to AI.

It also suggests that banks potentially have a much greater part to play in the lifecycle ...