[Music] [Christopher Young] All right. Good afternoon, everybody. I think we're going to get started.

My name is Christopher Young. I am the director of industry strategy for financial services. I did some math this morning and I found out like this my 10th summit presentation of this nature. So, no. Don't applause for that. I wasn't asking for that. But 10. But how many of you is-- Raise your hand, by the way, loosen the shoulders. I'm going to ask for a lot of hand raising. So, raise your hand if this your first session with me.

That's a lot. Welcome. Welcome. I hope you enjoy it. I think you will.

Raise your hand if you've been in a session with me before.

Okay. Thank you for coming back. I must be doing something right. Anybody over five sessions with me of my 10? Any? The Adobe people do not count, but yes. Thank you. Owen, Corby. I see you. I've been seeing you. So let's just jump right in. The session that we have today is operationalizing personalization at scale. And for those of you that have been in sessions with me before what you'll realize is that we are blessed with an incredible financial services community, and incredible speakers that are willing to present on our behalf, and there is no difference this year. So joining us from both U.S. Bank and BlackRock are both Chris and Nil, and they will follow me as I just provide some just initial perspective to get us started.

Why I called the session operationalizing personalization at scale, and a lot of the topics that I like getting into is the how. Because it's not just technology. It's a bit more than that, isn't it? So this session isn't going to be like Target did this and analytics did this. It's going to be more of like, okay, what was the broader strategy of these companies? What are they trying to accomplish from a digital transformation perspective? How did they do it, from technology to people to process? These are the things that I'm really interested in because these are the things that hold us back as an industry. So let's talk about some of the experience trends in financial services. First, you've been seeing a lot of things on main stage. The time is now. Technology has cut up and it's time for us to finally deliver. Why? 70% of customers expect anybody they interact with has their full context. And we're seeing banks globally saying, hey, we're losing our customers to competitors because of our experience. Second to that is now organic growth. Many of you have gone through acquisitions and grown the size of your company by acquiring smaller or like size companies, but now it's time to prove the value of your companies and their ability to attract net new customers, and organic growth is now similar or comparable to relationship development and deepening relationships, which is something that's very common in financial services as a priority. By show of hands, again, keep the shoulders loose. Show of hands, how many of you consider yourselves a B2B company? B2B marketing? Yes. So it's been a long way to get here, but the time is now here for you as well. Like, we're seeing a surge, obviously, two to 3X the investment is going into B2B Fintech companies versus B2C. So the disruption is coming. And 94% of buyers, as you see, would prefer to work with companies that continuously evolve and improve their digital capabilities. And by show of hands, how many of you are marketers? You're being asked to do more with less. So there's cost pressure for you to make all of these things happen. So I wish you all the best. No, I'm kidding. So when we think about organizational priorities, let's go to our recent 2024 Digital Trends survey. This hasn't changed much over the years. And we do this survey annually, and I think it's been a few years where I get to insert my own questions. I think I get, like, five dedicated questions. So these are all financial services providers, and the top organizational priority is the customer. But specifically, offering meaningful digital interactions that improve their financial health and well-being. The idea here is that digital has traditionally been transactional in nature, but now if they're going to be interacting with you more and more or exclusively, say, through a mobile device, the guidance, the advice, the type of things that you want to help them do, make smarter decisions with their money, has to take place in that digital channel. So that's what that means. Everything else seems pretty standard. Modernizing experiences to attract younger generations, accelerating time to market, deflecting, getting people to stay within their channel of preference and not get into something that's more expensive like a call center. The only data point that really moved the needle was the 37%. It moved 5% points from last year. So selling more online to compete with digital entrants.

But what did change is how the responders tend to go about doing. How are they going to do this? And the starting point is innovate with AI. So again, we've done this survey for several years. AI wasn't even in the top four. A lot of it was like digital offerings, digital channels. Now it's one. So there's a reason why we're talking this morning around AI and supercharging experiences, and AI in the in the age of experiences in digital marketing. It's here. Time is now. But the second thing I want to point out that were kind of hinting at before is the evolution of the agile organization or agile Organizational Evolution. To me, these are like the one, two combo of all of the things that we want to do digitally, but having yourselves organized in a way to actually do it. So I'm going touch on two of these things. I'd be remiss not getting into some of the GenAI data points, so let's get into a few of them just for context. But this how financial services responders are intending to use generative AI. Their areas of focus, top four. One, as you could assume, personalization of content based on interest and preferences. If you skipped it to the 29 and the 28%, the automation of audiences and segmentation and targeting and the automation of content creation. These are the things that were talking about this morning in the main stage. But the conversations I've been having, the second one is significant. The use of chatbots, in many cases, for service. There's a lot of times where use cases where chatbots are used to enable agents and advisors to be more effective by letting them query all of the internal information, helping them speed up in terms of, like, understanding the business, their role, especially if they're new.

