Maturity of customer data: N26
Gilles BianRosa is Chief Product Officer at N26. He tells Qorus and Wavestone how they utilize data in order to enhance their customer experience.
Gilles BianRosa is Chief Product Officer at N26. He tells Qorus and Wavestone how they utilize data in order to enhance their customer experience.
In your opinion, how does the use of data and the personalization of offers and paths respond to development or loyalty issues for your organization? What transformation does this evolution presuppose?
When N26 was founded in 2013, the banking industry was one that was lacking in digitization, innovation, and also personalization. N26 was designed to change this by offering 100% digital banking that was intuitive, simple, personalized and tailored to customers’ financial needs. With customer-centricity as our guiding principle, we have welcomed over 7 million customers across 24 markets to date.
Personalization takes many forms in our product, including:
• A range of free and paid premium subscription tiers offering different types of features and benefits
• The ability to create fully personalized Spaces subaccounts, each with their own savings targets and timelines
• Features that let the customer program automatic rules to set aside money, that help make money management and saving both effortless and automatic
• Functionality that makes it possible to control one’s security and account settings in-app at any time, to set and adjust limits to withdrawals, card usage, overseas spending and more.
Personalization allows us to give customers both the control and the freedom to bank their way, which results in improved rates of satisfaction, engagement and adoption.
What types of data are your personalization use cases based on? How do you enrich them?
While N26, like all other digital banks, turns to user insights and data to inform product design, we approach personalization in a much broader sense. Instead of trying to gear feature development around particular use cases, we aim to make sure that personalization is built directly into each feature we are launching – so that a customer can easily personalize new functionalities and apply these to their own needs and habits. One great example is our Shared Spaces subaccounts. These work similar to a joint account, with less of the hassle. They can be opened and closed quickly, without the fuss or commitment, and can be shared with up to 10 people. Our goal was to create a feature that would allow people to share money easily with loved ones. We built in savings targets, transaction histories, and the ability to name and choose an icon for each Shared Space created – allowing any customer to decide how to make the feature work for them, whether they are flatmates sharing housing expenses, a couple saving for their first home, or friends going on a holiday or contributing to a wedding present together.
Which data use cases are you particularly proud of? On which customer/employee situation? What are the expected/measured ROI elements?
At N26, our goal is to make sure that every improvement in our product encourages customers to use their N26 account more and more as their primary bank account. As such, we put customers in control of the use case, and focus on building personalization and flexibility into the product itself, rather than focusing on specific use cases from a product development perspective. While adoption is of course an important measure, our real end goal is to increase the frequency where customers transact with N26, or within the N26 banking environment. One great example of this is our Income Sorter feature, which allows customers to automatically organize their salaries or other large incoming transfers across their Spaces subaccounts. Some customers use this simply to save a fixed percentage of their income per month. Others use it to put money aside for multiple purposes at once, from household expenses for their shared flat, to saving for a holiday, wedding, or car, to investment purposes. Whatever the use case, the product was created so that customers could be in full control of this. Success from our perspective, is knowing that just four months after launch, we’ve seen customers set €95 million aside with the feature – for use cases of their own choosing.
What are the main obstacles and/or key success factors you are facing in their development and/or deployment?
As is the case with many fast-growing companies, our biggest challenge is in prioritizing the right products and features in development so that we are able to deploy limited resources to drive the greatest impact with customers. This is another driving force behind why we are focusing a lot of our development efforts on features that offer customers that level of personalization, rather than focusing solely on a finite set of use cases with the resources we have.
More generally, what is your view of your organization's maturity with regard to the personalization of paths and offers? For example, is it ahead of the game or at the state of the art? What are the possible projects that still need to be carried out?
Innovations with the potential to redefine sectors, such as personalization, are known for never being considered concluded, as there is always room for further improvements and new ways of application.
We are constantly working on more advanced ways to analyze and use the data to increase personalization in our processes, however, we believe that we are at a mature stage at the moment with our current applications.
Is there anything else you would like to highlight?
We are building a bank the world loves to use. A key focus in unlocking this mission is on increasing customer engagement and satisfaction, which we achieve by listening to our customers’ needs and demands and offering market-leading products.
Personalization and user data analysis have already been a dominant trend in the fintech market over the past 2-3 years, but we expect an even stronger presence in the future across product offerings and conceptualization, communicating with and gaining new customers, and the improvement of the customer experience.
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