By Alice Whitelam (Senior Consultant)
In today’s privacy-conscious, hyper-regulated world, customer communication has never been more complex or more critical. For banks and financial services providers, the challenges are perhaps more pronounced than in other sectors. You’re offering products and services that can genuinely make a difference in helping people budget better, avoid unnecessary fees, build savings, or manage debt. But too often, your customers don’t even realise these services exist.
Why? Because your message never actually reaches them. It’s buried in an overcrowded inbox, the subject line isn’t interesting enough, the email’s too long or, more likely, they opted out of your comms months ago.
Your customers are now firmly in control of how, when, and if they hear from you. And that means the old rules don’t apply anymore. To get cut-through, you need to move from broadcasting to connecting; from campaigns designed around internal priorities to communication strategies built on deep, human understanding.
Many banks are offering valuable tools and support, but they’re not landing with the people who need them most. Your customers have tuned out and are ignoring messages. Not because they don’t need help, but because what they receive doesn’t feel relevant, useful, or timely to them.
In our experience, communication often falls flat for a few core reasons:
The result is an ever-growing disconnect. You have something genuinely useful to offer – you're not sending useless spam! - but the message simply doesn’t land. And with every missed opportunity, trust and engagement take a little bit of a hit.
It’s not that financial services teams aren’t trying. I’m sure you know that better than most. It’s that the world of content and comms has changed, and many strategies haven’t really caught up. Too often we see that:
If – like many others - you’re still relying on traditional, one-size-fits-all communication models, it’s becoming harder to stay relevant. It’s a challenge, of course it is, but it’s also a good opportunity to rethink and reimagine how you connect with your audience.
So where do you start when the usual routes are blocked? It sounds simple, but the answer is ‘with insight’.
“We do use insight” I hear you say. That may be the case, but when did you last refresh that insight? The likelihood is that it was over a year ago and if that’s the case, it’s likely outdated, which is as bad as guessing. You need up-to-date, real insight about who your customers are, what they care about, how they behave, and how they prefer to interact.
When you have that understanding, everything else starts to shift.
For example, you might uncover that customers are opting out because your messages come too frequently or cover topics they don’t care about. You might find your tone feels too formal, or indeed too casual. Or that people prefer short, visual content in-app over long-form email.
This is where customer and behavioural insight makes the difference:
Let’s say you learn that a particular segment engages most with short, reward-focused messages delivered in-app. You can tailor your strategy so they only receive those types of messages, at the right moments, improving both experience and results.
Or perhaps you discover that customers with certain spending patterns respond better to a conversational tone on SMS than traditional emails. That knowledge allows you to build communications around their preferences, not your defaults.
Even more powerful is the ability to combine individual-level insights with broader behavioural trends. That’s how you move from reacting to preferences, to anticipating them.
This is what it means to shift from generic to personal. From reactive to proactive. From sending messages to building meaningful, insight-led engagement.
For the sake of this article, let’s assume your customers have opted out and email is off the table. What other channels are there?
Well, it’s not just about swapping one channel for another. It’s about building a multi-touch strategy rooted in context, behaviour, and intent.
Here are a few ways to start:
When a customer opts out, it’s not a closed door, it’s actually quite valuable feedback. It’s a signal that something didn’t quite work. That could be the content, the channel, the tone, or the timing.
Take that feedback seriously. Use it to reflect and refine. Revisit your segmentation. Re-examine the purpose of your content. Ask yourself: Are we offering value? Are we really listening?
Because when you start building communications around what your customers want, not just what you need to say, you begin to earn their attention again.
The institutions that win in this new consent-first world will be the ones who listen better, act smarter, and communicate more personally. That’s how you rebuild trust. That’s how you drive action. And that’s how you turn passive audiences into engaged, loyal customers.
At KAE, we help banks and financial services providers unlock deeper understanding of their customers by connecting insights about behaviours and expectations with strategies that deliver measurable results. If you’re rethinking your communication approach and want to create meaningful engagement that actually reaches people, we’d love to help - just get in touch.