Financial Services Loyalty on a Global Scale feat. WillowTree's Kate Gallaher and Caitlin Watson

Billie Loewen [00:00:03] Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Room For Growth. I am so excited to get to our guests today. We are going to talk about Loyalty, but like capital-L Loyalty, not just what we talk about all the time on this podcast, which is: how do we create meaningful brand experiences and drive customer loyalty. And then of course, there's loyalty programs, the structure of them, the offers that go with them, the intelligence that you need to make a good one. But today on the show, we are going to talk about financial services in particular, because financial services is humongous, especially for some of the largest brands. It's a regulated market which makes personalization and technology challenges more prominent. And then just the complexity of those organizational structures creates both, I would say challenges, of course, but also opportunities to do really unique and advanced things in loyalty. So we're going to get into kind of loyalty at the highest degree. We're going to have a real global perspective and talk about why a global perspective is more critical than ever. Without further ado, let's jump in to our guests.

Billie Loewen [00:01:11] Hello everybody. Today I have two wonderful WillowTree colleagues with me and we are talking about loyalty. And hopefully when I say we are talking about loyalty, your response is, "Billie, of course we're talking about loyalty. We have listened to this podcast before, we know what Room For Growth is all about." It is about customer loyalty and how as a brand, you can build an engaged fanbase and build loyalty for your brand through all kinds of tactics. So when I say that we are talking about loyalty, what I really mean is we are talking about Big Loyalty. Meaning if you are one of the largest brands in the world, you are primarily a global brand where most of your revenue is coming from global audiences, and you are trying to think about all of the elements of how you create loyalty among your customers. What are the components that you need to consider? So we're going to primarily focus on financial services because I think financial services loyalty is particularly complex. A) because it's a regulated market, B) because customer trends are just quite different, and what they expect from a financial services brand is different. So when I say that we're today, we're talking about loyalty, what I mean is we are going to talk about some of the largest and most complicated loyalty programs that exist, how to do them well, how they're evolving, and how we think about global scale at a company like, WillowTree. So I have two of the best and brightest with me for this topic to help tackle it from a multi-perspective lens, and I am going to let them introduce themselves. So Kate Gallaher, tell us who you are and how you ended up here today on this podcast with me.

Kate Gallaher [00:02:41] Hey Billie, good to see you. Long time listener, first time caller and honored to be on the podcast today. So for me and my kind of career projection, what I do at WillowTree, I lead our financial services practice. So for us that means anything from payments to retail banking, wealth management, and insurance. So really covering kind of the gamut of everything that you would see in this space. Career-wise, prior to this was a consultant, so really worked at the intersection of technology and strategy and kind of how those two things have to be so interconnected to drive the right outcome for organizations.

Billie Loewen [00:03:22] Caitlin, welcome back to Room For Growth. Remind us who you are and tell us what you're going to be focusing on sharing today around customer loyalty.

Caitlin Watson [00:03:30] Yeah. Hi, Billie. So good to be back. My name is Caitlin Watson. I'm a Partner of Marketing Services. So what that means in form and function is I get to lead our Marketing Services team here. A big piece of what we do surrounds loyalty. So thinking about loyalty programs, personalization, loyalty messaging, go-to-market, overhauling loyalty programs, advancing them really kind of in everything that a brand might need to reconsider about how they're connecting best to their customers. I get to lead a variety of clients across all industries, financial services being one, I get to work with Kate quite often, which is always so fun. Other services I work in are QSR, CPG, eCommerce, streaming, which is a really interesting industry on the cutting edge of loyalty and thinking about how to reengage workers in an interesting digital age. So excited to be here today and bring some industry knowledge about loyalty and all best practices.

Billie Loewen [00:04:32] Awesome. Kate, talk to us a little bit... You know, we work with primarily large enterprise, and sometimes those brands don't love to have their name just sort of dropped willy-nilly on a podcast. But give us a little bit of a sense of who we work with at WillowTree to just give folks a sense of the scale of brand and the broadness of deep expertise across financial services.

