Financial institutions are at a pivotal moment. As customer expectations evolve and AI reshapes digital engagement, leaders in marketing, CX, and IT must rethink how they deliver value.
Adobe’s report, “State of Customer Experience in Financial Services in an AI-Driven World,” reveals that only 36% of the customer journey is currently personalized, despite 74% of executives acknowledging rising customer expectations. With transformation already underway, financial leaders face five imperatives that demand immediate action to drive relevance, trust, and growth.
1. Make Personalization More Meaningful
Personalization has long been a strategic focus, but today’s consumers expect more than basic segmentation or name-based greetings. They want real-time, omnichannel interactions that align with their financial goals, life stages, and behaviors.
To meet this demand, financial institutions must evolve from reactive personalization to predictive, intent-driven engagement. This means leveraging AI to anticipate needs, orchestrate journeys, and deliver content that resonates with individual context.
Perficient Adobe-consulting principal Ross Monaghan explains, “We are still dealing with disparate data and slow progression into a customer 360 source of truth view to provide effective personalization at scale. What many firms are overlooking is that this isn’t just a data issue. We’re dealing with both a people and process issue where teams need to adjust their operational process of typical campaign waterfall execution to trigger-based and journey personalization.”
His point underscores that personalization challenges go beyond technology. They require cultural and operational shifts to enable real-time, AI-driven engagement.
2. Redesign the Operating Model Around the Customer
Legacy structures often silo marketing, IT, and operations, creating friction in delivering cohesive customer experiences. To compete in a digital-first world, financial institutions must reorient their operating models around the customer, not the org chart.
This shift requires cross-functional collaboration, agile workflows, and shared KPIs that align teams around customer outcomes. It also demands a culture that embraces experimentation and continuous improvement.
Only 3% of financial services firms are structured around the customer journey, though 19% say it should be the ideal.
3. Build Content for AI-Powered Search
As AI-powered search becomes a primary interface for information discovery, the way content is created and structured must change. Traditional SEO strategies are no longer enough.
Customers now expect intelligent, personalized answers over static search results. To stay visible and trusted, financial institutions must create structured, metadata-rich content that performs in AI-powered environments. Content must reflect experience-expertise-authoritativeness-trustworthiness principles and be both machine-readable and human-relevant. Success depends on building discovery journeys that work across AI interfaces while earning customer confidence in moments that matter.
4. Unify Data and Platforms for Scalable Intelligence
Disconnected data and fragmented platforms limit the ability to generate insights and act on them at scale. To unlock the full potential of AI and automation, financial institutions must unify their data ecosystems.
This means integrating customer, behavioral, transactional, and operational data into a single source of truth that’s accessible across teams and systems. It also involves modernizing MarTech and CX platforms to support real-time decisioning and personalization.
But Ross points out, “Many digital experience and marketing platforms still want to own all data, which is just not realistic, both in reality and cost. The firms that develop their customer source of truth (typically cloud-based data platforms) and signal to other experience or service platforms will be the quickest to marketing execution maturity and success.”
His insight emphasizes that success depends not only on technology integration but also on adopting a federated approach that accelerates marketing execution and operational maturity.
5. Embed Guardrails Into GenAI Execution
As financial institutions explore GenAI use cases, from content generation to customer service automation, governance must be built in from the start. Trust is non-negotiable in financial services, and GenAI introduces new risks around accuracy, bias, and compliance.
Embedding guardrails means establishing clear policies, human-in-the-loop review processes, and robust monitoring systems. It also requires collaboration between legal, compliance, marketing, and IT to ensure responsible innovation.
At Perficient, we use our PACE (Policies, Advocacy, Controls, Enablement) Framework to holistically design tailored operational AI programs that empower business and technical stakeholders to innovate with confidence while mitigating risks and upholding ethical standards.
The Time to Lead is Now
The future of financial services will be defined by how intelligently and responsibly institutions engage in real time. These five imperatives offer a blueprint for action, each one grounded in data, urgency, and opportunity. Leaders who move now will be best positioned to earn trust, drive growth, and lead in the AI-powered era.
Learn About Perficient and Adobe’s Partnership
Are you looking for a partner to help you transform and modernize your technology strategy? Perficient and Adobe bring together deep industry expertise and powerful experience technologies to help financial institutions unify data, orchestrate journeys, and deliver customer-centric experiences that build trust and drive growth.
