Of course the path to delivering high quality customer experiences means offering relevant and timely personalisation.

This is taken from our new Digital Trends in the Financial Services and Insurance Sector report, produced by Econsultancy in partnership with Adobe.

The research is based on a global survey of more than 200 financial services and insurance executives based mainly in North America and Europe.

For more insight, download the full report, but in the meantime here are a few key personalisation trends from the survey.

Only 9% of FSI marketers are not personalising the customer experience

We asked our respondents “which of the following statements best describes your company’s ability to deliver personalised customer experiences?”

The importance of personalisation is clearly reflected in the above chart, only 9% of marketers in the FSI industry are not personalising the customer experience. Also encouragingly, a third (33%) are employing multichannel personalisation based on digital and offline data.

Diving further into the data, and splitting it between Europe and North America, obvious differences became apparent.

It appears that North America is significantly ahead of Europe when it comes to multichannel personalisation and digital personalisation.

41% of respondents in North America said that they are carrying out multichannel personalisation based on digital and offline data (compared to 32% in Europe), and only 4% are doing no personalisation, compared to 12% in Europe.

The financial sector is held back by particularly strict regulations on data collection, sharing and privacy, which has caused it to lag behind other sectors in the use of new digital technologies. 

34% of European respondents see complying with government/industry regulations as one of the greatest barriers to personalisation 

European respondents were more likely to cite government/industry regulations as a barrier than those in North America, while a higher proportion of respondents in North America than in Europe said data security and privacy issues were a barrier. 

This result could imply that the stricter regulations in Europe result in higher public trust, meaning that data security and privacy issues are less of a barrier in Europe.

We asked our respondents “what are the greatest barriers preventing the ability to deliver more personalised experiences?”

‘IT challenges’ was selected by more than half of respondents in both Europe (51%) and North America (55%), a clear indicator of the need for joined-up technology and data to enable successful personalisation.

For more insight, download the full report: Digital Trends in the Financial Services and Insurance Sector report.