So what is the status? Where are most responders? Most of them, 33%, are implementing initial solutions, plans, and projects. So they're in the process of initiating. Some of them have a solution in place and they're evaluating its effectiveness.

Only a small percent have no formal strategy. So by show of hands, how many of you have initial generative AI pilots in place? I can't tell a lot of different color shirts and the hands are blending in. So let's call it like 40, 45% of the folks in this room. So similarly. I might be overestimating it.

But this slide here in particular is okay. In financial services, for us to accelerate and springboard a lot of these net new things that we're trying to do with content creation and data and personalization, we have to take the initial step of creating that foundation. So that foundation, in this particular case, that involves the policies for ethical use, the basic understanding, developing and implementing and governing frameworks, advancing the skill sets of SaaS, a lot of times, you can't jump into just using it right away, especially in a regulated industry like ours without establishing that foundation. So we've got to basically, eat our vegetables before we go right to dessert.

So let's get into the second aspect of it, which I think is going to kind of get us into a lot of the discussions with U.S. Bank and BlackRock that are coming up, which is the organizational aspect of it.

So first and foremost, this like a directional sense of where we see financial services in terms of maturity. The lines are kind of like the spectrum and from low to high, and the boxes are in the middle. First of all, can we give ourselves a round of applause as an industry of the progress that we've made and how like we're right in the middle of the park. Give ourselves a round of applause, put your cellphones for a second. We've made progress. We've made a lot of progress and it shows. So we're right there with Telco. We'll get you T mobile. So we're right there. But the idea here is like, this what we're trying to do together as a community. This why I bring speakers and our excellent exceptional customers to have these types of discussions to move us forward as an industry in terms of maturity. And the reality is barriers to advancing this not technical. This what I was hinting at before. Sometimes it's the way that the folks within our companies are individually focused. I'm responsible for paid media, I send emails, I'm responsible for public facing website merchandising. It's very difficult to align individuals with that specific focus. And then also how you operate in many cases in terms of you're a large matrix organization, there are a lot of eyes that need to see things, you're highly risk averse, there's legal and compliance involved. So this slows us down naturally.

So let's get into some of the key challenges here and what you have to overcome. So this what I was hinting at before. The CMO is pressured to do more with less, and then we're also seeing trends, in terms of marketing adoption from 2020 at 58% go down. So you're bringing in more and more technology, but in many cases it's sitting on the shelf. Why? It's the second point, is that in many cases, you are not organizationally structured or aligned to deliver on the end to end journeys that the technology you brought in is designed to do. And the number one response, if you see like where challenges, sorry, where executives are stating challenges, the top one at 84% is the alignment of incentives. Are the folks that are all part of those different channels and touch points aligned in the same objectives in terms of what they're trying to accomplish? Think about it. If not, also going to be difficult. If I send out emails and I can be independently successful in terms of what I do, in terms of open rates and click through rates and engagement, aside from the paid media folks, that's going to be difficult for us to work together in an end to end journey.

So we see three building blocks that need to be established to start progressing kind of the organizational maturity. One, do you have the right level of executive leadership at the C level? Chief digital officer, chief marketing officer, and are they backed by cross functional executives that make up the different components of what that journey is going to be? Could be a digital owner, it could be a channel owner, it could be business units. Do you have a dedicated center of excellence that runs a program designed to advanced personalization? Is there such a thing? And does that center of excellence enable scaled execution? So ultimately, I'll show you another slide in one minute. Here's what we mean by scaled execution. I'll skip ahead. It's a safe place here, by the way. So show of hands, how many consider ourselves low personalization maturity? Show of hands. And don't judge them. Don't you dare judge these. Okay. Good. Yeah. So in many cases it's department driven, you might have pockets of individuals doing some things. But a lot of the large enterprise customers that we work with are in the centralized capabilities. We have analytics teams, we have teams responsible for audiences and segmentation and the website.

But then they're migrating to centers of excellence. Teams that bring together date digital capabilities again to then either execute or then ultimately provision. And what I mean by that is this center of excellence, when you get started, is extremely valuable. Because it has all of the talent and expertise to do things on behalf of the broader entity, the broader enterprise, but ultimately, it doesn't scale. So there's a migration point where the center of excellence moves from execution to governance and federation, and this where a lot of our customers are trying to go. How do I take all of the goodness that we've done within the center of excellence and bring it to thousand? Different business units, different global regions, an enterprise of excellence. So how many of you, by show of hands, aspire to have a federated model of how digital technology gets used? A center of excellence that then distributes and scales out to individuals they can use. Not many. All right. So let's just drop that topic. We'll just stick with center of excellence. Okay? But you should aspire. Okay. Anyway, so my last slide before we bring in our customer speakers is like, okay, what are things that you can do to get from one place to the other? The first from a decentralized model, it's just we boil it down to ensure that your center of excellence has a clear charter in terms of what it is it's going to do. And then the second part is have the right technology in place that will service the enterprise and all the various use cases that you're trying to accomplish, and then third, get the skills to manage it. So that's how you go from the decentralized to the centralized. How you go from the centralized to the federated has all to do with alignment. Do all of the folks that are going to use this technology have common incentives in terms of what they're trying to do? Am I communicating the strategy? Like the thing that we heard, you have to do that repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly. Here's what we're trying to do, here's how we're going to do it. And then also around establishing measurement and criteria to ensure all of the things that are happening across the enterprise are driving consumer outcomes and business impact.

