A journey towards human-centric and AI-augmented marketing?

We are in the midst, or perhaps even the beginning, of transforming how banking relationships are being built and developed over time. At Handelsbanken, we took the first steps in digitisation in the 1960s. We were early to introduce Internet banking to customers in the 1990s and have, like the financial market at large, focused on digitalisation in recent decades. The activities that could previously only be done at a branch are becoming more and more accessible via digital channels, processes are being automated, yet there is still more to be done. This paper will demonstrate how a 150-year-old bank, which closed its marketing function in the 1970s and has essentially grown mainly through word of mouth, might approach using AI in marketing. In the discussion, the paper draws on previous experiences of introducing AI in other domains within the bank, performed by the Digitalisation and Innovation team in collaboration with other parts of the organisation. As always, the introduction of new technology, including in marketing and sales, starts with business principles, data, ethics, company purpose and values, rather than with the technology itself. It is still early days for the bank when it comes to AI in marketing, and until there is such a thing as attentive algorithms, humans will be very much involved in the process — especially if the aim is to continue being human-centric in our approach, where the outcome of an activity is beneficial for customers, the bank and society at large. And the meaning of ‘customer-centric’ needs to be defined as making the system work with the customer at the centre: cross-channel, relevant, timely and based on in-depth customer understanding. The paper will show that the rationale for closing the bank’s marketing function back in the 1970s might not be so different from the rationale to do things differently today.