Customer marketing and retention specialist Optimove has announced its official entry into the financial services space.
Optimove’s platform, which is popular among both Gaming and FX Broker clients to whom client retention and minimizing client churn is key to success, is already used by retail and gaming stalwarts like StitchFix, Glossier, 1-800-Flowers, Adore Me and Zynga, and FX industry names such as Oanda, AxiTrader, Ebury and eToro. The company is now making its solution and technology available to all financial services entities such as banks, insurance companies, trading desks and wealth advisories.
Optimove has been preparing for this move into traditional financial services for a while. Optimove raised a $20 million VC financing round late last year, and its CEO Pini Yakuel relocated from Israel to New York. The company also recently added AI expert Tal Kedar from Sears as its new CTO.
According to Optimove, customer retention is a growing problem for the financial services market. A recent research study conducted by Harris Poll found that eight out of 10 millennials would happily switch banks for better rewards. It also found that younger consumers are as likely to consider a large megabank as they are their local bank.
Changing user expectations are not only democratizing the financial services market – allowing smaller brands to compete directly with historically well-established names – they have also led to the rise of digital-first fintech companies that aim at taking customer mindshare away from big brands. Against this backdrop, Optimove has emerged as a strategic advantage that is helping financial companies not only retain customers, but also keep pace with high expectations of customer service.
Optimove’s advanced AI capabilities micro-segment customers according to predicted consumer behavior and value, and automate the delivery of personalized customer communications in real time and across multiple channels. The platform empowers brands to create emotionally intelligent, loyalty-building relationships with customers by anticipating their needs and wants through predictive analytics and machine learning. In effect, Optimove is combining the art of marketing with data science to autonomously generate actionable insights for financial marketers, allowing them to maximize customer spend, engagement, retention and lifetime value.
Pini Yakuel, Optimove
Optimove’s CEO Pini Yakuel said:
Financial services is today undergoing the kind of change that retail was going through a few years ago – technology is disrupting the way this space has traditionally worked, and newer, digital-first brands are threatening long-held market share by big brands. Our goal is to help financial marketers address this change by creating more customer loyalty than ever before – not through fickle perks or points programs, but through highly personalized and emotionally intelligent communications.