So that's at least our perspective of what's happening with generative AI and financial services, then also kind of our perspective on where large enterprises want to be in terms of organizational structure, and then federating digital capabilities. So with that, I think I've spoken enough. Let's give a warm round of applause for our first customer speaker, Christopher Yu of U.S. Bank.

[Christopher Yu] Thank you, Chris, for that introduction, and thanks to everybody here, for coming out and joining me and Neel for what I hope will be an entertaining and also informative discussion today.

So, I'm going to take you through a recounting of our transformation journey at U.S. Bank.

And when I think about what that journey entailed, the word that springs to mind when I try to sum up everything that we did in the last seven years since I've been at the bank is adaptability. Meaning, we had to go through an enormous amount of change, whether that change with resilience, and continue progress in a consistent direction rather than being pushed sideways or in directions that didn't make sense.

And I think you'll see what I mean by adaptability when I start to take you through kind of the growth curve. When I first started in 2017, I was what my boss described as a one man band for digital strategy, which probably should have been a warning to me about what I was getting into at the time.

And I was parachuted into a brand new next best action program, marketing program at the bank, which had just been stood up and was not knocking anybody's shoes off when it came to the volume or velocity of marketing that it was producing. And there were a couple of conditions for that, behind that. Number one was that our marketing technology stack at the time was owned by a number of different business lines. So that made it a little bit harder for us to actually integrate our capabilities and orchestrate them elegantly. As a result of that, our digital marketing was not regarded by the leaders of our business, by our product heads as a major generator of value for the bank. It wasn't regarded as the main path to revenue creation.

Fast forward a couple of years, to 2020, 2021, and our digital transformation team had grown. Our next best action program had accelerated significantly, and our capabilities were more integrated and scaled. And at that time we began actually looking ahead beyond operational exigencies to think about the strategy that we had to put in place long term. And we started really thinking about the use of Adobe Experience Platform real time CDP as a potential cornerstone of our personalization strategy. And you may be asking why were you looking at a customer data platform as a foundation for driving your strategy for personalization? Well, some of you may remember that at the beginning of 2020, Google made the announcement that they were not going to support third party cookies in Chrome much longer, and there was this little thing called the COVID 19 pandemic, which broke out at that time and radically changed the way that a lot of our customers looked at digital banking and the way that it works.

So fast forward again a couple of years to 2022 to 2024, and our digital transformation team has grown yet again, our next best action program has accelerated yet again. Our marketing platforms, and the technology stack in general, that sports marketing is now centrally owned by marketing. We've rolled out AEP across all of our business lines and across all of our customer facing touch points, and digital marketing, I'm grateful to say, truly is regarded by the heads of our business as a major driver of growth, and it's part of our CMO's kind of, four point plan for driving growth over the next three years.

So a lot of changes happened, a lot of changes in the organization of the company, a lot of changes in the way that marketing was regarded, a lot of changes to our capabilities. And how did we know that were making progress all that time, and that weren't backsliding at any point? Well, we stuck to a consistent digital north star, as it were, for what we were trying to deliver. And in a catchphrase, were really trying to move from a one size fits all approach to marketing to something closer to one to one personalization. And that's very difficult to achieve, but I think, as a team and as an organization, we adhered to a set of principles which we were consistent with. And those are principles that had to be implemented not only operationally, but they required a kind of change of mentality in terms of the way that were approaching marketing. So first was to try to shift from a very product centric approach to marketing to a more behavioral and customer centric approach to marketing. And that's a learning curve that we're still climbing every day, but it's been enabled very much by a lot of the real time functionality that's built into AEP. We've had to move from a static rules based approach to offer ranking to an increasingly experimental approach to the use of predictive models. And that's where, looking at the horizon of Gen AI is beginning to, encroach on the picture and it's beginning to become a real opportunity for us.

We've moved from a very channel specific approach to execution, to what I like to think of as a channel less approach to execution. Meaning that we are always striving to bring the same level of personalization to all of our customer interactions regardless of the touch point. And you can hear from the other rooms cheering that they really agree with that principle. So I'm going to regard that as the central driver of growth for our strategy.

