EXECUTIVES of UnionBank of the Philippines said they are putting premium on data science and artificial intelligence (AI) as they saw response rates to cross-selling financial products doubling through its implementation of “hyper personalization” initiatives for both consumers and corporate clients.
During the Singapore Fintech Festival, UnionBank Head of Data Science Solutions Julie Anne C. Dela Cruz said “hyper-personalization” allows the bank to offer financial solutions that are specific to the needs of its clients, helping it improve customer experience.
“So far it’s actually improved our cross selling. In terms of response rates, for products wherein we are able to implement next best offer models, we actually saw our response rates double. So that way, it really improved the revenues and as well as the process because we are able to find customers in a scalable manner and implement it across our customer base,” Dela Cruz said.
She said UnionBank uses data processing solutions to pinpoint the specific needs of its customers—both consumers and corporate. This enables the bank to cross-sell products like bancassurance and drive more revenues to the group.
“Another example for personalization is, actually, understanding our customers in a personalized way. For us, it’s important to close the loop with the customers,” UnionBank Head of AI and Innovation Center for Excellence Adrienne G. Heinrich said.
Heinrich explained that UnionBank uses customer feedback, processing unstructured text messages and forms to create report files for resolution and implementation of better processes and solutions.
“So what we’re doing there is we’re using natural language processing to automatically analyze all these tags and do it in such a way that we understand which customer group has which concerns and feels very happy about which experiences so that we can also understand what has high impact,” she said.
Through AI, UnionBank is now able to process feedback from “weeks to minutes.”
Moving forward, UnionBank intends to maximize the potential of AI and big data to create a frictionless customer experience, the executives said.
“We want to push this innovation beyond what we can do today. We have long term teams, we are exploring more of some of these use cases and opportunities—which means fail fast. We will learn from that. That is a conscious decision,” Heinrich said.