Head of global innovation
TD Bank Group
Getting good at personalization — in other words, being able to give customers useful recommendations or warnings in a timely manner using real-time information — has been a Holy Grail for banks for the past several years. Under Imran Khan’s leadership, TD Bank Group seems to be making progress.
One example of an insight Khan, who is head of innovation at the $1.9 trillion-asset Toronto bank, has spearheaded is the ability to predict a customer’s future balance in a way that could help them.
Many banks can provide an alert when, say, an account balance drops below $100.
“What we said was, everybody has varying needs and different ways that they look at their balance,” Khan said. “So for one customer, a balance dipping under a hundred dollars may not even matter. They just manage things to the penny and they’re not worried about that. But for somebody else, if it dips below a thousand dollars, that might be a cause for worry. So there isn’t really that one size fits all.”
His team uses artificial intelligence to predict the customer’s balance and then look at the customer’s historical patterns to determine if this is something they should be worried about based on what is going to happen in the next couple of weeks.
“We are able to help the customer understand that there might be a default, for example, in a bill payment or credit card payment,” Khan said. “But it’s fine tuned to that individual customer, because some customers might have credit card bills that get to the tens of thousands, whereas others might only go into the hundreds.”
Rather than alarm customers that they might not be able to pay an upcoming bill, TD offers customers a preview of coming bills based on what the AI predicts and what customers have scheduled, then gives them options to help them pay it.
Personalization has been launched in the branches so that staff can also make well-informed suggestions, in a manner consistent with the digital channels.
TD Bank Group has also been experimenting with having a presence in the metaverse. It recently used it in the onboarding of interns.
“We got fantastic feedback,” Khan said. “They saw us as a really innovative organization and they’re very active on social media, so it helped tell our story. And it helped them build networks across North America.” The bank is also testing the use of training in the metaverse.
TD Bank runs a platform called iD8 through which TD Bank staff have submitted nearly 63,000 ideas since 2019, and 6,350 of these ideas have been executed. — Penny Crosman
Source: americanbanker.com