We've also moved from a very kind of fragmented and decentralized approach to data privacy and how we govern the data that we've brought into AEP to a still somewhat fragmented, but I would say more integrated approach, where we're beginning to centralize a lot of the controls and a lot of the capabilities for delivering governance over customer data and information. And we've moved from very predefined customer journeys to a much more dynamic and adaptive approach to customer journeys in which we can revise those journeys on the fly as the customer makes decisions about what is the right message to respond to or the right touch point to engage with the bank.

So how do we continue to stay true to that digital north star, as we work through really a multiyear process of rolling out our personalization strategy and engine? Well, there may be many different ways that companies scale that mountain. For us, we started at the beginning with trying to identify the use cases that would really move the needle for us when it came to personalization.

Then we decided, okay, once we've defined those use cases and what's going to move the needle, we have to find the right engine in order to deliver the personalization features that we want to deliver to customers.

Having selected the tool, we need to think about the data architecture. How do we lay a strong foundation of data so that we're bringing in the right customer insights to drive personalization at scale across the enterprise? And having laid the foundation of data, then we need to rapidly scale the actual activation of that data with our customers across the different touch points with which we interact with customers.

And how do we do that? Well, we need to remain agile. We need to remain responsive to the imperatives of the business, and that means iterating and optimizing in agile and changing the way that we fundamentally work with each other. And at a certain point, exactly as Chris had pointed out, that begs the question not only of execution but of governance. And that means bringing together our key stakeholders, our key teams, our key people under one unifying operational model.

So let's go back to the starting point. What were the use cases that we decided to select to begin our personalization journey, and why did we select them? There was a lot of debate around that at the beginning, and we knew that we wanted to test with a variety of different products. And at the end of the day, I think the principle that we ultimately landed on was that we needed to really pay attention to what were the key activation signals that were going to be meaningful to delivering personalization to our customers at scale. And so we started, for example, with thinking about accessing the first party customer ID when a customer was first onboarding with the bank. And we realized that with AEP, we had the opportunity to set things up in such a way that we could access that customer ID at a faster cadence than we could with our legacy marketing systems. And that meant reaching our customer within the first 30 days of their relationship with the bank when there's a greater opportunity to deepen the relationship early on. Another example would be looking at our real time clickstream data and using that data essentially to identify the customers who had signaled their intent by starting a product application but not completing it. So very classical digital retargeting.

A third opportunity for us was looking at credit card and debit card transactions and recognizing that when a customer made a large purchase, in combination with other information we knew about that customer, that might signal a propensity to actually consider a lending offer that might help them defray some of those expenses. And lastly, we wanted to be able to test bringing in third party lead data from a partner that would enable us to identify customers who had approved a signal that they were shopping for a financial product with a competitor to be shared back with U.S. Bank so that we could actually, essentially make a bid for the customers attention and present an offer of our own, which would compete with the offers that they were seeing with competitors.

So we identified the use cases that we felt would be meaningful when it came to driving personalization, and at that point, we realized that we had to develop a strategic approach to selecting the technology itself. So we defined a framework of criteria to select out the right tool, and I'm not going to try to take you through every single criterion here and talk about the exact meaning of it. But suffice it to say that we kind of broke the criteria into our bucketed them into five major groups, and the first group was real time customer data integration and activation. So we knew that we wanted to bring the data together and assemble the profile as quickly as we could with access to real time data whenever we could use it, and also activate against that data in the same moment.

We knew that we wanted to have native modeling capabilities built into the platform so that we could apply predictive insight to all of the data and the profiles, and we knew that we wanted to deliver at the end of the day, that channel less style of customer engagement so that personalization would be consistent whenever we touch the customer.

We knew, as well, that we wanted to centralize customer information that would be more durable than what we could get from third party cookies or mobile IDs because we had to be able to continue to market to customers in a post cookie environment. And last but not least, we wanted to have internal controls built into the platform that would allow us to safeguard our customers' privacy and assure them that everything that they were doing with U.S. Bank would be trustworthy. Now, did AEP check every single box in that checklist? No, it didn't. But it checked a long enough list of the criteria that we had defined, that in conjunction with AEP's native capability to integrate with other Adobe solutions that we were using at the bank, it was a very easy choice for us to move forward with AEP ultimately as our personalization engine.