Kate Gallaher [00:05:00] Yeah. So like you said, we don't want to-- we do such mission-critical work with our partners. And so I wouldn't necessarily want to kind of reveal all of those where I'm not able to. But we do feel or I personally feel privileged to be able to partner with brands that you would see at the top of your wallet that are in the credit space, in the payments space, but also doing really, really interesting things outside of that, in travel, for example, in dining and entertainment. We have the privilege of working with over half of the top ten banks in America, over half of the top, 10, 15 banks in Canada, and even some of the top banks across the globe. Outside of Banking and Payments, though, we also cover, like I mentioned, Wealth Management. So, the top three wealth management organizations in the world we get to partner with and then also Insurance. So each of those, kind of subsectors of the financial services space are quite different in a sense. But as we tie this into loyalty, and as Caitlin said, we have the privilege of working together. You'll see that some of those trends and some of those needs really across whether it's B2B or direct to consumer, across those brands that we work with in payments and credit, banking, insurance, wealth management start to converge. And so we get to draw from kind of all of those experiences across the entire industry.

Billie Loewen [00:06:32] So with that, I want to talk just a little bit about some of the trends and evolution that we are seeing in loyalty programs today, particularly in the financial services sector. So what are some of the factors that are really driving the need to differentiate loyalty today? This is such a big topic where more and more frequently, brands are investing in their loyalty programs and in their approach to customer loyalty and even their rewards. I'm curious, Kate, tell us a little bit about why. Why now are things shifting and shaking?

Kate Gallaher [00:07:01] Digital has really impacted the financial services, loyalty space in a few ways. It has kind of both sides of the sword in a very positive way, and also in almost a negative way that makes it more challenging. So the things that we are seeing, the things that I am seeing in the markets specific to financial services, is: 1) just increased diversity of products. Brands are moving outside of just offering a credit card program, right? They're moving into customer lifestyle as well across travel: how can they impact kind of your travel experience? Dining: what can they do to kind of shape really unique, cool experiences for you as a customer? Shopping: moving into the retail space, right? Payments and embedded finance has a huge role to play in that. And so, you know, beyond just having a financial advisor do one thing or a retail bank do another and a payments organization do another, we see an incredible diversity of offerings that's available to a customer in this space. So that's one. And digital expands that, right? 2) Just ease of switching. So, you know, with certain other industries you kind of get locked into that brand affinity. But in financial services, you're looking for an outcome. You're looking for a specific product or a specific place for someone to hold and guide and advise you on your money and your financial situation. Brand affinity is really hard to capture in this space, and digital has made the ease of switching across brands, and really across products as well, even easier. And then 3) Just the rise of fintech, which we've been saying for years. So I feel a little bit silly saying that today, but it continues to be true, right? We have digital-native organizations that appeal to younger demographics and generations. And as those fintechs are able to be digital aggregators and take all of your spend across every product that you have into one place, it presents kind of more of an opportunity for loyalty, but also more of a challenge, because it's easier to lose that brand affinity.

Billie Loewen [00:09:13] Yeah, I think especially because so many big financial brands are based in the US too. A huge change for them is the need to really shift away from a US-first mindset. That the way that especially younger people around the world use credit cards or open bank accounts, and what they expect from financial institutions, tremendously different than a US customer base. So the prevailing wisdom of just like build it for North America and then replicate, test and optimize, that actually just can't be the approach anymore. So I think that's really brilliant, Kate.

Billie Loewen [00:09:47] Caitlin, I'm curious, you are knee-deep in all kinds of loyalty programs across different industries. What kind of trends and evolution are you seeing?

