How to Upgrade Customer Persona Use to Boost UX in Financial Services?

Modern organizations operating in the financial sphere are experiencing increasing pressure to provide an outstanding user experience while maintaining robust security measures. Finding the perfect ratio between these two elements is especially challenging as the demand for frictionless services grows amid the intensifying regulatory requirements.

This article uncovers how rethinking the approach to the implementation of consumer personas can aid companies in the financial sector in striking such a balance while ensuring scalable user management for system administrators.

What Exactly Is a Customer Persona?

For example, in this context, some potential personas for a neobank could include:

• A Gen Z student
• A frequent traveler
• A small business owner
• A Millenial from an underbanked region

Due to its efficacy in creating long-term strategies and enhancing customer-centric approaches, the concept of customer personas has also become prominent in the Identity and Access Management (IAM) software sector, where it gained a slightly different meaning.

For instance, an individual may have their own personal account at a bank while also being an employee in the same financial institution, thus performing two different roles from the company’s perspective. Another example could be a mother managing her own medical insurance as well as the accounts of her kids.

While separating these roles keeps the entity’s system organized and secure, in the majority of cases, it compromises the user experience by creating friction. This is due to the fact that an individual would require different sets of credentials for each persona they represent, meaning that to switch the roles, they would need to log out of one account and log in again using distinct credentials.

Fortunately, there is a way to address this issue - keep reading for all the details!

How Can Companies in the Financial Sector Improve the Use of Personas?

The idea behind this strategy is for companies to embrace multi-persona accounts, allowing users to seamlessly switch between different roles within the same session without requesting a new login. While such a transition from one persona to another may require extra authentication from the users for security reasons, this approach still maintains the convenience of uninterrupted login sessions.

For increased efficiency, this tactic should be combined with such measures as:

• Optimized account linking
• Intuitive user interfaces
• Accessible and swift customer support

Having these fundamental aspects in place has the power to offer financial companies a plethora of advantages - more on this below.

Key Benefits of the Multi-Persona Approach

Aside from the obvious benefit of offering consumers an improved user experience, adopting multiple-persona accounts has a multitude of other perks for companies in the financial sphere, including:

• Increased customer loyalty. Given the fact that the multi-persona approach provides users with the convenience they are looking for without compromising the security of their sensitive data, it comes as no surprise that it boosts client loyalty.
• Competitive advantage. Many companies in the financial sector across the globe still require multiple logins for the consumers to switch between personas, which provides organizations that have adopted a more forward-looking approach with a significant competitive advantage.
• Enhanced data insights. The multi-persona approach enables a deeper understanding of user behavior, preferences, and needs in different contexts. These insights can be utilized to improve custom offerings, tailor marketing strategies, and identify opportunities for cross-selling or upselling based on the customers’ diverse financial interactions.
• Improved risk management. When users are required to remember multiple passwords, they often resort to insecure practices like writing them down on paper notes or using easily guessable combinations. Multi-persona accounts address this issue by narrowing down the password count to just one.

Overall, it is clear to see that the multi-persona approach is superior to the traditional one, as it acknowledges the multifaceted nature of users’ financial affairs and allows individuals to manage them efficiently.

By embracing the concept of accounts that allow juggling multiple personas and implementing the necessary infrastructure, companies in the financial sphere can provide more flexible, secure, personalized, and progressive experiences for their users.