Okay. So we've selected the tool. Now comes the daunting task of bringing all the data that we need into the platform in order to enable targeting. So how did we do that? We broke that process into four stages. In the initial pilot stage, we established a kind of MVP architecture in which were connecting AEP to five essential data sources for us at U.S. Bank and bringing in the minimal data needed to assemble the profile. In our crawl phase, we started to enrich that MVP profile with additional data that we felt was fundamental to supporting the majority of use cases that we had with our retail business lines. We then moved to a full walk phase, in which we significantly enriched the customer profile with business line specific information, which allowed us to begin to really kind of support and enrich the segments, the portfolio segments and the marketing campaigns that we were supporting, on a business line to business line basis, and we were moving incrementally across our classical kind of retail banking products and our wealth management advisory services. We also devised a data set export for analytics purposes, via AEP custom destination, which was a critical requirement for several of our business lines, some of whom are here today, in order to enable kind of a full view of the customer funnel, which was important because we actually don't have CJA, and we have a lot of customized dashboards and views of value that we apply to our marketing funnels.

In our run phase, which we're executing now, we have been able to begin to kind of pivot away from the retail business lines towards focus on kind of our B2B business lines, starting with our small business segment and then moving into our mid and large size corporate banking clients. And that, I think, is a reflection of exactly the trend that Chris was capturing in the earlier research with B2B becoming increasingly important in the mix. And that enabled us to take advantage of AEP's B2B data architecture so that we could kind of gracefully handle all of the relationships that come within an account based marketing approach to dealing with buying groups.

So completing that process has meant laying the data foundation for the entire enterprise, and simultaneous to that, we've had to actually build out our capability to address all of our addressable audiences across our different touch points. So what did that look like? In our pilot phase, we started by connecting AEP for activation to paid media and to our unauthenticated web content. And we made that choice primarily because we could take advantage of native integrations built into AEP with the destinations.

In our crawl phase, we added email, which was a custom destination and required a fair amount of fine tuning to get right, along with online banking and mobile app, through AEP offer decisioning. And at that point, by the time we completed our crawl phase, we actually had all of our own digital channels attached to AEP for distribution, as well as paid media. So we had a relatively strong channel mix at that point for activating the majority of our use cases.

In our walk phase, we enriched that and added ATMs, branches, and direct mail, essentially adding our offline channels to our digital marketing channels.

And in our run phase now, we're beginning to integrate our B2B client facing portals, in order to build out the B2B business cases.

All of that progress and pursuit of the digital North Star would not have been possible if we didn't exhibit some agility within the team and the ability to coordinate across our teams. Fortunately for U.S. Bank, Agile doesn't actually look like that in practice. There's a lot of detail contained in this slide, and I'm not going to try to replicate every single step. The real point of this slide is to say that the process begins at the beginning with ideation. It goes all the way through the waterfall, as it's illustrated here, which is an antithetical term to agile, but that's what it looks like on paper, to the measurement and optimization phase, and then it begins again because it leads directly back into the development and ideation phase. And that is the actual practice for us. I've been very proud of our team that, over the last couple of years, I think we've become relatively fluent in building and optimizing in increments, and in continual increments. And that has meant that our team has been able to actually build, test, and release continually on any day of the week, any week of the month, as opposed to many other U.S. Bank teams which have to release to a specific window.

But you can only get so far by being small and scrappy. So in addition to being agile and executing from a bottoms up perspective, we've also executed from a top down perspective. And this exactly the kind of maturity to get to the point of a governed approach and a scalable approach that Chris was talking about. So at the very top, we have the strategy and governance layer, which is defined by our executive sponsor, our chief administrative officer, who reports to our CEO, and that is carried down through to a steering committee, which is chaired by our chief marketing officer, and which brings together the executive leadership from across the bank, from different business lines, in order to enable execution overall. And that strategy and governance function kind of oversees then a program management office, which is led by the heads of our digital marketing team, our enterprise analytics team, and our IT team, who fortunately all get along and like each other because this would be a lot harder if they didn't, and they work in hand in hand in tandem with stakeholders from our business lines, from what we call our digital office, which really owns digital platforms that deliver the user experiences to our customers in our banking portal, in our website, and in our mobile app, and then critically our risk and compliance officers.

And that PMO function then enables the agile teams to do their work in a more coordinated fashion.

So what does success look like then when you've got all of those pieces in place? Well, this was kind of an encouraging success story for us relatively early on in the development. I would say kind of between the crawl phase and the walk phase of our development. We knew that there was an opportunity with our emerging affluent and affluent customers to raise their awareness of the importance of our wealth management advisory services, as they neared retirement. And so we put in place a multi touch orchestrated journey across a variety of different marketing channels that could be triggered by multiple life stage specific events. So it could be triggered by the actual event of retirement, it could be triggered by reaching the age of different retirement distribution events, it could be triggered by interacting with retirement content, it could be triggered with attending an event at a branch in which a wealth management advisor was educating the audience on the value of the services. And all of those different events across all of those different touch points would ultimately funnel in ultimately into a phone consultation with a wealth management advisory officer who would set up a meeting with a customer in order to really kind of lay out the benefits of our advisory services when it came to retirement planning.

