Banking

Modern Banking: Anticipate, Educate & Advise to Cultivate Customers for Life

5 mins read
April 9, 2019
By
Total Expert

Although consumers can find just about anything they need with a simple Google search, seventy-eight percent of retail bank customers still prefer to receive financial guidance from their local branch. Yet, the reality is only twenty-eight percent of Americans are receiving the advice they so desperately desire.

The financial services sector has started its shift back from a transaction-focused model to the customer-centric model of the good old days. In the new era of humanized marketing, technology plays a huge role in the daily interactions financial services professionals have with their database.

Don’t worry, technology won’t replace the relationship manager (loan officer, personal banker, etc.), but a relationship manager who is leveraging technology to add real value will replace the one who is not. That’s because there’s still one thing technology can’t replace: the value that comes from having a trusted advisor to guide and protect your customers’ financial future.

Let’s take a look at the three strategies today’s financial services professionals need to adopt to achieve lasting success in the world of modern financial services.

Anticipate

What will make your brand stand out? Anticipating the needs of their customers.

With the right technology in place, relationship managers can leverage customer-specific data from their Marketing Operating System (MOS) to deploy personalized communications at a local level via relationship managers. This messaging should be based around life events, such as when a customer opens a new account, applies for a car loan or has a baby.

When customers feel like you truly value them and know what’s happening in their life – and provide advice based on this information – relationship managers can build a foundation of trust to turn a one-time transaction into a lifelong advisory relationship.

Ensuring your customer-facing teams are empowered to send the right message to the right person at the right time, sets apart organizations who anticipate their customers’ needs from those who actually proactively act on this information.

Many financial services organizations engage with customers in their own business line silos – for example, the mortgage team doesn’t know how the wealth management team is engaging with the same customers. This means the organization fails to fully know this customer, their life stage and applicable products and services to meet their evolving needs. Thus the bank’s engagement with this customer feels clunky and the customer has a poor experience – and in today’s market, a lackluster customer experience is not an option.

Educate

Today’s consumer craves knowledge and information, making education-centric content and engagement around various financial products to help them achieve their life goals (buying their dream home, opening a business, etc.) very important.

It’s critical to turn your database insights into action. If you know your customers well enough to be able to anticipate their needs, but never proactively reach out to consult with them about their financial future, you are missing the mark.

The phrase “one-size-fits-all” can be true in a lot of scenarios. But when it comes to educating customers on what’s best for them based on their personal life events, one size certainly does not fit all.

This is where your relationship managers come in. Your customers are looking to you to tell them what products and services they need to be financially secure now and in the future.

Despite the push towards digitization and online banking, studies show that consumers still want advice from their bank. Forty-one percent of consumers are looking for investment-related advice and thirty-nine percent are seeking retirement-related advice.

What’s more? Eighty-nine percent of consumers who did receive financial advice found it valuable. This presents a huge opportunity to fill this gap, expand customer relationships and grow the bottom line.

Advise

Among consumers who receive financial advice, eighty-nine percent of them become repeat customers. Customers don’t just want this advice from a professional – they value it. Once you’ve anticipated your customers’ needs and educated them on their options around one life event, it’s critical to continue to advise them into the future.

Consumers engage in financial transactions or buy various financial products to coincide with their life events – and many are dependent on relationship managers to break down complex financial transactions and advise them around the best decisions for them and their families. By continually delivering information specific to their evolving life events, you become the trusted advisor they turn to again and again.

Anticipating, educating and advising your customers is cyclical – and nearly impossible without leveraging an MOS that houses powerful customer data combined with robust intelligent automation.

Conclusion

The modern consumer will be won or lost based on how well your organization anticipates, educates and advises them around the intersection of their current life events and complex financial transactions to meet their evolving needs.

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Navigating the HPPA Shift: Why It’s a Win for Lenders Who Put Customers First

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Change is the one constant in financial services, but the way we respond to it separates the leaders from the pack. The newly signed Homebuyer Privacy Protection Act (HPPA)—taking effect in March 2026—is a shift in how lenders can access and use consumer credit data. However, while some may view this as another regulatory headache, the reality is far more encouraging: it’s an opportunity to raise the bar on trust, transparency, and customer experience.  It’s another validation of our “Customer for Life” strategy.

This isn’t about dodging restrictions. It’s about recognizing that the playbook for winning customers is evolving—and those who embrace that evolution will come out stronger.

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Under the HPPA, credit bureaus can no longer sell a consumer’s credit file unless the lender meets one of a few narrow conditions:

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For lenders who have long relied on trigger leads, this represents a fundamental shift. But for institutions that have invested in building relationships the right way, this is good news.

What this means for lenders

The HPPA shuts the door on spray-and-pray solicitation tactics. But it opens the door wider for lenders who want to compete on trust and relationship strength. Specifically, it creates new opportunities to:

  • Deepen existing customer relationships with proactive, personalized engagement.
  • Capture consent earlier in the journey, before borrowers get lost in a flood of noise.
  • Differentiate in a less crowded, more consumer-friendly marketplace where trust is a true competitive advantage.

The lenders who lean in here will win—not because they shouted the loudest, but because they earned the right to stay connected.

Why this isn’t just another regulatory headache

Consumers have been saying it for years: the barrage of calls, texts, and emails after a mortgage application is exhausting. Some borrowers receive 100+ solicitations within 24 hours. That doesn’t build confidence—it erodes it. And we know this is not how our TE customers run their business.

HPPA represents a rare alignment of regulators, consumer advocates, and lenders themselves. It clears away predatory noise, improves the homebuying experience, and rewards lenders who put relationships at the center of their strategy.

