How Community Banks Can Use AI to Improve Sales and Marketing

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become vital to many aspects of financial services, from powering chatbots to improving fraud detection. But one area where AI has not gained as much traction, particularly with community financial institutions, is in sales and marketing. Its use has been steadily ramping up, though: SouthState Bank and Eglin Federal Credit Union are among those using AI to parse data in ways that have resulted in much greater impact for their marketing efforts. Rather than targeting people based on simple demographics like age or gender, they combine internal data with information available beyond their own databases to surface a much more telling -- read: predictive -- combination of details. The key benefit has been the ability to more accurately identify when customers are ready to buy a particular financial product and deliver the appropriate messaging to them.