M&T Bank is focusing on first-party data as a way to personalize the interactions it has with its customers.
“A lot has been written about the ‘death of the cookie,’ ” said Chris O’Brien, vice president of marketing technology strategy at the Buffalo, New York, bank. “How do we get good at leveraging first-party data and using that within digital-media strategies, rather than relying on more legacy approaches that utilize cookies?”
The “death” of third-party cookies refers to the fact that privacy laws and updates to user-tracking capabilities are making it more difficult to target customers, says ActionIQ, a customer experience and data firm.
M&T’s efforts are one example of a regional bank trying to get ahead of such changes as it improves its digital-marketing messages and interactions with customers online and offline. Small and regional banks tend to struggle in four areas when it comes to harnessing their data to understand, and market to, their customers, said Kevin Miologos, a managing principal at Capco: collecting and tagging data, porting it securely to a database, crunching the numbers to understand the needs of customers, and delivering the data to customer-facing employees and through web and mobile applications to customers.
But the investment is worthwhile because “you can cross-sell, you can become a primary relationship, you can deepen existing relationships, direct customers toward high-margin products and follow customers through their life-event-driven needs,” he said. “That’s huge.”
Mary Kate Loftus, head of digital banking at the $155.1 billion-asset M&T, defines “personalized experience” as an applied understanding of what is happening in a customer’s life. To get to this point, banks must stitch together diverse data sets — including transactions, website activity and more — to figure out what stage of life customers are in and how the bank can tailor messaging to them whether in written communications, in the contact center or in the branch.
For example, if a customer begins a search for a mortgage online, then goes to a branch to discuss, an optimal personalization strategy would ensure the bank could follow up and close the loop on any additional questions once the customer left.
“Our customers expect us to know them and show them we know them,” said O’Brien.
M&T started working with ActionIQ, which has a handful of other financial institutions as clients, in late 2021. The bank’s goals are to combine multiple sources of data and create profiles of both customers and noncustomers, then redesign digital-media campaigns that rely more heavily on first-party data. More broadly, M&T wants to use everything it knows about its customers to create more meaningful interactions whether they take place in person, over the phone or digitally.
Approximately three-quarters of the people who visit M&T’s website are logging in, meaning first-party data is prevalent. O’Brien points out that data from cookies is fleeting, and the anonymity does not provide a full picture of who the user is. Consumers are also wary of how their data is collected and used by cookies.
Tamara Gruzbarg, vice president of strategic services at ActionIQ, said the company’s first task is to “collect signals,” or consolidate customer data, including account information and account behavior, customer demographics, website behaviors and email responses.
M&T anticipates the first use cases will go live in the second quarter. The bank will start with customer targeting, suppressions and look-alike modeling in paid media. A simple example of suppressions — in other words, determining what types of messages should not reach customers — is not showing a customer an ad on Facebook for an M&T checking account shortly after they’ve already signed up for a checking account.
“Today it is manual and labor-intensive to do that with our current stack,” said O’Brien. “We are looking forward to bringing more automation and doing these things at more scale.”
