By Brandon Rembe, Senior Vice President of Products, Envestnet | Yodlee
Originally appeared in PaymentsSource on April 1, 2020
Imagine a world where consumers receive highly personalized, real-time answers to the question: “What do you want to know about your financial life?”
Picture a 25-year-old receiving personal insights from their bank that their streaming service spend is above average compared to peers. Or a 35-year-old with a large inheritance receiving personalized recommendations on how to best use those funds, for example, toward their student loan or paying off a high-APR credit card bill.
With access to comprehensive and accurate financial data delivered through advanced APIs, financial services providers no longer have to develop these types of personalized experiences themselves—the tools for delivering these powerful and actionable insights are available to them.
As a result, financial service providers can share data and create new insight-driven experiences with less effort. Financial service providers can also deliver custom experiences that aggregate and interpret data automatically, including income stream changes, expense tracking, and next step recommendations; allowing consumers to create their own personalized insights to better manage their financial wellness.
This holistic financial picture can be further strengthened by directing consumers to useful points of reference, like comparisons with their peers. By combining hyper-personalized insights with peer benchmarking, consumers will be able to benefit from a more customized financial wellness experience.
Peer benchmarking helps consumers compare their financial wellness with peers in similar geographies, income levels, socioeconomic contexts, and more. This enables consumers to evaluate how they’re tracking against similar groups and, if necessary, take actionable steps to change their habits. Then, based on the consumer’s data profile, “next action” insights can be used to create personalized recommendations to better manage every day and longer term financial decisions.
The aggregation of financial data ultimately enables consumers to have a more complete understanding of their financial health, but data is only as powerful as the way it’s applied. By providing tailored, actionable, hyper-personal insights to consumers, financial service providers are empowering people to make decisions that improve their financial wellness and enable them to reach their goals.
