Financial services brands are at a crossroads. The industry is shifting from tradition to innovation, causing many organizations to rethink the way they connect with customers. But many leaders, especially at larger organizations, are slow to respond to the rapidly evolving landscape.
The 2025 Financial Services Customer Engagement Review from Braze and Wakefield Research reveals that many financial services brands gauge the success of their customer engagement based on metrics like product adoption. When financial services leaders were asked to name the top measure of success for customer engagement, 37% said product adoption, nine points higher than average across all surveyed industries.
However, consumers care about more than just new products. They want brands they can trust, sound financial advice, and communications that make them feel seen and heard as individuals.
Product adoption is a crucial business goal for financial marketers, but not what consumers care about. Institutions may fall short of their objectives if they aren’t engaging customers on an individual level, providing the support, care, and guidance they need in an often rapidly changing economy. The brands that remain agile and meet these needs can succeed where more traditional strategies may ultimately cause brands to lose valuable customers.
The Evolving Landscape of Customer Expectations
Today’s consumers want to be treated like individuals, but their actual experiences often fall short. For many years, these frustrated customers tended to stay where they were, given the difficulties of transitioning their accounts to a new financial services brand. Customer loyalty was driven by apathy and a lack of viable alternatives.
That’s no longer the case. Fintech startups have removed many of the barriers that kept consumers locked where they were. Simply download an app, fill in a few details, and you’re all set to deposit your paycheck or start making purchases on your credit card. The result? Unsatisfied customers can quickly and simply leave for a better financial experience.
Loyalty is eroding especially in younger generations. More than half of Millennials and Gen Z consumers are willing to switch banks, in part due to impersonal services. Across generations, consumers believe banks should be working for their unique financial success. More than 75% of consumers are likely to switch banks if they find an alternative brand that meets their specific needs.
Brands have been slow to adapt to the new reality. When Braze surveyed marketing leaders across the financial sector, only 29% ranked retention as a key marker of customer engagement success.
The brands that double down on efforts to retain customers through engagement and personalized experiences stand to win on two fronts–retaining more customers while attracting consumers dissatisfied with their current banking experience.
Bridging the Divide Between Brands and Customers
Financial services marketers have a wealth of data on their customers. However, raw data does not necessarily equate to “knowing your customers.” Braze found that 66% of financial services leaders believe they are mostly or completely confident in their understanding of customer sentiment and preferences related to their brand. Many even believe third-party data, which offers only a small window into customer motivations, is an adequate way of understanding intent.
But whether brands are leveraging their data to engage customers is another question, and customers tell a different story. More than 90% of consumers seek financial advice from sources other than their banks. Additionally, only 33% of consumers feel that their bank does enough to support their financial needs.
Meeting the Exact Needs of Modern Consumers
Financial brands risk falling behind in the eyes of their customers. Modern consumers expect robust personalization, engagement strategies that prioritize their unique needs, and communications tailored to their preferences.
New fintech startups are making inroads by investing strategically in engagement and personalization, enabling marketers to meet customers with the right message on their preferred platform, with content and messaging that resonates on an individual level.
As Erin Bankaitis, Director, Financial Services Industry Marketing at Braze, notes, “Fintechs are setting the bar on engagement and personalization, and the longer legacy institutions wait to catch up, the greater the risk they’ll be left behind. Customers are already expecting this level of tailored experience—and soon, it won’t be a differentiator, it’ll be the baseline.”
Journeys Based on Customers, Not Products
Financial decisions are emotional and deeply personal. While institutions can convey strength and reliability, they may find it challenging to connect with customers on an emotional level. One way to begin is by building a customer journey that demonstrates an understanding of customer needs, preferences, and behaviors, delivering the right message at the right time. This involves leveraging customer data to interpret digital signals and crafting a narrative based on customer interactions.
Brands often send marketing messages that are focused on the actions they want customers to take. However, tailoring messages to individuals—ones that emphasize the next best interaction, not necessarily the next best action—can demonstrate a more careful attention to their unique needs. None of this is achievable at a personal level without the right technology to power personalized engagement strategies. Marketers will need to conduct a thoughtful inventory of their tech stack and prioritize the technology that can facilitate real-world emotional connections.
How Brands Can Evolve Their Customer Engagement Strategies
Only 41% of financial institutions personalize messages based on real-time engagement, the lowest of all industries surveyed by Braze for the 2025 Global Customer Engagement Review. Transitioning to a more customer-centric marketing strategy—one that offers messaging based on customer browsing, clicks, and views—could help brands meet short-term goals while improving valuable Net Promoter Score metrics. To achieve this, financial institutions should read and act upon digital body language–or how customers reveal their true selves to brands online–sending messages that matter and surfacing products aligned with customers’ goals or life stages.
A young professional living in New York City has different financial incentives than a parent concerned about sending their middle school children off to college soon. Both customers are likely communicating their financial aspirations to their financial institutions.
For instance, the young professional may be saving for a trip to Paris with friends, while the parents want advice on how to save for college tuition. With the right technology and lifecycle strategy, marketers can interpret each customer’s body language, assess their needs, and send personalized marketing messages that drive action.
The Next Generation of Customer-Centricity
Artificial intelligence can help marketers advance to the next level of 1:1 personalization. Given the vast amount of data legacy financial services brands possess, marketers can quickly integrate AI decisioning into their lifecycle campaigns. AI decisioning acts as the brain that sits atop a brand’s tech stack, learning how to personalize every aspect of a campaign based on individualized profiles that AI builds, analyzes, and learns from. This allows marketers to scale personalization across millions of customers, data points, messages, and interactions.
When starting with AI decisioning, brands select a business metric they want the model to maximize. The model then begins experimenting with the right message, channel, offer, timing, and more. Through this experimentation, the model learns and helps guide customers through a journey that maximizes that business metric.
One large North American bank used AI decisioning to optimize business credit card referrals. By customizing every aspect of the campaign to customers based on unique customer profiles, the organization increased the campaign’s conversion rate by 92% compared to the traditional approach.
Financial Services Marketing Made Personal
As retention becomes an increasing focus in this new environment, finserv marketers can build a foundation of customer-centricity across the lifecycle. By adopting new customer engagement strategies and state-of-the-art marketing technology, marketers can leverage the data and customer knowledge they have to deepen relationships and increase customer lifetime value.
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