As our Founder & CEO Joe Welu often reminds us, “Trust is the currency of modern financial services.” This law is an accelerant for lenders who understand that principle.

How we're going to help you thrive in a post-HPPA world

We’re not sitting on the sidelines waiting to see how this plays out. Our platform was purpose-built to help lenders engage customers in a way that’s personal, compliant, and built to last. Here’s how we’re making sure you’re ready for March 2026:

  • Proactive guidance: Our mortgage and tech experts are already helping lenders adjust monitoring practices, so they stay compliant without losing momentum.
  • Expand Customer Intelligence: We’re finalizing new capabilities to drive increased awareness and enrichment of your relationships, including expanding CI to all three bureaus, and streamlining our credit improvement alert.
  • Investments in consent: Upgraded features coming soon to capture and respect consumer consent in clear, frictionless ways—including through our ecosystem partnerships.

This isn’t a band-aid or a reaction; it’s an evolution of how modern lenders build sustainable engagement to develop customers for life.

Bottom line: this isn’t a roadblock—it’s an opportunity

Every regulatory change comes with friction. But HPPA isn’t just about compliance—it’s about clarity. It’s about stripping away noise and giving lenders who prioritize relationships a stage to shine.

The lenders who thrive in this new environment won’t be the ones chasing trigger leads. They’ll be the ones investing in trusted, personalized engagement—from first touch through every financial milestone.

And that’s exactly what Total Expert was built to help you do: navigate the shifts, build lifelong trust, and continue winning customers for life.

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AI has surged from curious novelty to critical business driver faster than any other technology in the digital age. With AI capabilities evolving faster than most financial institutions (FIs) and marketing teams can train for, it’s easy to understand how leveraging AI tools and enterprise solutions effectively can become a frustrating experience for both leadership and marketing pros.

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Here are three foundational elements to help marketing leaders accelerate AI-enabled customer engagement without losing control of authentic, on-brand customer experiences.

Focus on using AI to scale—not replace—your team

The AI revolution arrives with ironic timing for FIs: We’ve spent the last decade talking about how to bring back the human touch in a digital-first world. On the surface, it’s easy to think that AI will push us in the opposite direction—breeding more generic, cold, impersonal experiences.

But like other tech tools, the most immediate and significant value will come in using AI as a tool to scale your team’s capabilities. What does that look like in practice?

  • Automating or offloading the tedious and repetitive work your team does: Think about AI agents cold-calling for lead gen, doing time-consuming data analysis, or handling the orchestration of complicated, multi-touch, multi-channel, anything-but-linear customer journeys.
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Choose the right AI—and connect it to your core systems

Not even three years after ChatGPT opened this AI era, there are thousands of AI tools on the market—including hundreds of marketing-specific AI solutions. Don’t be fooled by the “they’re all the same under the hood” line—the packaging is critical to the usability and time-to-value with these tools, especially when it comes to delivering authentic experiences.

It’s really a classic Goldilocks problem: On one side of the spectrum, the big-name generalist AI platforms that claim to do everything produce generic experiences for your customers. They’re not built for the highly regulated, highly sensitive kinds of engagement and conversations that FIs have with their customers. Plus, it takes a lot of work—and time and money—to get them to work like you need them to.

On the other side of the spectrum are hyper-specialized AI apps built to do one very specific task right out of the box—but lacking the broader capabilities to connect with your core systems and orchestrate entire experiences. This kind of extremely focused functionality ends up creating maddening experiences for customers when they hit the limitations of the tools’ knowledge and capabilities. FIs need AI tools built with enterprise-grade, enterprise-wide capabilities—able to tie into your marketing system of record so they can see and orchestrate the full customer journey.

If you can solve that Goldilocks problem — finding an AI solution built for financial services and connecting it at the core of your CX — you can realize the full efficiencies and, more importantly, deliver a more genuine, helpful, brand-authentic experience.

Give your AI the inputs that set it up for success

Using GenAI to create content — copy, design, video, etc. — really can feel like magic. But the reality is that it’s inherently derivative. In other words, the outputs are only as good as the inputs — like the classic analytics adage: garbage in, garbage out.

If you want to maintain brand authenticity, create reliably compliant outputs, and deliver consistent experiences that feel seamless for your customers, you need to help the AI fully understands your brand, your engagement strategy, and your acute and big-picture objectives.

Best practices for prompt engineering is an article—or an entire book—in itself. But the point is, as incredible as AI is, it’s still a tool — and a tool requires a skilled, intentional user. Cultivating these skills also takes intention. Workers in any role can feel naturally hesitant to be open about their AI use and experimentation; they don’t want to risk looking lazy or replaceable. But to move forward effectively with AI, FIs need to build a culture that encourages that experimentation and sharing of new use cases and best practices.

AI as an engine for authenticity

There’s little doubt that AI will lead to a surge in impersonal, generic banking experiences. That’s not a condemnation of AI; it will be the result of FIs using generic AI tools and generic AI strategies.

That also means that genuine, personalized experiences will become even more differentiated in this incredibly competitive industry. The key is to focus on how to use AI to amplify what we’ve always strived to do in this industry: make real connections and build authentic relationships based on trust.

By focusing on these three principles — using AI to help your team focus on scaling human connections, choosing the right tool and integrating it deeply, and giving your AI the best possible inputs — you’re building a strategy that makes AI an engine for authenticity. The reward isn't just increased efficiency; it's the ability to deliver authentic, brand-consistent experiences at a scale never before possible.

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