The client is never just a target

by Francesco Minelli Senior Advisor Insurance & Wealth Management at Excellence Consulting

For years, financial marketing has thought in terms of segments. Age, wealth, profession, geographical area, products held, length of the relationship, risk profile: useful variables, often indispensable. They have helped banks, insurance companies and financial advisory networks organise complexity, establish commercial priorities, plan campaigns and design service models.

That logic remains necessary. But perhaps today it is no longer enough. Because the client does not live within a segment. The client lives within a moment. It may be the same client, with the same wealth and the same demographic profile, but in very different phases: the birth of a child, an ageing parent, an inheritance received, a market that causes concern, a disappointing statement, liquidity that remains idle because making a decision seems too difficult.

Beyond the snapshot of the client

Traditional segmentation takes a snapshot of the client. AI-augmented marketing can help interpret the film. The point is not to abandon segments, nor to criticise those who still use them. The point is to recognise that, in financial services, the value of a client does not always coincide with what is currently visible in the systems.

Having little wealth with a financial intermediary does not mean being a low-profile client. It may mean that the relationship is new, that trust still needs to develop, that the client holds wealth elsewhere, that they are waiting for the right moment, or that they have not yet found a conversation capable of identifying their real needs.

This is why potential becomes a decisive variable. And potential cannot be assessed solely through account balances. It can be assessed through behaviours, life events, professional trajectory, family, savings capacity, sensitivity to protection, the quality of the relationship and the time required for that relationship to turn into trust.

McKinsey estimates that effective personalisation can generate a revenue increase of between 10% and 15%, with cases ranging from 5% to 25%.

Understanding potential, not just wealth

Data help make the issue more concrete. According to the European Commission's Eurobarometer, only 18% of European citizens demonstrate a high level of financial literacy; 64% have a medium level and 18% have a low level. In Italy, the Bank of Italy reports that the overall score among adults increased from 10.2 in 2020 to 10.7 in 2023, on a scale from 0 to 20.

These figures raise a question: how much of our commercial and communication campaigns assumes a client who is more financially aware than they actually are?

In financial services, knowing the client does not simply mean knowing how much wealth they have or which products they hold. It means understanding how capable they are of interpreting risk, time, volatility, protection, cost and return. It means asking whether they are making decisions with clarity or out of fear, with trust or suspicion, with a clear plan or with a sense of isolation that makes every choice more difficult.

This is where technology can enable a qualitative leap. Not to replace the human relationship, but to free it. If central marketing has access to better data, predictive models, sentiment analysis and AI tools, it can stop being merely a campaign factory and become a system for listening to and managing the relationship.

When marketing becomes relationship

This is particularly important for those working in marketing departments who do not personally experience the relationship with the client every day.

Bankers and advisors perceive nuances that no model can capture on its own: tone, hesitation, family history, resistance and trust built over time. But central marketing can provide new support for that sensitivity: life moments, behavioural changes, drops in engagement, disengagement, latent needs, protection needs or unexpressed potential.

Personalisation is not just a more elegant way of doing marketing. McKinsey estimates that effective personalisation can generate a revenue increase of between 10% and 15%, with cases ranging from 5% to 25%.

Salesforce, however, identifies a paradox: 75% of marketers have adopted AI, but 69% still struggle to respond promptly to customers and 84% continue to manage generic campaigns.

The challenge, therefore, is not to use new tools to carry out the marketing of the past more quickly. It is to use AI to better understand when a commercial campaign is needed, when educational content is needed and when, instead, the person who owns the relationship needs to call the client and start a conversation.

In financial services, a signal is never just a signal. Idle liquidity may indicate inertia, but also prudence. A lack of response may indicate disinterest, but also distrust. A relationship with little activity may not be poor: it may simply be immature.

Perhaps the real leap is not moving from the segment to the individual client. It is moving from the segment to the context.

The question is no longer simply: which product should be offered to this segment? But rather: which conversation is right for this person, at this moment, through this channel, with this level of trust and with which intermediary?

It is a more complex question. But it is also closer to the nature of financial marketing, because the client is never just a target.

The client is a person who makes decisions under constraints of information, emotion, trust and time. If AI helps central marketing better understand these constraints and helps those who manage the relationship intervene with greater sensitivity, segmentation does not become less human, but perhaps more closely aligned with real life.