U.S. Bank drives conversions with personalized customer experiences.

“The only way to present relevant information the customer is looking for, in the moment they’re looking for it, is to have a platform that provides predictive insights. It’s accelerated our marketing volume significantly.”

Chris Yu

Senior Vice President, Head of Owned Channel Personalization at U.S. Bank

2020 was a pivotal year for U.S. Bank — and increased customer engagement and demand for online banking services weren’t the only reasons. 2020 also marked the acceleration of an industry-wide shift away from relying on third-party cookies, with companies rethinking how they collect, use, and protect customer data.

The dual developments presented a challenge — as well as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for growth and transformation. With so many technologies evolving at once, it was the perfect time for U.S. Bank to accelerate its digital marketing efforts to meet customers’ growing expectations for personalized experiences while at the same time ensuring the safety and security of their data. But it would take buy-in from multiple departments and more than 10 lines of business across the organization.

“2020 was the point of change for us when the stakes went way up,” says Chris Yu, who led the martech team during U.S. Bank’s digital transformation and now serves as senior vice president, head of owned channel personalization. The bank needed to move quickly to establish a central customer data foundation that could unify data sources, provide actionable insight to marketers, and protect sensitive customer information.

The bank’s search led to Adobe Experience Platform, including the offer decisioning capability of Adobe Journey Optimizer and Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, which gave the ability to organize rich data sources to drive intelligent customer experiences. It also united teams across the organization, from IT and analytics to marketing, in ways they’d never worked together before.

“The explosion of engagement through our digital channels scaled demand and forced us to ask, ‘Are we ready for this kind of growth?’” said Yu. “There was a sense of urgency to invest in marketing across the enterprise, and I think it was serendipitous that we did because it enabled us to scale and set ourselves up for success.”

A single view of the customer

The journey started with a vision of orchestrating best-in-class, personalized customer experiences and digital marketing across channels by aggregating data from multiple sources into a single view of each customer. To accomplish this, the team members needed to change the way they determined which messages to present to customers, moving away from relying on business rules and instead using real-time customer data.

“It helped that we were already using Adobe products, including Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign,” says Yu. “We had a streaming pipeline we could plug into Experience Platform easily. There were native integrations, and having Adobe’s expertise in activation was extremely important.”

Real-Time CDP enabled marketing teams to centralize actionable marketing data from multiple disparate systems to provide a single view of the customer across online and offline channels. It also provided peace of mind to privacy teams by streamlining data governance to protect customer data while delivering personalization at scale.

The unified profiles in Real-Time CDP facilitated omnichannel marketing targeting digital channels, including usbank.com, the online banking portal, and the mobile app — as well as channels like the ATM fleet, banker channel interface, call centers, and Salesforce CRM. U.S. Bank could now react in real time to customers across channels and predict their needs based on their history with the bank.

“The explosion of engagement through our digital channels scaled demand and forced us to ask, ‘Are we ready for this kind of growth?’ There was a sense of urgency to invest in marketing across the enterprise, and I think it was serendipitous that we did because it enabled us to scale and set ourselves up for success.”

Chris Yu

Senior Vice President, Head of Owned Channel Personalization at U.S. Bank

Accelerating marketing volume exponentially

The team’s first experiments with Real-Time CDP started prescriptively so they could gather information and learn what worked. One early use case involved using real-time personal customer information to provide customer solutions. For example, if someone purchased home improvement materials, they could be presented with information about a home equity loan that could finance their remodeling.

The team also created audience segments for new customers so they could be served with additional offers. Customers are most likely to enroll in multiple products within the first few weeks of joining the bank, and with profile data operationalized in Real-Time CDP, U.S. Bank can engage them almost immediately.

“We cut down the time it takes to reach new customers from weeks or months to a matter of hours or days,” says Yu.

Native integrations further widened the possibilities for personalization. The team used Adobe Analytics to identify frequently visited webpages on usbank.com, such as the deposits page, routing number page, and logout page. Adobe Target then drew on the segmented audience data in Real-Time CDP to deliver personalized ads to customers who visited those pages.

“Highly trafficked pages were ripe for personalization — the Real-Time CDP ultimately gave us the opportunity to blend customers’ data with their onsite behavior to bring relevant messages forward,” said Yu.

The new system connected digital and in-person channels in new ways as branch bankers and call center reps can now see more information about customers and bring offers to their attention.

“There's no marketing team in the world that could manage all of that content and information at the individual customer level manually,” says Yu. “The only way to do it effectively and present relevant content and information that the customer is looking for, in the moment they're looking for it, is to have a platform that provides predictive insights. It’s accelerated our marketing volume significantly.”

A culture of collaboration

Implementing the new digital marketing strategy also required adoption by the bank’s 10 different business lines and internal teams such as privacy, risk, and compliance — essential partners within large financial services institutions like U.S. Bank. “We realized pretty quickly that the types of things we wanted to do needed close partnership from the risk and compliance experts in light of the changing business environment,” says Yu. “So we built the roadmap in collaboration with them.”

The most extensive and crucial cross-departmental collaboration, however, was among three key teams: marketing, technology services, and analytics.

Technology services are critical in identifying and consolidating marketing data for Real-Time CDP activation and ensuring smooth integrations across the tech stack — the foundation of enabling personalization at scale across channels. The analytics team helps architect the many datasets so they can be integrated into Real-Time CDP, and the team also tracks and analyzes the data to inform targeting and strategy.

The art of the possible

Real-Time CDP has significantly accelerated U.S. Bank’s ability to drive growth. From the end of 2022 to the end of 2023, Real-Time CDP-driven conversions grew by 19 times, and marketing impressions grew by four times, with impressions shown in the mobile app growing by five times.

The bottom-line result was a 127% increase in annual booked accounts and a proportionate increase in digitally acquired annual revenue for consumer banking.

Meanwhile, the technology services team is magnifying these impacts by focusing on reusability — which enables scaling marketing capabilities across channels and expanding personalization efforts to meet the needs of corporate, commercial, and business banking clients. The bank’s next steps also involve going deeper into customer journey orchestration, an effort that will continue to rely heavily on cross-departmental collaboration.

“We all come at things with a different lens, but ultimately we want the same things and are inspired by the art of the possible,” says Yu. “We know what these tools can do if we put them to work. We have a best-in-class stack now, and it’s really exciting.”

Learn more about U.S. Bank’s Experience Maker of the Year award in 2024, and Chris Yu’s Adobe Summit session on how to operationalize personalization at scale in financial services.

Then read up on all the ways Adobe Experience Platform supports FSI business growth through scaled personalized journeys and a commitment to data security and privacy.