Banking on personalisation: TSB Bank CMO on delivering more magic than misery for customers – and 300% home loans boost

TSB Bank CMO Emma Springham with the mutual bank's Tiny the Elephant mascot
Personalised product rates, piping micro-segmentation into owned and paid channels for more effective and personalised messaging, making marketing as much about service as advertising and better consent management are all part of TSB CMO, Emma Springham’s plan to improve customer outcomes at the mutual bank. Having been hit with multi-million-dollar fines by the UK’s financial regulatory body for historically lacking suitable systems to address customers falling into arrears, plus confronted by more rigorous UK consumer duty laws cracking down on financial services players, you could argue there are hefty regulatory reasons why TSB should do so. But Springham views the new laws as an enabler that’s further supporting her proactive, cross-functional and data-driven approach. The aim is to provide more “magical” than “miserable” customer experiences by highlighting and prompting around personalised benefits, she says, improving money confidence and taking the anxiety out of increasingly complex products during a cost-of-living crisis. Plus, it helps the results are coming down the line already, including a 300 per cent home loan sales boost in one month.
What you need to know:
- TSB Bank is two years into a tech-enabled project to bring personalisation and data-driven marketing to life.
- Supported by personalised product rates and micro segmentation, the work saw TSB's marketing team deliver a 300 per cent increase in home loan sales in the first month of going live.
- The key is to get customers to opt-in to that personalisation.
- With the UK introducing more rigorous Consumer Duty laws for financial services providers, the regulatory impetus to provide better customer outcomes is higher than ever for banks like TSB. But building internal buyin for data-driven personalisation requires education, training staff in good data hygiene, and bringing along the critical functions of compliance, legal and product on the journey from the get-go, according to TSB’s CMO.
- The CMO’s work is also an exercise in challenging internal mindsets about the role of marketing and is proving how blurred the line today is between marketing and service.
TSB Bank CMO, Emma Springham, calls it delivering “magical or miserable moments” – and she’s well aware injecting personalisation into a customer’s journey with the bank can result in both.
The UK-based mutual savings bank, which has 5 million customers and over 5,000 employees, has been investing in both its marketing technology and data platforms over the last two years to improve customer outcomes through personalisation. It’s not just affecting what’s traditionally seen as ‘marketing’, but also service, financial education and product utilisation.
The payoffs of personalisation are obvious when it’s done right, says Springham. Recently, a piece of work on overdrafts identified a set of customers who didn’t have direct debits set up, affecting their credit score when they were not paying on time.
“We served a banner [to these customers] and saw a 44 per cent uplift in the first week,” Springham tells Mi3 on a recent visit to Sydney.
But personalisation of messaging without personalisation of product can equally result in miserable experiences. Which is why one of the earliest things Springham did after getting her marketing tech and data ducks in order was work with TSB’s product team on personalised home loan rates.
“Without a personalised product rate, and working with the credit scoring teams, compliance and legal, there’s no point in me doing personalised content,” she says. “We started with loans, because that’s our highest income product, and I wanted to be able to show a return on investment.”
TSB chalked up a 300 per cent increase in sales from personalising home loan offers in the first month. “If I served you a banner that just said here’s a home loan, then you go through and get declined, you’re going to be really miserable,” Springham comments.
“I call that a miserable customer experience. Now I’m serving you personalised banners and 98 per cent of our customers are accepted if they go through the process. It’s more relevant and means they’re more likely to get accepted… it makes it a much more magical experience for them. It’s all about getting it right for that customer.
“We’ve now done mortgages and we’re starting to turn our attention to overdrafts as well, getting those personalised rates out there.”
I want to be able to prompt to say, you’ve made four transactions this month, if you make one more, we’re going to put five pounds in your account. I almost see it like us being a Fitbit watch: How do I get people obsessed with the steps they’re taking to get that money confidence and financial health?
Proving marketing is more than advertising
The tech catalyst for TSB’s rethink on customer outcomes is on-boarding Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) for customer data centralisation and Adobe Experience Manager for executing data-driven, personalised content and campaigns across channels. A market catalyst, meanwhile, is the UK’s recently rejigged Consumer Duty Law, which kicked into effect in 2023 and include a new Consumer Principle requiring firms ‘to act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers’.
The third trigger is arguably a brand and marketing one: Improving the customer journey and experience with the bank by better product utilisation and money confidence, thereby improving trust and engagement.
“If I take mortgages for example, it’s a very stressful process. So what prompts and data can I use to support that customer?” Springham asks. “Not knowing where your application is at is one of those points. The more I can inform and engage the customer, we find their anxiety levels are much lower. It’s how I can be helpful and really prompt the customer. So if they’re in the mobile app and that’s their preferred channel, how can I give them those personalised prompts to let them know?”
Springham points to about 2,000 micro segments a day now running against these nuanced use cases, going well beyond traditional life stage or behavioural segmentation banks traditionally employed to segment customers. As well as first-party data sets, TSB applying lookalike modelling as well as external data sources like Zoopla to ascertain new mortgage intent.