Caitlin Watson [00:09:55] Yeah, I think similar to financial services, digitization of companies is global. That is a trend that is hitting everyone everywhere. It is easier than ever for niche products, niche companies to come into the space. Actually an interesting company I was looking at the other week, Bilt Loyalty is a new kind of credit card provider and loyalty provider, all based on gaining points for paying one's rent with their specific credit cards. So really, the ability to appeal to a specific generation or audience or cohort of users is easier than ever. So big, big brands that we work with are kind of struggling to understand how do they diversify, how do they appeal to masses and kind of historical audiences that are in their databases without losing the things that make them so special and have made them successful over the years? I think security and Big Data is another topic that financial services in particular, but all companies are really, really thoughtful of. I mean, especially with the rise of AI, there's a lot of consumer sentiment and mistrust out there. So interestingly, and even some of our own research, we're finding that not only does the way a company have best data practices and responsibly use personalization matters, but also vehicle matters for loyalty. So in some of our own research on loyalty programs, especially worldwide, an interesting tidbit that we have found is that not only do customers feel more secure accessing their loyalty programs, accessing their financial programs on an app or on a website, but feel less secure on a mobile web experience. So nuances matter when we talk about loyalty, and we talk about how a brand shows up for a client, regardless of industry, but we think specifically for financial services.

Billie Loewen [00:11:52] Totally. And I don't think many people would perceive a loyalty program as particularly challenging. So at the moment, the fact that we are seeing so many brands come to us to overhaul their loyalty program, whether it's QSR — coffee, pizza — hotels, financial institutions, travel and leisure, it's a really interesting time. And some of those trends have positive repercussions for the brand in unexpected ways. One of the things that we often see, for example, is that brands are giving too much to their customers too early. They're not actually changing and causing behavior modification. They're not able to — or they previously weren't able — to understand customer behavior the way they can now with technology and data. And so now they're much more able to say, we're not going to give quite as much upfront. We're going to ask you to do a little bit more for us as a brand, and then we'll reward you more deeply when you actually display the behaviors of loyalty that we want to see. But that can happen in a way where the value exchange is also significantly better, where they may not need to give away, you know, something of high value immediately out of the gate because they can give something of perceived value much more quickly with that personalization.

Billie Loewen [00:12:59] Kate, I'm curious how you see personalization as a critical component of how brands develop their loyalty strategy. What parts of personalization, particularly in financial services, become kind of a real reward for the customer? How do they or how do you think about how to personalize loyalty in a way that that value exchange is good? And how do expectations of the customer to have personalization in their loyalty program, differ across like industries or markets? That's kind of a big one. But let me throw you the, you know, get us in the same in the same field together, and then we'll explore more details.

Kate Gallaher [00:13:38] Yeah. So before answering that question, because it's a big question. So you hit on a little bit of what does personalization look like? What's the expectation of personalization in financial services. Kind of before even going through that, one thing that I want to back up on, is just the loyalty framework that we can follow, that we use at WillowTree early days when we're talking about kind of how do we build a strategy. So this three-R framework, right. It starts with: Reminder. So you need some sort of trigger to engage with the customer to say, oh, I need to take some sort of action. Then the second one is: Routine. So you build routines, you build behaviors. You need data to understand what those behaviors will be, but also to influence and drive what that behavior should be or what you want it to be in your loyalty program. And then comes the Reward, which is something you asked about, Billie. So across each of those we have the opportunity to drive personalization. So that's why I wanted to kind of center on that framework first. Right. So whatever that trigger is, whatever that Reminder is, having it personalized, whether it's a mobile push notification or some sort of email communication or even anything else. How is that specifically tailored to your end customer that you're, that you're targeting. Two, the Routine: so thinking through kind of what that behavior that you want to drive, is it, to your point, are you hitting a KPI of pure engagement? Are you hitting a KPI of cross-sell and upsell and offering other products within your portfolio? Or is it exposing them to kind of new promotions? And then what is that Reward? What you were specifically asking about, though, is how do we see rewards being different in the financial services space versus others? And I actually think that's a it almost can transcend industry. But we're seeing a lot in terms of just specific personalized offers that might not even be for some of your specific products, but maybe a partner that you partner with. So in the credit space we partner with brands that support hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of retail partners. Can you provide a cross-brand offering, so that they feel like they're getting something that is so hyper-personalized to them. Is it other products? Is it other rates or upsell within your own product portfolio? So that reward, you'd think, "oh, in financial services, it should just be if I have a checking or savings account with you, now you should offer me a new credit card." It could be something very, very simple, along the path that gives them access to new products, new promotions that they might not be familiar with within your own brand. Can you show small moments of delight that are simple, easy to identify, but really continue to draw that customer into that three-R framework that becomes a habit. You trigger. You create a routine. You provide a reward. Sometimes it can be as simple as that: showing fun, delightful, easy, engaging progress towards something like a savings goal.

