Today, more than ever, the banking sector is facing a more demanding, informed, and rapidly changing customer base. The challenge is no longer just to acquire customers, but to retain them, personalise their financial journey, and intervene at precisely the moments when support or engagement has the greatest impact. To achieve this, platforms such as Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have become essential, serving as a foundation for deeper customer understanding, smarter interactions, and more seamless omnichannel experiences.
According to Luis Moreno Sanz, Head of Digital Technology at NTT DATA Benelux & France, there are five major challenges that are defining the future of banking in Europe:
Challenge 1: Data Silos
Due to legacy systems and the sheer size of most financial institutions, customer data is dispersed across channels, regions, and product lines.
CDPs unify this disparate data into a single customer profile, enabling:
- Consistent experiences across borders, channels, and business units
- Faster deployment of personalised services
This supports competitiveness and aligns with the EU’s focus on more integrated, customer centric banking.
Challenge 2: Regulatory Compliance & Risk Management Demands
With rising capital and conduct requirements, banks need precise, accessible data.
CDPs help by:
- Enabling better tracking of customer vulnerability and financial difficulty indicators
- Providing transparent data lineage and governance
- Improving risk modelling using unified, high quality datasets
This supports evolving regulatory expectations, including Consumer Duty, borrower treatment rules, and operational resilience frameworks.
Challenge 3: The need for hyper-personalisation and real-time engagement
In a market where customer expectations are shifting quickly, CDPs allow banks to:
- Detect real time behavioral triggers
- Personalize financial recommendations
- Deliver timely interventions (e.g., credit offers, fraud warnings, savings nudges)
This directly addresses customer volatility and the need for timely, high-impact engagement—especially important as digital channels replace physical branches.
Challenge 4: Ongoing Digital Transformation
Many banks face brittle, fragmented data infrastructure that limits AI adoption.
CDPs provide:
- A scalable, clean data foundation
- Real time customer insight streams
- Improved training datasets for AI models (e.g., personalisation, risk scoring, anomaly detection)
This accelerates transformation and supports new digital business models such as open finance or embedded banking.
Challenge 5: Margin and Profit Pressures
Many European banks face profitability headwinds due to stagnating growth and regulatory constraints.
CDPs help improve economics by:
- Reducing acquisition cost through better targeting
- Increasing share of wallet through tailored cross sell
- Lowering service cost via automation and personalised digital journeys
- Reducing credit losses by improving predictive insights
Together, these enhancements help banks maintain profitability even when macroeconomic conditions are challenging.
Enhancing CDPs with AI and Marketing Automation for Smarter Customer Engagement
As financial institutions work to unlock greater value from unified customer data, AI and marketing automation are becoming more important. When layered on top of a CDP, these technologies transform customer data into intelligent, real‑time engagements that meet the rising expectation for speed, relevance, and personalisation.
For Moreno Sanz, AI-powered analytics allow banks to:
- Predict customer needs through behavioural modelling, enabling proactive offers such as pre‑approved credit, investment recommendations, or tailored financial advice.
- Detect risk signals earlier, strengthening fraud prevention, vulnerability monitoring, and credit assessment.
- Optimise omni-channel engagement, ensuring each customer receives the right message, on the right channel, at the right moment.
Marketing automation further enhances this by orchestrating personalised journeys at scale. Instead of manual, campaign-based communication, banks can now deploy:
- Always-on onboarding flows
- Automated retention and cross-sell journeys
- Behaviour-triggered service nudges or reminders
- Tailored compliance-driven communications
Together, AI and marketing automation transform the CDP from a data repository into an active intelligence engine—one that improves customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and revenue growth while strengthening regulatory accountability. For financial institutions such as BNP Paribas, navigating increased competition and complex customer needs makes such capabilities no longer optional—they are foundational to modern digital banking.
NTT DATA: An experienced provider of CDP planning and AI technology automation and enablement.