How to achieve personalization at scale when delivering digital financial services
The following is a guest post written by Lucinda Revell from Boost Capital, a platform that enables small businesses to access financial services and learning through smartphones.
Here’s a secret that most fintech companies won’t tell you: in-person financial services have some really effective elements. This might seem a strange admission from a cofounder of a company offering digital onboarding technology for banks — but the idea that in-person financial services have some great elements is pretty central to our company philosophy.
When a bank onboards a loan or savings applicant in person at a bank branch or during a home visit, they 1) build a personal relationship with the customer, which can create customer loyalty; and 2) engage in Q&A, offer clarifications, and give assistance specific to the customer’s individual needs, enabling a tailored experience.
While recognizing those merits, we also know that it is difficult to scale in-person services. They’re time-consuming and inconvenient for customers, who have to make trips to the bank branch. Digital financial services can help achieve scale in a way in-person offerings cannot, but we need to make sure that in designing digital options, we don’t sacrifice some of the best parts of traditional financial services. This philosophy has been core to how we’ve built Boost: keep services tailored, informative, and thorough, and build the customer-provider relationship.
Here’s a real-life example: We’ve found that customers applying for a loan want to receive updates on their application status whenever there’s a pause in the onboarding process. For instance, when their pledged collateral is being evaluated, customers want a tailored, clear update. Boost’s chat-based onboarding tech has an integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, so that clients can self-check their application status at any time and get an instant answer. It’s personalized, but also scalable.
In designing Boost’s chat-based financial education offering, we applied the same principles we’d built into our financial service offerings: take the best of what’s worked offline and move it online. For financial education, in-person training also has a lot of merits: it can be personalized and adjusted to the learner, offered in local languages, and use local examples. But again, this is hard to scale from one-on-one training or even group education classes. Some organizations have tried to deliver online financial education at scale, but a major pitfall has been a reliance on non-interactive content. These examples tend to be video-based, static, and too long. Often the content doesn’t use locally relevant examples, opting for culturally generic content in order to deliver it in multiple markets. Often the subject matter is generalized, not tailored to the learner.
Even Boost made the mistake of making static, too-long content at the beginning of our growth trajectory. When we first started offering digital financial education several years ago, we started with Facebook Live learning sessions that ran 15 to 30 minutes, thinking that learners could post comments during the broadcasts to interact with the information. In one session, we responded to requests from business owners to teach them how to lower their marketing expenses by using social media ads and content more efficiently. We brought in pop star and social media influencer Sophia Kao to give advice, since she is an expert on social media strategy in local market conditions. We produced a 17-minute-long interview, broadcast through a Facebook Live session. We included an artist-signed guitar giveaway contest. We thought it would be very popular.
The average viewing time was 16 seconds. Only 10% of people stuck around for more than 30 seconds. So, clearly, that didn’t work.
Audience Retention of Boost Capital Social Media Marketing Facebook Live Broadcast
Rethinking personalization for financial education
So how do you achieve personalization at scale for financial education? We’ve previously written about how digital financial education needs to be interactive, flexible, and tailored (see Chatty chatbots vs. approachable apps for financial education), and strategically relevant and beneficial (see It’s all relative: delivering financial education when it’s strategically relevant). These conclusions came from many interviews, both with consumers of our existing digital financial education content and with those who had never even seen digital financial education. We looked at the data from our prior efforts on what had worked and what had not worked, and revamped all our content.
What works is short and sweet. We stopped our 20-minute Facebook Live learning sessions and shifted to modular, interactive chatbot sessions in Facebook Messenger and Telegram. We promoted the content with ads and sharing on Tiktok, Instagram, and Facebook and through referrals from Boost’s banking and microfinance partners.
We edited the Sophia Kao interview into an interactive module in chat. Instead of just 10% of the audience making it through 30 seconds of the original Facebook Live learning session, now 74% of people watched a 38-second clip of Sophia talking about social media posting, and then 63% answered a multiple choice question following the clip. Success!
What’s more, 19% of people made it through two entire interactive learning modules that covered the same content as the 17-minute-long Facebook Live session, and it was better! Those we engaged through chat created their own customized social media strategy, received a copy of that strategy, and answered questions to receive completion certificates that could be shared with Boost’s banking partners for expedited financial services. Those are great engagement rates and metrics by industry standards.
By creating an interactive, flexible, tailored version of the lesson with a clear incentive to finish, we increased our learner retention rate sevenfold and doubled the portion of learners that consumed the entirety of the content.
Advantages of digital education beyond scale
There are other advantages of digital education (when done right) beyond just scale. The delivery medium makes it convenient for students to learn anytime, anywhere. Students can go at their own pace and repeat modules when they don’t understand or get distracted. Some students report feeling less intimidated, since they will not be embarrassed or ashamed to repeat learning modules or get a question wrong when they’re not in a classroom. A majority (73%) of students for Boost’s education were women.
Through Boost’s project with the Strive Community Innovation Fund, in 9 months we achieved over 4,700,000 impressions of our financial education content, over 12,000 financial literacy participants, and over 131,000 data points marking participant’s learnings. Micro- and small enterprises (MSEs) especially benefited, with over 5,600 reached with business education content during the project. With the appeal and efficacy of Boost’s chat-based financial education confirmed, we’re making it a commercial product.
Importantly, Boost’s project with Strive Community didn’t just aim to prove that chat-based financial education works and scales, but also to show that integrating the data from those chat-based learning sessions can be used to de-risk and expand access to financial services. And we saw great results — all the Financial Service Providers (FSPs) working with Boost on the Strive Community project have expressed interest in integrating financial education into credit underwriting for loans. In fact, one FSP partner estimates it could expand its MSE loan book by 30% based on these changes. We anticipate that another partner could expand access to credit for 8,700 MSEs, and this FSP has also started microseeding savings accounts (in which the FSP makes small contributions to a newly established savings account) for financial education students to reward responsible saving. This shows both a financial commitment on the part of the FSP to the financial education effort, as well as a recognition that the data we’ve collected shows that when a tangible benefit to learning is included, uptake improves.
If you’re interested in hearing more about the lessons we’ve learned at Boost through our project with Strive Community about achieving personalization in financial services and education while still also achieving scale, we’re happy to talk.
About Boost Capital: Boost is a white-labeled SAAS platform that allows banks to onboard loans via chat through smartphones in five to ten minutes without an app download. Banks in Southeast Asia traditionally operate in-person via brick-and-mortar branch locations. Boost allows these Banks to launch digital via chat to compete with neobanks. This means massive new reach in customers! Boost can enable applications on 100% of the smartphones in each market, so our partners see a huge increase in new clients. Our tech has simple integrations, so we can launch a new Bank partner in two to three weeks. We’re already operating with a regional bank and a regional digital wallet, and have partners across Southeast Asia in Cambodia, Singapore, and the Philippines.