Billie Loewen [00:17:06] I love those examples. I am an AMEX Platinum cardholder, and one of the trends that you called out that's so critical is that more frequently, brands are being asked to partner with other brands to double and maximize rewards. You see this with like an Uber and your hotel where if you book an Uber from your hotel app, you might get like double points. Or for AMEX Platinum, they partner with Saks Fifth Avenue, where you get a $50 credit, twice a year, I believe, and I would never have really purchased from Saks Fifth Avenue. It's just not a place that I normally frequent. But because they have this partnership and I'm aware of it as part of being a cardholder, it's not necessarily a loyalty benefit. It's not like I'm using my points necessarily to go shop there, but it's just the sort of like surprise and delight and a way of exploring brands that I might not have. So I do think more and more frequently, the partnership becomes a really critical component of how you set your strategy as a global financial services brand.

Billie Loewen [00:18:01] Caitlin, you deal in the nitty-gritty of customer data every day. You work on projects, everything from setting up customer data platforms [CDPs] and thinking through naming conventions and how to do appropriate analytics marketing for different apps and websites. I'm curious how you think about personalization, particularly in financial services, but more broadly, what is the customer really asking for today and how are we enabling it?

Caitlin Watson [00:18:28] Yeah. Billie, I think the biggest thing to underscore from what you all are saying that I see as so exciting, and as the opportunity that financial services has in really outside of cash back or getting benefits like low ATM fees or better customer experience overall, really that benefit that most especially credit card services find is in those partnerships. And they're really kind of the first to do it right is quite different from a Starbucks where you might buy a coffee, get a coffee, buy a coffee, get a coffee. They're extending their brand into these partnerships. So while that's so exciting and there's so much ground to lay there, that's actually where we see a lot of our partners still struggling today, because the data that underpins delivering that right partner to the right person is actually quite hard still to orchestrate. So having the right tech stack as your foundation to be able to power and enable those personalized experiences, whether that be on web or mobile or your marketing-owned channels or even paid channels is quite an organizational feat to pull off. Understanding customers who are in your database, what they're doing, how they're behaving is so, so, so important, and then creating all the fundamental channels and ways in which you're going to connect up. The advice that we give even to large global brands is to start small and to test. So, to test out use cases, to test out where you think you might be able to move the needle. And this changes globally. I think we said earlier, all of our research findings time and time again help to underpin: designing for North America first is just not the way to reach global markets. Unless you're independently creating offerings and services and experiences for each of those markets, which most aren't doing and isn't great at scale, it's really thinking about new markets, markets where credit is actually quite a new offering to those audiences. And considering how cultural impacts might also tailor these cohorts. So underlining that ,Billie, it is not easy. That is where we often spend the bulk of our time in helping our financial institutions, or even other industries just understand who are their users, what do they want? And then putting kind of all the pipes in place to be able to make that personalization happen.