So imagine the output of that kind of journey multiplied across multiple different life stages, multiplied across multiple different journeys. Sometimes journeys that were as a simple call to action or an offer multiplied across all of our different retail banking customer cohorts, and you can begin to see how we actually kind of grew the business through these efforts. We essentially doubled our run rate when it came to booked accounts from digital marketing between 2021 2022, and then we doubled that rate again last year.

And so that growth has set us up very well when it comes to attaining that digital north star of personalization at scale. And since it's March and it's basketball season, I felt like we had to translate the lessons learned from our journey into the language of basketball. So how did U.S. Bank get to what we think of as our sweet 16, when it comes to digital marketing? Well, it took a lot of air balls, and it took a lot of slam dunks. And on the air ball side of the ledger, I think if there were three key things that if we could do over again, I would try to do differently, it would be number one, when we started, we lacked even an approach to master data management, and I think that slowed down our execution early on when it came to data onboarding.

Number two, like many other companies, perhaps some of you might be able to sympathize with this, I don't think we've ever really taken a strategic approach to investment in measurement and especially tagging. And as a result of that, we've gotten a lot of things wrong over the years, and that has constrained our insight gathering and collection and our ability to optimize.

Number three was that, for a variety of different reasons, perhaps one of them being that we're a very large bank, we don't have the most agile and flexible approach to change management. And that has meant that when there are big changes in strategy or unplanned work, that has made it a little bit more difficult for us to absorb.

On the slam dunk side of the ledger, I think one thing that we really did right from the very beginning was we designed for the enterprise from day one while building in agile increments, and that has allowed us to move faster and more efficiently through our roadmap. Number two, we really embraced our one U.S. Bank operating model from the get go, and that encouraged a lot of cross team collaboration and issue resolution. And lastly, I think we had the foresight to actually invest in Adobe support relatively early on, and that actually accelerated our learning curve and our ability to get things done.

So keep your fingers crossed. Maybe we'll make it to the final four.

Yeah.

That was excellent. Neel's going to join us on stage now, but I just want to give you a heads up because we have two speakers, there's not going to be a lot of time for Q and A. But they'll stick around a little, if you have questions and then we can make some connections. But please, warm round of applause for Neel.

[Nilanjani Adhya] Thank you.

Hi. I'm Neel Adhya. I'm also the only non Chris in this presentation. So, I'll talk to you a little bit about personalization, less from a technical perspective, but more from a business perspective.

I spent some time at IBM before BlackRock, so let me see if I can do this. Maybe we'll get there. So prior to BlackRock, I was chief digital officer at IBM. So I'm coming at the issue in the financial services sector from a broad understanding of the technology space, and there are some interesting challenges. But the one challenge that I feel is still the same across any industry, it comes down to three things that I'll cover in the presentation. And the three things I want to cover is, the first from a business perspective, every company says that they are customer centric, but customer centric is not the same as customer experience centric. And so we all of us have a responsibility to really help the business understand that customer experience centric really requires mapping out customer experiences, understanding the user journey, and then really using technology, processes, and organization to be able to get there. So I'll give you the takeaways from my presentation, and then I'll show you the data. Second, customer experience is not just a marketing problem, though it oftentimes marketing takes the lead around customer experience issues. What it will show is that within BlackRock, we have defined customer experience as a broader journey because customer journeys take you from between marketing and product and sales and how we are integrating those pieces as part of our personalization platform. And then lastly, personalization is not just a technology question, as Chris mentioned very eloquently. Technology is a big part of it, but you'll have to solve not just the technology issues, but also process and organizational issues. And we'll talk a little bit about how that's possible. So first and foremost, why does even BlackRock care about personalization? Unlike U.S. Bank, we are a B2B company. Most of our clients are business users. But at the same time, when we look at what's happening in the asset management space, we're seeing that there's a enormous transition that's happening in the asset management space. There's about $61 trillion of wealth that's going to be transferred from the baby boomer generation to gen Z, gen X over the next few years, in the next 15 years. And the preferences and the expectations of users are very different. So first and foremost, 80% of them will seek a new financial adviser. So I know many of you in this room would say that the new generation prefers financial advisers that are different than what their parents are used to, and have a way of interaction that's more two way rather than a one way interaction. They're dissatisfied with the level of personalization that they're seeing from their existing advisers, and they are often migrating in large numbers to digital first wealth advisors. So as BlackRock, we think about this problem and say, even though these are not necessarily the problems that our immediate customers, the businesses face, these are some of the issues that our customers' customer, the transitions that are happening and how do we start engaging and interacting with them. The biggest statistic in the asset management space is that 76% of customers indicate that customer experience was a main factor that caused them to switch financial advisers. The reason why these data elements are important when you start a personalization journey within your companies is that it needs to be very clear that linkage between what your personalization program is about and why does it matter to the company, not just in the things that it can do immediately, in the next year, or the year after, but why as a strategic priority, customer experience and personalization would actually drive business benefits? And a lot of the work that we as practitioners have to do early on is to convince key leaders why personalization and customer experience focus is a strategic priority. And we had to do that in BlackRock, and I'll talk a little bit in terms of how we did that. But the first thing that I would know that I joined BlackRock about two years ago. When people talk about personalization, they oftentimes don't use the word personalization. So you would hear a lot of different things from your stakeholders, which has an element built into it around personalization. So I remember the first few months at BlackRock, I would hear things like, our sites are too static. We need to make it more dynamic. Well, okay. That's interesting. But why? What does dynamic mean? And he would say, "Well, there's underlying basis that our sites are not necessarily audience specific." You'll have a couple of stakeholders who would say, "I want the sites to be respond to more the various different kinds of audiences, whether I have a retail investor versus a financial adviser, whether institution or a journalist." The words are different, and I'll go through many of these. But, essentially, what our personalization program, internally, we don't call it a personalization program. We actually call it a customer experience program with personalization at the heart of it. But it's meant to solve some of these fundamental challenges that we heard from the business.

