A day’s worth of banking interactions can reveal a lot about who you are and what is important to you. Let’s take the example of a random day in your life. Say you swiped your card to buy a birthday cake for your wife in the morning; you popped by at the branch in the afternoon to see if the Man U branded credit card your son talked you into has any rewards lined up during the Europa League; and in the evening you used the app to pay your daughter’s admission fees at Harvard.

A bank that has an ear firmly to the ground can thread together all customer interaction — from ATM, branch, device, website or app — to colour in the customer’s profile, in real time. From being merely a financial adviser, the bank that listens can now participate in making a customer’s milestones possible. If your heart is set on, say, the redesigned Audi A4, you can pin a picture of the car on a personalised version of your bank’s website and set mini goals towards the big one of bringing it home.

At the same time, the bank gets to remind you next year that your wife’s birthday is approaching, to nudge you gently when the next fee tranche is due at Harvard, and celebrate your favourite football team’s successes.

Banks have always been trusted storehouses of their customers’ data. A lifelong or even multi-generation banking relationship would likely contain in its database information about the cars you prefer, the nature of your business, your choice of home, your children’s aspirations and the birthdays of everyone in the family. Banks participate in milestones in a customer’s life in a positive way. It’s what we do.

Historically, we haven’t done much more with Know Your Customer (KYC) information other than collect it to make financial transactions secure. Until a couple of years ago, this data was used to create generically segmented customer profiles on the basis of which the bank communicated with its clients.

With a renewed focus on the customer and huge improvements in data science, a bank today has the ability to create what I like to call ‘a segment of one’. We now understand with more clarity that our customers have no desire to be part of a segment or demographic — they want to be addressed at a micro-personalised level. At the same time, it helps make banking more secure.

Fraud prevention

Today, the biggest use of data comes from putting together two unconnected bits of information to deliver personalised experiences ensuring the safety and financial well-being of the customer. In one example, juxtaposing the location of your phone with the place where the merchant swiped your card can act as a fraud protection tool.

In November 2015, Emirates NBD became the first bank in the world to use real-time geo-location intelligence, called Mobile Location Confirmation (MLC). Quite simply, it alerts the bank instantly if you are in London and your card is being swiped in faraway Bangkok, for instance.

From geo-location to behaviour analysis, intuitive banking is the next logical step, through which it becomes possible, for instance, to anticipate whether you would be thinking of a home loan next or a supplementary credit card for the teen leaving for university. Using this intelligence, the bank can serve up a personalised platter of content — including relevant offers from our partners — when you next visit, online or in person.

Your financial doppelganger

Is all this information-gathering compromising privacy? The balancing act for any bank is to weigh privacy against convenience. An emerging area is taste graphs. Big data analytics work beyond the individual. By analysing data across billions of transactions worldwide, it’s possible now to use lookalikes for transaction behaviour — your financial doppelganger, if you will — to predict with a certain level of accuracy where you may want to eat next.

It saves the customer the trouble of rummaging through the 2,000-plus dining offers that we may have at any given moment, and pick from the six most relevant served on first click.

All of these uses of data help us make banking more human. In the 30-odd years that I have been a banker, the focus has visibly shifted from product to people. This thinking reflects in data gathering as well.

It may take some time to get there, but this striving for a complete picture of a customer is one of the most important future paths down which your bank is travelling. And the journey is being accomplished hand in hand with you.

-- Suvo Sarkar, Senior Executive Vice President & Group Head — Retail Banking & Wealth Management, Emirates NBD.