Billie Loewen [00:20:53] Totally. Caitlin and Kate, I think a lot about a brand that we recently worked with together that's a major financial institution. They're trying to build a more personalized marketplace. Just meaning when you show up on their website or in their app, they want to make sure that the brands that they partner with and frankly, brands that they don't are providing the best offers to customers. So, you know, this is a pretty table stakes experience. You sign into your app, you see that you have ten offers from different brands that might be like 5% off at this brand or 10% off at this brand. But just the logistics of how you make that compelling and available is very challenging. So, for example, and this is just an example, as a credit card company, customers assume, "hey, you know, I love Nike. I shop at Nike all the time. If you are my credit card provider, you can see how often I'm shopping at Nike and how much I'm spending. Why wouldn't you give me a Nike offer if that one's available?" Or, "You know, my zip code, you know the region I'm in. You know that I don't have a White Castle anywhere near me. Why would you serve up that offer, for example?" It's very interesting to say things like, to work with a brand where it'd be easy to say, let's take past purchases and location, use just those two data points to determine which offers you should surface to them first in their app experience. But then the complexity behind that, it's just an absolute iceberg. Like the data complexity of that is so much greater than, you know, our friends in IT right now are cheering. They're like yeah, exactly, exactly right., we've been saying this for years. But it's really complicated. And then on top of it we have to help empower our clients to take data that says, A) here's the cohort of people who love your brand. Here's how often they're shopping, here's what they're spending, here's their average spend. Can we work together with your marketing team to create a compelling offer that then we're going to put in our marketplace? That's just a lot of cohesion across different teams and technologies. Which is why I'm gonna ask Kate a question, because, Kate, you are kind of the queen of taking really complex, really ambiguous challenges and reminding our clients that the experience has to be simple. I'm curious how you think about, taking something so big and so vast and turning it back into a simple, compelling experience?

Kate Gallaher [00:23:12] Well, maybe you call me the Queen, because although I work for a digital agency that started as a mobile agency, way back in the day, I hate apps, Billie. I hate mobile apps. I don't like to be overindexed in the digital space. And so therefore, like the way that I think about it, I need something that is so, so, so simple and so, so, so easy to use that it continues to build that — like I was talking about that, not to go back to frameworks — that three-R framework of what we're seeing and building those routines. It needs to be so simple, so clean, so easy to use. So to your question, taking complex problems and simplifying it sounds like that would be a simple process. But for us, kind of what we do and what we work with our partners on is a few things: Understanding, like you mentioned, understanding your data, where it lives, how you can use it, which a lot of times, as Caitlin was articulating, requires significant investment in pulling information out of legacy systems to be able to compete with those organizations that are unhinged and unburdened from those legacy systems. So that's number one, kind of understanding your data foundation and kind of where it lives, how you can use it, and then pulling it into something like models, that it can be surfaced in a really clean, simple way to an end customer. Number two, though, for simplicity, we think a lot about and do a lot of research just talking directly to customers about what they want to see and how that should be surfaced and truly a UI, UX perspective. So, to your point, like with the marketplace example, rather than going and scrolling extensively, to try to find the right offer for myself, can we use machine learning models and AI and the data that is able to be stitched together? Although like you said, there's regulation and and restrictions on that. But can we use what we have to kind of surface the most relevant thing at the most relevant time and do test-and-learn to identify what the customer is responding to, what I'm responding to. Right. And then can you make the design so clean and simple? So can you make that reward so clean and simple that it's easy to come back to. I think that's critically important as well.

Billie Loewen [00:25:49] Yeah. Caitlin, I'm curious what else you think about in terms of the behavior modification that brands should be aiming to achieve or what they would measure or how they might determine what priorities to put first when they think about how to hit the intersection of kind of like delight, but also brand value, in a compelling way. You know, for every brand that's investing in these loyalty programs, there has to be an outcome for the spend that they're creating. But sometimes that's very lagging. I'm curious how you think about this.