We tend to have one size fits all content for all audience. How can we tweak it? Our journeys between web and email and events and mobile apps tend to be disconnected. How can we fix it? So you would hear, and many of this will resonate with you, as you're talking to different stakeholders within the business, whether it's marketing, sales, product, these are some of the terminologies that that they would be using. And when I started the digital program at BlackRock a couple of years ago, we started with the mission of helping BlackRock do two things. One was using digital platforms to create scale so we can reach broader audiences, and second, deliver more personalized engagement with these audiences. So from a business perspective, the real goal as a chief digital officer for BlackRock is reach and engagement. And the business immediately got this notion, reach and engagement. Those are two good things. And from an engagement perspective, personalization was the central pillar of engagement.

Over the several years, as a result of these changes, BlackRock, we have changed a lot of what personalization looks like on different canvases. So first and foremost, as we're thinking about our home page, it's been a huge evolution, and this shows, like, a 10-year evolution of our home page. From messaging that was more inside out, here's what we want to tell audiences. We have transitioned more to an outside in perspective. We know that our users come to our home page to really serve two main functions. They either want to come to us for insights on the economy and on markets, or they want to come to us for products. So a web page very much starts reflecting these days what those two requirements would be around content around products. And it's very different. I like to say it's very different than other corporate websites. We don't lead with anything BlackRock centric. Here, we really talk about different audiences in terms of different flavors. And we have been rated the industry leading website here. But our program actually goes beyond our websites. Our personalization program extends into products. So BlackRock has several set of products for different audiences. For end investors, we have a set of different financial tools that allow them to manage their portfolio, for financial advisors, we have a software solution called Advisor Center that enables them to really optimize their portfolio for their clients. So we have taken the same underlying platform, the same underlying structures, and extended the personalization program everywhere from the marketing domain all the way into the product domain. And for us, this has given us the ability to sit on the table with the business to really show that the same underlying capabilities can be applied at scale across a broad set of experiences. And then lastly, our personalization program also starts showing the business how we can start really engaging across multiple channels. So web, email, inside of the product, but also chat agents, chat bots, and things like that. So by design, the personalization program is multichannel.

Some very quick results. I think personalization is a journey, and as part of what we communicate to the business is that we'll just have to go through this journey over multiple years. But it's very important that every few years, we start reiterating at least some of the results some of the early results of this personalization. So you'll see the way we manage from a metrics perspective, start sharing these metrics with the business. From a reach perspective, we show that since we started this program, our reach and awareness of users have grown about 35%. This in terms of aggregate traffic. Engagement rates have also grown significantly. The one thing we like to track in terms of its habit formation, do people keep coming back again and again based upon the content and product and the personalization we put there? So we are starting to see increased rates of habit formation. And then lastly, we track all the way to lead generation, and we're starting to see some good numbers there as well. Each one of them requires a technical solution, but it also requires figuring out from a process and from an organization perspective the issues that have to be resolved. So as we have been thinking through our personalization program and an experience program, we think about it roughly in four critical buckets that have to be iterated upon.

First, very importantly for us, is to explain to nontechnical users why. What is the relationship between customer experience, personalization, and business outcomes? I think in the abstract, most people understand what this means, but it's coming down to dollars and cents. It's coming down to strategic priorities. And I'll show you how we do this. Second, it's the notion of making sure that we have the right platforms that scale with us. It's very important early on to ensure that you're choosing the right partners and the right platform, because one of the things you would soon realize is that the architecture you're on, especially if you're trying to do it across the company, across marketing and product, and other functions, you have to make sure that the right platforms are in place. And in this group, we'll talk a little bit about how we think about that. Thirdly, I think you have to bring the why and the platforms together and really initially focus on a certain critical part of your business and really show outcomes, because without that, you will not be able to scale or be able to scale that fast. So we talk a little bit about how we do that. And then lastly is the scaling phase where you have to solve the technical issues that scale brings, but also some of the organizational and process issues that scale bring.

