Building a thriving brand in financial services can be quite challenging. This is especially true if your brand provides services similar to those of companies like JP Morgan, Charles Schwab, Cash App, and Robinhood. The competition can be tough, yet it’s not impossible to overcome it and carve a niche for your brand. The following insights cover the latest strategies and technologies for financial brands to scale their operations and ultimately increase revenue.
1. Market Insights
Whether you plan on going public someday or your company is already listed in a stock index, keeping track of what is happening in the finance sector is important. Market tracking tools like TradingView help business executives and owners monitor the stock, bond, and crypto markets, as well as keep track of economic events that impact the business world.
While TradingView mainly gives access to the price charts of currency pairs, stocks, bonds, and stock indices like the S&P 500, business news services like CNBC and Reuters will be useful for expert insights on market reports and regulations.
Enterprise software like IBM Watson can also generate key financial insights for your brand. Rather than spending more time perusing volumes of insurance products, audits, and actuarial and client information, analytics tools like the IBM Watson can get you the information you need in less time.
2. Marketing
The finance sector is rife with competition. Staying ahead of the game requires keeping up with trends and leveraging them for growth. There was a time when Venmo and PayPal were the go-to fintech for online transfers, but Cash App came along and converted a significant share of the market.
Cash App targeted its marketing to Gen Zs and millennials, the biggest internet users, pushing its way to become the biggest online payment app in the US. The company combined influencer and podcast marketing to connect with its audience where they were most likely to be: social media.
Fintech marketing requires combining traditional and out-of-the-box strategies to reach your target customers. Right now, the most effective marketing trends for business brands include referral, affiliate, or influencer marketing, partnerships, content marketing, and search engine optimization.
3. Artificial Intelligence
Generative AI took the world by storm in 2022. Now, it is a buzzword everywhere, and the finance sector is not excluded in its reach, because, AI and machine learning have paved the way for smarter financial tools like robo-advisors.
Robo-advisors are trading bots programmed to trade the financial markets with risk-adjustable settings, a tool that is perfect for beginners with no prior exposure to investing. Robo-advisor assets under management (AUM) are expected to increase to roughly $2.3 trillion among 34 million users by year-end 2027.
Some financial brands use sophisticated algorithms to generate customized investing portfolios based on their risk tolerance and financial objectives. Others use cognitive computing technologies and big data trends to create the best investing plan for each person after analyzing the user’s historical performance or questionnaire responses.
Integrating AI into your product or service may be as simple as creating a data-driven, AI-generated summary of user activity or using an AI chatbot already trained on all relevant data and information related to your business to provide customer service support.
More recently, AI agents have gradually gained popularity as agentic artificial intelligence aims to provide more possibilities than generative AI. For example, AXA Switzerland, a global insurance company, uses AI agents for fraud detection to identify claims with unusual billing patterns or suspicious activity.
4. Blockchain
Users want nothing to do with transfer processing delays, and the latest technology solving this is smart contracts. Smart contracts are blockchain systems that allow transactions to be processed instantly. Banks use smart contracts to strengthen their operations globally, especially when the mission is to scale cross-border sales, like transaction processing, securities lending, and stock exchanges.
One of the best examples of blockchain in action in the finance world is the development of Komgo, the world’s first blockchain-based platform for the commodity trade ecosystem. Komgo uses blockchain to serve as a transparent system, allowing traders, carriers, banks, and other stakeholders to securely transact in a highly efficient and digitized way. Within a year of its operation, Komgo has supported close to one billion USD in financing and is adding new members at a rapid rate.
The speed of claims processing is one of the most important factors users consider when choosing an insurer. For insurtech firms, Etherisc, using blockchain to automate and speed up claims is a strategic way to reach 100 million users by 2030.
Blockchain provides security, quicker data transfer, and lower transaction costs for fintech innovation apps, which are the top reasons for upcoming financial brands to adopt the technology.
5. Gamification
Gamification is rapidly expanding to online financial platforms in paytech, insurtech, wealthtech, and other fintechs. If improving customer engagement is a top priority for your brand, incorporating game elements like scorecards or awards can get the results you’re looking for. These games help people keep track of their spending and reward them for making wise financial industry choices.
Acorns is one of the financial brands that is already integrating gaming into finance. Acorns is a personal finance app that invests users’ spare change from debit or credit card purchases into exchange-traded funds. Since its initial operations in 2012, it has gathered over 8.2 million customers, aggregating about $2 billion in investments on the platform.
Flourish Savings, another financial brand in the gamification business, pitches its service by offering users rewards for saving. By making saving feel enjoyable, these brands are not only locking in on brand loyalty but also on consistent revenue.
Key Steps To Build a Smarter Financial Brand
Building a smarter financial brand requires a mix of different things. As a brand owner or business executive, keeping track of news and company insights is non-negotiable. Additionally, looking into new technologies like AI that can help you scale your brand is a worthy venture every business owner should opt in for regularly.
To read more content like this, explore The Brand Hopper
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