How hyper-personalisation could help us all live better lives
Margaret Doyle, Chief Insights Officer and Partner in Financial Services at Deloitte, on the benefits of hyper-personalisation - and how it could help us all to live better lives in terms of our health, carbon footprint and other aspirations.
“Hyper-personalisation is about finding ways of merging behavioural science with data and analytics, to help the user be the person they want to be.”
We’re at a point now where we’re seeing more happening in terms of personalisation – and even hyper-personalisation. But what do we mean by that?
Let’s look at how you could set life objectives, and where banks and payments companies could provide tools to help you achieve your goals.
We already see this type of personalisation working in other domains. Britain’s NHS, for example, has a range of tools to help people live more healthily. It offers various apps for individuals to measure how healthy they are now and to set personalised goals, whether to quit smoking, cut down on alcohol, lose weight or move more. And it also offers apps that provide guidance on goal-setting, and on instilling healthy habits.
In the commercial world, one audio-book provider rewards listeners with virtual badges. Although, arguably, listening to at least three different titles in one day, to earn a ‘Silver Dabbler Badge’ is a mark of dilettantism rather than curiosity.
Let’s say you want to help save our planet. Hyper-personalisation could mean an app that provides the equivalent of calorie counting for carbon emissions, using your spending patterns to provide the underlying data to measure them.
These sorts of tools could record things like when you drove a car, or whether you took the train or bus, or walked or cycled, and calculate how much carbon dioxide and other pollutants these transport choices generated.
It could also see that you booked a weekend plane ticket to Rome, and which airline you were flying with, and how that airline performs compared to others in terms of its emissions. It might also be able to advise how much carbon emissions were generated depending on which class you flew.
This sort of data would allow you to get a more complete view of how your everyday decisions and choices interact with your wider life objectives. The finance industry – through your bank or credit card provider – could play a big part in helping you achieve those objectives.
Hyper-personalisation is about finding ways of merging behavioural science with data and analytics, to help the user be the person they want to be. Banks, at the moment, can see a lot of what you do, but the next step could be about pushing it further.
Customers could set objectives for themselves, based on their current situation and their aspirations – whether they want to have a big wedding celebration, buy a home, have children, support an aging parent, and have a comfortable retirement.
Using banks’ treasure trove of customer data, combined with the customers’ own objectives, and with machine learning offering insights as to personal habits, hyper-personalisation tools can enable the finance industry to help individuals meet their goals.
Banks and payment companies could help us all achieve our life goals – both short and long-term.
We now know so much more about behavioural science and have so much computing ability in terms of storage, accessibility on the cloud, and analytics. Harnessing all this information could really help us to live our lives better.