So let's get into some of them. So the first and foremost is the why and helping the business understand the relationship between personalization, user experiences, and business goals. One of the things we had to do early in the process is really understand who our stakeholders' way for personalization. And lo and behold, it was not just the CMO of the company. While the CMO was definitely somebody who was advocating for it, we realized that we have to sell the notion of personalization and of user experiences being central to the business to a lot of different business heads. So the head of sales, our COOs, CFOs. And for each one of those groups, we had a kind of a message that was tailored. So in many ways, you have to personalize the message for those stakeholders. A CFO is mostly interested in, well, how does this drive growth, and what is the actual value of this? And we have to bring in things around cost of customer acquisition, around growth in wallet share, or understanding retention rates when you're selling a personalization program to a CFO. So having a lot of those storylines specific to our different stakeholders was very important. And the way we did this within BlackRock is through a series of memos that we had to write for each of those audiences. So in these memos, we actually spelled out the business case for personalization. But we actually showed folks what a specific journey would look like. What would be the future journey? What's the current journey? And that helped us a lot in being able to really sell this program, because I think that was the first big aspect of it. Second, when we talk about platforms, it is very important for us to lay out to a nontechnical user, to many of our business stakeholder, what the investments were required in platforms. We think about it in terms of four layers of investment. First is fixing the data stack around an integrated data stack. Second, we actually also had to unify multiple different design systems in the company, across not only marketing, but also between marketing and product, and investment in integrating a data stack. Third, fixing content stack...

Creating a content management system that actually could work with the underlying personal underlying data and profile data to create personalized experiences. And lastly, it was, thinking about, really about the personalized about the experience stack. With every channel, what does personalization mean within that channel? The third aspect of it across, after we talked about the stakeholder, the platforms, is to really pick a use case. The first use case for personalization we picked within BlackRock was not a marketing use case. We actually picked a use case where there was a lot of intersection between user acquisition and marketing and then user growth within the product. In this case, we chose one of our adviser center products. It was very important for us to pick a new use case that actually was cross functional when we first started, and go from there. It also gave us a lot more people interested in being able to do personalization beyond just our traditional marketing client set. So we picked the Advisor Center as the use case where we deliver tailored insights, where we use insights from a marketing platform to bring special experiences, personalized experience inside the product, but also use what users were doing within the product to change the way we thought about marketing to them. So in that way, it had a flavor of multidimensional use case, and we started, really seeing some very good results within six months of implementing this.

And you can see some of the increase in the metrics around impressions, around visits, around click rates that resulted from this.

I'm going to end in a couple of minutes here. Most people have this question that when you start a program like personalization within BlackRock or any other large company, IBM for that matter, you require a very big team. I would say that that's necessarily not true. What you really need is a set of committed stakeholders, a real solid use case. But for the first use case, we actually had a relatively small team, probably less than about 10 people in there, but across multiple different groups. First and foremost, we had a single product lead, somebody who could speak both the language of the business as well as language of technology, somebody who would be very good with clients. Most of the team was data engineering because there was a lot of data integrations that be had to be done.

Half of the team was our partners, Adobe, our own technology teams, a couple of marketers, a couple of folks on the product side, and then finally, a business stakeholder, which in this case, was the head of product for our financial advisor product. So you can actually start with a fairly small team, if you have these roles well defined and are able to run a squad model. So in summary, as I end, the most important thing from our perspective was to make sure that you sell the idea before you build anything. Second, it's important to assemble a cross functional squad. It doesn't have to be a big squad. Start small and iterate from there. Make the first use case count, which means that what you choose as your first personalization use case will matter to you in the journey. So in our case, we chose one that was cross functional, that went across marketing and product. Lean on your partners for your expertise. On day one, you would not know most of the problems and how to solve them, so make sure that you have partners who have done this before. Communicate early and often, especially to your business stakeholders. And then, finally, this our disclosure statement. But let me just leave it here. Thank you.

That was great. Thank you.

Okay. So in the few fleeting seconds that we have...

Let me just wrap up with three key takeaways. Actually, that's my first takeaway, which is like 10 different things. So it's not even like a single takeaway. But either way, again from my presentation, leadership, strategy, charter for a center of excellence, and then ultimately aligning objectives and KPIs, getting everybody on the same page. The second is design for the enterprise, but from U.S. Bank, design for the bigger picture, but then build them in increments. And then one of my favorite lines of the presentation was from Neel is, sell the idea before you build the thing.

So thank you very much for attending this afternoon. Those were two incredible presentations and we're thankful for that.

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