Caitlin Watson [00:26:25] That's a great question, Billie. And every brand looks at a couple different things. However, they all center around understanding churn of users. So like Kate mentioned earlier, the ease of switching, especially in the credit card provider space, is higher and higher every day. It is easier, faster, better to sign up for something with the click of a button and installing a new mobile app. So retaining customers — longevity and lifetime value of that customer — is something that we track tooth and nail. We know as marketers that it is far less expensive to retain a current customer than to acquire a new one. So really nurturing those customers and understanding how they're returning to your app or web property, how they're using their points, as you mentioned, Billie, how they're spending with you. What share of wallet do you have with them is so critical to keep a pulse on. So those are kind of the indicators that we always use to understand: are things going well? The second thing that we always think about is actually financial impact to the company itself. So something that we hear a lot from our clients, are that they — while maybe it's retaining customers and customers are continuing to use and love their loyalty program. It might not be financially sound for the business. So understanding if they're giving away too much, if they're not giving away enough, if it's eating in their profit margins of customers who would have bought that item regardless of this habit that we're trying to build? So understanding that fine line between balance is something that we often help our clients think about, and restructuring or taking a hard look at their current loyalty program. So wanting to make sure that we're equitably considering that customer-first approach and how we're designing, developing experiences, but also understanding how it fits within the business model and how we can be thinking about others that are coming into the space.

Billie Loewen [00:28:28] One of the things that is especially challenging, but also a huge opportunity in financial services, is the fact that large financial services brands are often B2B. They're B2B2C. They're direct to consumer. They have a number of different products. That means they might have a relationship with their B2B partners that's really dependent where the end customer for them is that business. Or maybe that business partner is just a conduit ultimately to the customer. Or perhaps they're building products that directly introduce their brand to the customer, and they have to think about how all of these various relationships, products, and consumers help them grow, help them create unique experiences, give them, of course, technology and customer data platform challenges. God bless all of our financial services clients who we've helped with CDP implementations. We are thinking of you right now because we know how challenging it is to integrate across all those spaces. But Kate, how do you think about those different relationships, those different kinds of business constructs, and relate that back to the opportunity in loyalty?

Kate Gallaher [00:29:42] Really great observation. I'm glad you called that out, Billie, because so many of our partners, particularly in the Payments space, for example, and even in Banking as well, their customer is B2B. However, that customer is B2C. So many times we have partners and clients that we work with that sit really squarely in that B2B2C space. However, much of their KPIs today and the data that they can gather is in on the B2B side. But ultimately the ultimate kind of sale is in that B2B2C side. And it's really easy for us, as we've been having this conversation, right, to think about ourselves as the end consumer and what we kind of want in our loyalty rewards program with cash back or travel or whatever it is. But where we see challenge but also opportunity is many of those players operate in almost like the white label platform space. So that's where we also, have cut our teeth. How do you build a platform that is going to be best for the financial services organization's direct customer, on the B2B side, but also enables them to have a really powerful experience for an end consumer like the three of us, right? So for us, there are few things that matter. None of these will come as a surprise. And, Caitlin, I'll pass it to you in a second to talk about the technology side, but, number one is kind of building that unified platform that's highly scalable. And so we're able to do that. I know when I say that everyone in, unless you're a fintech, starts thinking about, well, legacy systems, legacy systems, legacy systems, disparate data, siloed organization, etc. And we get that. We understand that and we manage and work through that every single day. But there's still the ability to architect a really thoughtful platform that does drive unification for the B2B space that then sells to end direct consumer. But unification, scalable global platforms. And there's kind of thoughtful technology considerations as well, which, I could speak to. But honestly, I think, Caitlin, you're probably best ingrained in that space to hit.

