I just attended and presented at the Mobile Banking and Conference Summit in Miami. Now in its seventh year (mobile banking existed in 2006?!?), the conference was an exploration of how financial institutions are being influenced by, and taking advantage of, the mobile channel and mobile technology. A few hundred attendees, including mostly high-level executive, product, technology and marketing folks were there.

I must say, going to the conference, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Having worked for so long with so many early adopting companies (ooVoo, JackThreads, eHarmony, EA, Halfbrick Studios) in traditionally more early adopting industries (gaming, mobile commerce), I didn’t have high expectations about the content or the networking. My assumption was that banks are slow to adopt new technologies, and so mobile would be no more than a bell and a whistle.

I was wrong.

There’s some really cool mobile tech being developed in the financial services space. There were robots who could remotely sign legal documents; mobile bank tellers and customer service agents ready to talk to you on your iPad; a variety of mobile wallets with new innovations like friend-to-friend payments; and lots of banks who are working hard to learn, understand and deploy innovative new mobile solutions to create better customer experiences and find new ways to deflect costs from more expensive channels. I was sincerely impressed by some of the efforts by USAA, Wells Fargo, Ally Bank and others to integrate these exciting new features, and their commitment to making mobile their primary channel.

However…

The conference felt a bit like a car show. What I mean by that is it was full of shiny objects–cool technology that, while pretty darn interesting, had little practicality. And though it was innovative, it also had no proof points. Cool technology for the sake of cool technology make conferences more exciting, but with so many competing innovations, how is a business supposed to figure out which one to actually deploy?

Data was completely missing from the conversation, and I found that a bit scary.

How is a bank–whose business is being cannibalized by mobile already and presents huge risks if they don’t get it right–supposed to determine which new feature will generate the greatest return? There’s just not that much room for error… Unless of course they are keenly attuned to their mobile customer behavior, and understand how mobile customer intelligence can help them alleviate risks and create smarter opportunities.

Indeed, at the show, it was apparent there are five primary pain points that banks have when it comes to understanding their mobile customers. Here at Kontagent, we address these pain points with our mobile customer intelligence solution, which is a combination of mobile analytics and data science consultation.

Here are five pain points, and our unique approach to solving each one, head on:

Pain Point #1: How do I know if mobile is worth the investment, relative to other channels?

The kSuite Multiscreen dashboard lets you see how customers move across your banking products.

The Kontagent kSuite Multiscreen executive dashboard is our answer to this common pain point. Banks are scrambling for data and insights into how their customers interact with their product on their desktop versus their mobile app. Which channel has the most efficient customer acquisition? Where is retention and loyalty the highest? Which has the best revenue potential? Without this insight, it’s relatively impossible to run a smart (mobile) business.

Pain Point #2: What’s the lifetime value of my mobile customers?

Kontagent’s Revenue Analysis makes analyzing LTV simple.

I heard this question a lot at the conference. And I’ve heard it on many other occasions. When you dig a little deeper into what banks are asking, it becomes clear that it can’t simply be answered with a single number. Our recently-released Revenue Analysis feature helps banks and other types of businesses to evaluate and trace the lifetime value (LTV) of their customers, and run analysis on how different groups or cohorts compare to one another. In this way, banks can make smarter marketing decisions, deliver relevant content based on LTV and overall run a much more efficient business.

Pain Point #3: How can I be sure I’m creating a positive mobile customer experience, and not risking my brand?

A deep custom event framework system is vital to understanding customer interactions in your app.

The biggest risk to banks at this point, by far, is the potential for creating a negative customer experience. Too many financial institutions are either trying to cram their websites into their mobile app or leveraging cookie-cutter mobile app platforms that deliver no differentiating value. Even worse, many banks’ mobile apps are unstable and crash.

To address this major pain point, Kontagent’s custom event hierarchy and custom event timeline helps banks monitor customer behavior from the moment their app is downloaded and throughout the customer’s entire lifetime of interaction with their brand.

Something technically wrong, and hanging up your app? You’ll see it before it becomes a problem. Customers not making it past the third session? Identify what and where the blockers to progression are, and fix it before it gets too expensive. The custom event framework is flexible and powerful, and it’s the heart and soul of our mobile customer intelligence solution.

Pain Point #4: How do I target the right customers at the right time, with the right offers?

Although banks need to work on their customer experience and generally de-risk their app, they are also concerned about how to target cross-sell and upsell offers to their customers in the mobile channel.

For years at Capital One, I worked with teams on these types of strategies, and we leveraged every piece of real estate in existence (from statement ads to envelope stuffers, banner ads, emails and text messages). Now, the game has changed with mobile apps, and banks are once again in the dark about how to access, evaluate and act on customer behavioral data to run profitable marketing campaigns.

kSuite DataMine’s allows members from every department run queries quickly and easily.

Our kSuite DataMine™ solution is a phenomenal tool to help marketers conduct analysis and identify opportunities in their customer base. Run queries to identify the top 1 percent of customers (by any attribute); the “inactives” (those who haven’t logged into the app in X amount of time); those with the highest propensity to buy a product; or any other targeting criteria you can come up with. It’s quick, easy, powerful and flexible, and it gives marketers the power to run direct response campaigns that used to take 10 times as long to execute.

Pain Point #5: How do I see a single view of my customers, across screens and channels?

Kontagent data scientists experts in translating metrics into strategies.

This is the big money pain point for banks, and just about every cross-channel business we talk to. Everyone wants supreme knowledge of their customers, wherever they are, whenever they want. Multiscreen. Cross-channel. Omnichannel.

Our approach to this vexing problem is twofold:

1. Let’s focus on mobile first, and gradually layer in your other digital channels, and then your offline/branch channel. Solving the Omnichannel problem isn’t an easy one and it will take time. In the meantime, your mobile channel is an enormous risk to your business if not done right. It’s also a massive opportunity lost that you will not get back. Let’s build the customer analytics infrastructure to track customer lifetime behavior and value, using mobile as the “stake in the ground”, and then use that model to figure out the bigger picture.
2. We’ll put our data science expertise to work for you. Kontagent is where math and engineering meet. We’ve got a powerful SaaS offering, collecting over 1 trillion user actions each year. But, we’ve also got an incredibly talented and brilliant group of data scientists who are both working on R&D (models for predictive analytics, amongst other projects), as well as consulting with clients on custom solutions to solve big problems, like, “How do I see a single view of my customers, across screens and across channels?” If you’re vexed by a data puzzle in your mobile or multiscreen business, we welcome the challenge.

I am encouraged by how the banking and financial services sector is experimenting and investing in new mobile technologies and platforms. As a consumer, it’s exciting to me that I can now deposit a check without visiting the ATM, pay a friend through friend-to-friend payments and use my phone as a credit card at various retailers.

But, as an analytically-driven business person, I am fearful that this same industry is in for a difficult wake-up call if they don’t start to adopt more agile development and marketing methods that their counterparts in other, more early-adopting industries are using. Mobile will be big money for banks who do it right. For everyone else, keep those bowls of candy full in your branches… You’re going to need it.

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About the author: Dan Kimball is Kontagent’s CMO and resident storyteller. His drive to make sense of complex concepts and solutions comes from his unique background in philosophy, quantitative research and brand marketing. You can contact Dan at: @dmkimball05.