‘Safe’ digital marketing innovation for the financial sector

Last month Starling Bank was the latest ‘challenger’ bank to be licensed in the United Kingdom, following other online-only institutions like Atom Bank and Tandem. These lean and innovative providers are aggressively confronting the incumbents like Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC and the Royal Bank of Scotland.  

Starling founder Anne Boden reflects the philosophy of these challengers in her blog 'We are united by our values and beliefs that technology and innovation can improve your financial health and relief from financial anxiety is a human need that the banking industry has exploited for its own benefit for too long.'

The banking sector across the UK, US and closer to home in New Zealand and Australia are re-examining how they take their offerings to market in this context. They have to respond to the disruptive forces in their sector.

For digital marketers in the sector, whether in incumbents or disruptors, there are particular challenges.

Digital marketing across industries has become synonymous with speed. Using powerful, cost-effective tools to deploy online campaigns quickly and reduce reliance on expensive, pitched-battle traditional advertising campaigns.

In the financial sector, marketers understand the opportunity and want to respond. However, marketers from banks and other financial institutions understand more than any other industry how crucially important trust is with their customers, and can’t be risked.

The real challenge is not simply about implementing digital marketing projects quickly, which is relatively straightforward, it is about changing the way a bank does things so they can continuously execute more quickly without creating unnecessary risks.

At SilverStripe we have grappled with this tension in our financial sector engagements. From this experience we have developed a set of eight principles that help increase the speed while managing risk with a bank’s digital marketing:

1. Customer-led: moving from personas to people
2. Data-driven: using the rich customer information any bank has
3. Tech-enabled: being ready to deliver digital projects
4. Distributed authority: trusting your people to innovate and deliver
5. Responsiveness: being prepared to disrupt yourself
6. Showing leadership: management understanding the challenge and stepping up
7. New capability: introducing the right mix of new skills and experience
8. Achieving managed risk: achieving a continuous quality process.

To find out more about the eight principles, and for more ways of how you can safely increase the pace of your digital marketing, download our eBook—Banking on disruption.