Caitlin Watson [00:32:11] Yeah Kate. I mean, you are absolutely right. Legacy systems is something that we talk about day in and day out in our financial services client space. You know, traditionally there's something built, especially in this space with security in mind. So scalability and the thought of moving to something to empower those white label solutions is quite scary. It takes a lot of time and effort and energy, but we find that the clients of ours that do are the ones leading the pack, because we know that B2B space, that B2B2C space is so important. Users like us are expecting those customer experiences that you might get from a retail brand, or something else that's in your wallet, in your life. So as we think about scalability and flexible design, CDPs are usually the place that we start, helping to migrate to something that is best-in-class, that's really cutting edge, that can sync up to loyalty experiences is key here. We think about things like an Adobe partner that have that flexibility, have that scale, are always investing in upgrading their platforms, their custom solutions to be able to meet the needs of the industry and the needs of the customer where they are today. So pinpointing the right solutions partner is ideal. And then investing that time and kind of migrating off to create that scalable white-label solution. Often times, Kate, as you mentioned, is really critical as we think about scale too. It's not only scale and volume or scale and personalization, but scale in a global manner as well. Fundamentally, being able to shift on a dime the experience that a user gets when they walk in thinking about that modular design, thinking about how we can serve up the right thing at the right time to the right user, wherever they are. Sounds easier than it is. But investing, taking time to really go through a thoughtful process of evaluating CDP vendors, marketing technology vendors, website platform vendors, CMS platforms, it's so critical. And then creating those custom pieces along the way where you need to, to connect those disparate systems, even if just for a time to kind of migrate on to something best in class is critical.

Billie Loewen [00:34:32] Caitlin and Kate, you are two of the smartest people I know in this space. And yet I will say that in WillowTree, we often have robust discussion and sometimes even disagreement about what's the best thing to start with, particularly when we're bringing in global audiences, because often it's really easy to just be like, North American audience is huge. Start with North America, build for them, and then scale out like that's prevailing wisdom. I'm really curious just for a moment, because I'm feeling spicy on this Wednesday afternoon, let's talk about some of the ways that we often disagree as we move from brainstorm into ideation into customer research about how to approach global loyalty and where the best place is to start.

Caitlin Watson [00:35:15] Well, Billie, hot take, I was actually just discussing with some of our design team the other day as we think about designing UI and experiences for customers, especially in the kind of fintech space that really lives on these partnerships. So bringing in offers and rewards and promotions and discounts, travel points all into one space for one customer. As we're thinking about design systems, how we label those, oftentimes you'll find when you log in to a major credit card provider of yours, there'll be a little promotion space and a little travel rewards space. And we really kind of create these artificial buckets for how we think about offers and rewards and self-label them often, in my opinion, from a very business-centric mindset of of how those things come back to us in the business, how we get those deals. But in my opinion, they are not customer-centric. I think a player that's doing this really well in this space is actually Affirm. I have a Peloton payment through them. I'm often in their app every month, paying off my Tread Plus. One of the things that they do really well is to tear down all of those silos. So there is no meaningful difference in the way that they have design systems and the way that they talk about these things. It is all brand focused and brand focused in a personalized way. So me as Caitlin, I come in and I see things about Nike, I see concert experiences. All of those are kind of missing the labels that as companies, we tend to put on them. And I think what that does is opens up that feeling of a truly personalized experience, whether it's really personalized or not, even if it's, you know, a quarter mile of the way there. What we're getting to is kind of breaking down those artificial silos that can sometimes shackle us as companies, and really connecting with the user on the thing that matters most to them, which is what they're getting in return. So an interesting place to be in, I think specifically for fintech, as we consider, but really examining where we using language or even pushing on consumer experiences or in our white label experiences, things that might just be old norms that we have as companies and folks within the industry and examining those and what they mean to the consumer, kind of pushing ourselves on being consumer-first.

