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ANZ Bank CMO Sweta Mehra on rebuilding from the failures of the banking industry

“Multiple pieces of data show that the customers are right, we are not doing what they’re asking us to do, or they’re expecting us to do,” said ANZ Bank chief marketing officer, Sweta Mehra in a session at Mumbrella’s Finance Marketing Summit on Thursday.

In the session, titled “It’s not you, it’s us: Decoding data to get to the heart of personalised banking”, Mehra shared ANZ Bank’s approach to rebuilding customer trust through a focus on customer experience in the aftermath of the Royal Commission into Banking.

“Banks were not always at the bottom,” said Mehra, referring to RepTrack’s corporate reputation management data which in recent years has placed the big four banks in the bottom quartile of companies.

She went on to explain there were three key themes surrounding the fall of the banking industry in recent years. The first being that consumers did not trust that the banks were doing the right thing. The second was that there were gaps in expectations of service and the reality, and the third was the lack of empathy from the banking industry for its customers.

Mehra asserted that in the wake of the Royal Commission, marketing would be become an essential function for the banking industry. Moreover, the bank’s marketing functions would need to lead their organisations to embrace customer-centric objectives across the business.

“If you want to stand for something more than just a blue colour, then we absolutely need to be all aligned and all working towards the same objective,” said Mehra.

In doing so, the ANZ Bank had to make five major shifts, from product to experience, one to many to one to one, media planning to orchestration and most importantly, from a focus on acquisition to engagement. Here, the bank would need to find a way to increase the longevity of the customer journey by placing the concept of financial wellbeing at the core of everything.

Asked by an audience member about the challenges of leading this financial wellbeing journey as a marketer, Mehra explained that it was difficult to convince the entire organisation that this was the right path forward, and then cleaning up the bank’s tech stack to create the capabilities required to fulfil the financial wellbeing proposition.

“One of the toughest things was that people were not used to marketing having these conversations,” said Mehra. “It was a long journey, every year there would be probably one big win and then of course, a lot of battles.”

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