Forget about staying ahead of the curve — if the 2024 business strategy for your financial institution doesn't include a roadmap for increasing AI adoption, you’re likely falling behind your peers.
That business insight goes beyond the buzz surrounding AI. It’s grounded in two things: what Southeast Asia’s (SEA) customers want, and the rapid pace of AI adoption by brands in the region.
Consumers today expect financial institutions to help them respond swiftly to market fluctuations so they can continuously grow their wealth. And they’re willing to explore multiple service providers to meet this need.
In Singapore, for instance, search interest in banks like UOB, Standard Chartered Bank, and CIMB rose 10% year over year. But for the same period, search interest in fintechs fell by 38%.1 The divergence reflects customers’ shifting brand preferences in an increasingly competitive industry, and that’s where AI comes in.
With AI-powered solutions, financial institutions like yours can keep up with customers’ changing needs and financial behaviours at speed and scale efficiently. And as our research on AI adoption among the region’s top advertisers shows, there’s still headroom for financial institutions to deepen their use of AI.
So here are two strategies for your financial institution to supercharge business growth with AI.
1. Chart your AI adoption roadmap to stay on the cutting-edge
Our team at Google has developed an assessment framework to help brands measure how mature they are in the adoption of AI-powered marketing solutions across the marketing funnel. Known as the Google AI in Ads adoption score, it shows whether a brand is experimenting, widely adopting, or deeply invested in custom AI ad solutions.
Based on the adoption score framework in SEA, when we compare cross-industry adoption as of January 2024, we find that the finance sector lags behind ride-hailing by 33%, e-commerce by 30%, retail by 21%, and travel by 11%.
Within the finance industry, fintechs lag behind traditional banks and insurers in overall Google AI Ads adoption, with the AI adoption score for banks and insurers being 1.4X that of fintechs as of January 2024.2 And even among banks, which are in the lead overall, there is a disparity — the adoption score of the five most AI-mature banks beats the average adoption score of financial institutions by 2X or more.3
Whether you’re a traditional bank or fintech, evaluating where you stand against your competitors will help you chart how much more your brand needs to mature in terms of AI adoption, and build a long-term AI-powered marketing plan with clear milestones.
2. Stand out, stay ahead with full-funnel, AI-powered marketing
Charting your AI adoption roadmap is just the beginning. To unlock profitable growth and remain competitive, you’ll need to understand which AI-powered solutions to adopt across the marketing funnel and how to maximise their impact.
Here are two AI-powered solutions that can fuel your business growth by driving valuable acquisition and reducing customer churn.
Acquire customers sustainably with Demand Gen
Given customers’ evolving brand preferences and willingness to switch providers, financial institutions that are mature AI adopters are looking beyond lead generation solutions to AI-powered upper-funnel solutions that drive valuable acquisition. In fact, the adoption rate of the latter type of solution by mature AI adopters is 5X that of those who are less mature.4
One such solution is Demand Gen. Powered by Google AI, it lets you optimise your ad creatives to be most relevant and engaging to customers across the purchase journey, so that you can drive acquisitions sustainably. The solution can also be paired with other ad campaigns to further maximise impact across the funnel.
For instance, the digital direct-to-consumer insurer Acko General Insurance added Demand Gen to its Search and Performance Max campaigns to improve consideration and acquire high-quality leads.
With Demand Gen, Acko was also able to customise its creative assets to maximise reach and engagement across YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Discover, and Gmail. And it further combined its first-party data with Google signals to create Lookalike segments and connect with people who were most likely to convert.
The result: a 15% increase in cross-channel leads and a 26% reduction in account-level cost per acquisition.
Re-engage lapsed users with App Campaigns for engagement
Engaging your customers on apps is a critical way to drive growth by catering to the region’s rising demand for finance apps. The challenge, however, is that it’s common for users to switch between multiple apps. In Indonesia, for instance, across the top five lending apps on average, the rate of users activating the app as compared with the rate of users installing it on a monthly basis dropped by seven percentage points year over year.5
AI-powered solutions like App Campaigns for engagement (ACe) can help you actively engage users and drive valuable cross-selling opportunities on your finance app. Simply provide some text, images, videos, and a starting bid and budget, and the Google AI-powered solution will design the most effective ad formats and asset combinations to re-engage your existing users.
Take India’s Groww for example. The financial service platform tapped into ACe to customise creatives for re-engaging different segments of users, based on where they’d dropped off in the marketing funnel.
The integrated cross-channel solution helped Groww drive conversions across the funnel and generate incremental value, resulting in a 24% increase in conversion rate and 44% lower customer acquisition costs.
In today’s dynamic finance landscape, AI adoption isn’t just an advantage but an imperative. By staying at the forefront of AI-powered marketing, your financial institution is well-positioned to win customers and drive sustained bottom line growth.