Billie Loewen [00:37:40] Yeah, I love something you said there too, Caitlin, and what I continue to reinforce across all types of clients, which especially in the age of AI, language is more important than ever. Language is how humans decipher: can I trust this? Is this offer coming to me something that I can believe in. So there's of course the relevance of it, but often times language is just critical to get right. And foreign language translation, if you're offering something blanket as sort of a UI template, and then you're populating it with something personalized, is a place where we see brands get this really wrong. It could be as simple as the word "mobile" versus "mobility," which is like a US/Canada difference, for example. But it could get into like, is this person a Spanish or a Portuguese speaking customer living in Brazil or living in Portugal? And how do you make sure that you get language right? That drives meaningful conversion change and meaningful change in terms of just loyalty to a brand, and understanding, and is often very expensive to figure out how to get right. So I always think about that one on top as well is like what is going to be our language generation component here? And how are we going to create compelling content that still has a bit of that local flavor at scale? Kate, I'm curious if you have any that you're thinking about. Yeah.

Kate Gallaher [00:38:56] Well, so while I, you know, on paper and as a thesis, I completely agree with everything Caitlin said and like she said, we're teammates in this. But at the same time, like, let's not forget that there are many organizations that started well before our firm, right, that have kind of structured ways in which they need to go get business case approval for how they get funding for certain things, like everything we've been talking about, like building that unified, scalable platform, and using the right martech stack to drive future enablement. And so, we have to give a little bit of grace to some of the brands that we see out there. However, Caitlin is not wrong. She's dead-on right. But like you as a customer, so even in the B2B2C space, really thinking about that customer need like they aren't thinking about the business case that had to go be approved for to get funding to build platform X, Y and Z. And so therefore I think that there is, we have healthy contentious dialogue on what is that intersection between driving business KPIs and then also having something that is user-centric, backed by data-driven research that all of our PhDs do in the background. But it's intentionally healthy contention. And so I think that it's even kind of rethinking the KPIs that we're driving towards and ensuring that those outcomes are the right ones. Because I come from a business background, like I spent decades in consulting. And so you see at the top level just kind of what the conversation is for risk management, risk mitigation and kind of how we're thinking about ROI on a lot of the things that we've talked about. Globally, though, I think you raise a wonderful point, Billie. That part of what we see organizations, where they end up missing from where they start off is not investing — although I'm talking about kind of building the business case — but not investing early on to understand regional differentiation and regional different needs of the end customer, or even what the different KPIs should be. So there's commonalities, right? We've talked about kind of Routine, Reward and and kind of how you drive that loyalty. There's obvious commonalities that our researchers find across regions. Folks, no matter where you live, love cash back. They love focus on offers and promotions on essentials. People, regardless of region like to travel is what some of our research or early research kind of starts to find cross across geo, but ensuring that we're always bringing it back to that data, but then also kind of understanding what KPIs are we trying to drive? Because that, to Caitlin's point, can kind of shift us away from being end user centric, correct geocentric, cross-geography centric. And so sometimes those need challenge as well. Healthy challenge, of course, but challenge as well.

Billie Loewen [00:42:22] Totally. Yeah. One of the things I love so much about WillowTree is it's one of the few places where you can take an analyst and somebody who's a CDP expert, a designer, a researcher who's done global research, people who have worked on 10 or 15 different brands across different spaces. And they can say things like, "hey, when we worked on QSR, one of the offers that we saw work really well for loyalty was something geolocation based. Can we take, you know, geolocation and think about how to apply it to a major credit card." And then have a solutions architect who's really thinking about how you would create a backend system that would support that, and what would be required from engineering, so that we can even have that business perspective to say, "Hey, yeah, if we were going to reach this segment of people and we're going to size them to be this many, it would have to create a change in behavior of X to even make the investment in the labor worth it." Like, we can have those conversations relatively quickly in a small room to bring perspective. That's really deep. And, you know, unfortunately, so many brands in their day to day, they don't get to cross silos like that. They don't get to stop and consider in a really cross-functional way what might be new, different, best way to approach things. So super interesting. Caitlin and Kate, it has been wonderful to have you both today. We could talk about this forever because it is truly some of the most complicated challenges that we deal with is: how do you take an incremental but simultaneously impactful approach to thinking about some of these major challenges at scale in a global ecosystem? But I love the perspective that you both have brought to this monumental task. Thank you for being here today, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.