Running in complement is a cross-channel consent management strategy. Springham has kicked off what she describes as her biggest project to ensure TSB has a business-wide culture of collecting “really good data when we’re talking to a customer, whether that be in branch or over the telephone”. To this end, she’s instigated a big education piece with branch staff on the vision being taking and benefits to the customer.
“I need consent to serve those personalised banners, so it’s really thinking about where we put that into the journey and how we give customers a good reason to give their opt-in consent,” Springham says.
There are plenty of research reports locally and globally indicating consumers are less and less keen to share personal data. One of the latest is the sixth iteration of Dentsu’s Data Consciousness Project, which revealed 87 per cent of the 3,300 Australians surveyed would like to be able to take control of the data they generate and choose who they share it with. What’s more, 83 per cent want to be able to refuse to share their personal data with any organisation while still receiving the same level of service, up from 75 per cent in 2022.
“Customers are opting out more and more because they feel like lots of companies are trying to just collect their data. But I do think banking has an opportunity to be the one they do opt into,” agrees Springham. “But to do that, we need to show them the benefits of what we’re doing with personalisation, so we can guide them.”
With banking propositions becoming more complex, prompting customers about the fact they might qualify for a cashback offer if they make five transactions in a month is one such benefit Springham cites.
“I want to be able to prompt to say, you’ve made four transactions this month, if you make one more, we’re going to put five pounds in your account,” she says. “I almost see it like us being a Fitbit watch: How do I get people obsessed with the steps they’re taking to get that money confidence and financial health?”
Then there are money worries in and of themselves. Recent TSB research shows only one in five people are willing to talk about their money anxieties, yet 44 per cent of the bank’s mortgage book is now potentially vulnerable. Personalised data is one way of identifying and proactively engaging those customers who might start missing mortgage payments but bury their heads in the sands in confronting their challenges.
“There’s an education piece we need to fulfil,” Springham says. “Often they don’t talk about it to their family, and it’s a secret. They have all this stress on their shoulders without realising that actually, we can help them.
“To me, personalisation is about the power of the data and how I can use that to prompt the customer to actually make a difference or improve their money confidence. If they stop paying their mortgage as an example: At the moment, they don’t tell us, the research tells us that. But I can use data to create a prompt so I can get someone to proactively reach out to that customer and say, can we help you? Then they can ask them to come in and do a health check, and start talking to you, rather than leaving it to the customer who has their head buried in the sand.”
Fraud response lines
Another area in Springham’s sights is fraud. “I’m having conversations internally with different teams and compliance on whether that is service, or is that marketing? These are big conversations where we’re trying to challenge thinking. What I’m saying is if I can’t message the customer, then I can’t help them. So there’s a lot of work going on to work out the difference between marketing today and helping a customer with a service prompt as well.”
It's an uphill battle for a marketer, Springham admits: “TSB is quite conservative, so they’ve always been on the line that everything is service ‘until you prove to me Emma, it’s not’”.
“That’s where fraud is quite a good angle for me to go in on – protecting customers. We’ve got that through as a service message rather than marketing.”
A conservative view of AI – and marketing
Webchat is another one of those blurring of functional lines – and also where TSB’s growing adoption of gen AI comes into the frame. Upon rolling out a new website using AEM earlier last year, the bank introduced Gen AI-based webchat, with human oversight. Currently, agents get three options of what the answer to a query might be there choose which to apply.
“Customers still know they have that human touch if they want it, which does differentiate us from some of the challenger banks in the UK, like Monzo. We make it very clear if you want to speak to a human as well,” Springham says. “I don’t think I’ll remove human touch and review anytime soon. Even with webchat, it makes me feel we’re in a much safer environment as we’re making our way through, so long as I’ve got human intervention and a human pressing that button.”
Through all of these efforts, internal marketing to the compliance and legal teams about the value of harnessing data and personalisation has been critical.
“People forget about engaging them really early. But then you get further through the project and they’re like, what is this personalisation and data? And they get scared of the word ‘data’,” Springham comments. “But take our new website last year: That took us to another level of accessibility, which is a great thing for our customers and something teams can take back to the board.
“It’s the same with product teams: They see this increase in our results, and they’re going to board saying personalisation is working. So it’s not just my voice and it’s trusted by others. Because as a CMO, I’m going to say personalisation is the right thing – to me, it’s a no-brainer. Taking a step back, even as a customer, I think it’s the way everything is going. We can see it in our research: 71 per cent of customers expect personalisation, 79 per cent got frustrated when it wasn’t there.”
What's next
Springham’s next earmarked job is connecting Adobe platforms with TSB’s Sprinklr social media management platform to enable more personalisation in social marketing and messaging, owned and paid.
“We know we can sell through the channel, we’ve proven it, but they are still blanket offers,” she explains. “We started with savings and current accounts, so very safe products, rather than loans, where the customer could apply. Yet they could end up miserable at the end of it. That’s where I’m focusing next.
“Social is my cheapest channel, but again it’s about serving that right message at the right time and how I can use the data behind it.”
Springham’s ultimate brand ambition is cutting through via differentiated personalisation. “With onboarding journeys, how do I create a personalised journey that no other bank has ever created? How can I do something really different and brave that gets us noticed and gets us picked up again? Using Adobe technology, I want to do things really differently. I don’t want to follow on a bit further down the line.”