What It Really Takes to Successfully Automate Accountholder Communications
By Nicole Volpe
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If you’re a financial institution leader or strategist, the following stories may sound familiar:
Accountholder A has had a savings account at their bank for 20 years and decides to open a new credit card there. Soon after, their card arrives along with a separate email welcoming them to the bank. Triggered on the account-open date, the automated welcome series did what it was programmed to. But nothing in the bank’s system recognized that this “new” accountholder was in fact a longtime one, and Accountholder A is left wondering whether their bank even knows who they are.
Accountholder B receives an email promoting a new CD rate, clicks the link, and ends up on a page showing a lower rate. Behind the scenes, the product team followed procedure, gaining approval of the new rate and updating the website. No one updated the automated email, however, which went out on schedule but with the wrong page link. Accountholder B feels they have been bait-and-switched, and their trust in the institution takes a hit.
In both cases, the institution had deployed automation to lighten the burden of ongoing accountholder communications and accelerate growth. And in both cases, the automation led to errors with the potential to have the opposite effect, undermining loyalty and engagement.
Key insight: Automating accountholder communications has become increasingly common among small and midsized financial institutions. According to ABA research, more than half of institutions (52%) now use marketing automation platforms, up from 44% a year earlier, and 82% of those use them to power email campaigns.
At the same time, when it comes to data analytics, most institutions are thinly staffed. Nearly half have two or fewer employees dedicated to such work, and difficulty integrating data across systems is the most significant barrier to advanced use cases, according to ABA. Responsibility for data is also moving away from marketing: Just 28% of marketers now oversee their institution’s data and analytics function, down from nearly half before 2024.
Key takeaway: Statistics like these suggest a reality check is in order for many institutions, on two fronts: whether automated accountholder communications is serving their strategic goals, and whether they have the people and oversight in place to keep it running to an appropriate standard. For insight, The Financial Brand turned to Lauren Langlais, vice president of client services at ADVANTAGE.
How Automated Is ‘Automated’?
In truth, whether a solution is truly “automated” can be a fluid concept. Do you have the staff in place to ensure campaigns and messages go out as planned and that unintended consequences don’t result? Such considerations have loomed larger in the AI era as more and more organizations grapple with its implications and the need for “humans in the loop” to validate outcomes.
Key insight: Financial institutions must establish ownership and accountability, assigning specific individuals as responsible for the communications that go out, identifying their backups, and documenting everything. “Who owns the process?” Langlais asks. “Once a full set of messages has been generated, how often will you review and update them?”
Platform usability is also a factor. Many automation tools have strong initial appeal, with simplified user interfaces and the promise of reduced campaign set-up time — even reduced user training time. But meeting such expectations often assumes that an institution’s executions will remain at the entry level and may ultimately put a ceiling on its ambitions.
Ensuring Data Readiness
It’s critical that an automated system has access to relevant and up-to-date accountholder and product data. Moreover, the system’s data architecture can influence both its versatility and its risk profile.
In some configurations, ensuring data readiness will require assessing two distinct platforms: the execution platform (where the team builds emails, sets up journeys, and defines triggers) and the data platform (which requires the right interfaces and compliance controls). Others rely on limited data subsets, prepopulated into the communications platform, which must be updated on a regular cadence.
In either case, there can be pitfalls. “A marketer may conceive and build a campaign only to realize that the data structure doesn’t support what they’re trying to accomplish,” Langlais said. “Naming conventions may vary from one environment to another, and lead to errors.” Are data updates happening properly and on schedule?
Avoiding Creative Chaos
Resource-constrained marketing teams are increasingly embracing AI’s potential to bring efficiency and scale to content creation and campaign development. “There’s enormous and exciting potential,” Langlais said, “but AI is also adding its own challenges at the same time.”
Key insight: It’s essential that human team members are part of the process, confirming that creative — messaging and visuals — are aligned with the brand’s voice and compliance standards. Critical thinking must be “built in,” as templates and workflows are established and as part of ongoing operations. And human team members, trained in prompt engineering and fluent in the brand’s standards and compliance policies, must be accountable for ensuring it happens.
Oversight Isn’t Optional
Even with defined accountable team members and their backups in place, even with monitoring and management routines documented, small marketing teams are especially at risk. This is less a system or technology risk and more a matter of human tendencies — call it distraction risk.
Key insight: “When something comes up that is a higher priority and you only have a small team, it will be easy to assume that automation can take up the slack” while accountable team members rush to fill resource gaps elsewhere. The data checks, content reviews, and ongoing improvements all require time and coordination, often from the same small team that manages the institution’s other marketing priorities.
The risk is greater with ongoing or iterative campaigns and messaging programs, than for one-off campaigns. The former requires regular management and oversight; the latter, all else equal, may truly be set-it-and-forget-it. More importantly, continuous optimization — test and learn — is the heart of modern digital marketing. Institutions must ask whether their automation strategy leaves room for that work.
Seeing the Future Clearly
As the pace of change in marketing automation has accelerated, from shrink-wrapped communications tools to full-blown agentic AI, many financial institutions are returning to first principles. Rethinking their functional org charts, banks and credit unions are asking whether marketing automation belongs under marketing’s management, and whether it is in fact two functions masquerading as one: creative and analytics on one side, and operations on the other.
Before deciding whether to manage communications internally or work with a partner, leaders should ask: Who owns each ongoing program? How often are messages and results reviewed? Could the work continue if its primary owner left? Does the team have the capacity to make needed changes? The answers can help institutions assess whether their operating model supports what they expect automation to accomplish.
Bottom line: As innovation rushes onward, institutions must be disciplined in assessing the strategic pros and cons. The decision to buy, build, or outsource marketing communications is typically a joint responsibility of marketing, operations, and product development teams, Langlais said. When marketing makes the case for the investment, though, marketing owns the outcome, including its total cost of ownership and promised return on investment. The leader who signs off must ensure that the right people, processes, and oversight are in place to deliver those results.
