Highlights from the 2025 Financial Services CER

Every year Braze surveys financial services executives from across the world to uncover insights, shared challenges, and key customer engagement trends. The CER represents a synthesis of these responses along with opportunities for financial services brands to implement practical customer engagement solutions to solve these challenges.

To understand the customer engagement challenges facing financial services brands it's important to understand the goals and structure seen throughout many of these organizations. First, among any other industry, financial services tends to be product led. When asked what was the top measure of engagement, 38% of respondents cited "product adoption", 9% more than the average across all industries. Additionally, 28% noted that customer engagement was led by Product or IT, once again the highest proportion of any industry.

This focus on product adoption with engagement led by product adjacent teams does however run the risk of product tunnel vision with messaging strategies that can sound too focused on upsells with product offerings like credit cards, loans and other financial tools that don't resonate with user's journeys. When brands are able to keep the long term vision in mind and build brand equity by shifting towards other engagement goals like LTV and retention, they can avoid these types of hard sell messages.

Another theme captured within the responses was a limitation in the tech stack hindering personalization within their messaging. Despite financial services brands possessing a trove of valuable customer data, acting on the data seems to be challenging. For example, 41% of respondents said they don't even test their customer engagement strategies.

In addition to tech limitations, connecting with users on a personal level has also been a challenge for financial institutions. Surprisingly enough, 39% of respondents mentioned that they monitor organic sentiment and engagement through community forums and groups, the highest of any industry surveyed. So with a desire to connect with users on a more emotional level, these brands face the challenge of maintaining the right tone and often can't leverage gifs and other gamified elements in their messages like other industries can. The solution then needs to be reading consumers' digital body language and ensuring they’re sending the right message at the right time. Despite this necessity though only 41% personalize messages based on real-time engagement — the lowest among all industries surveyed.

So what's holding so many financial services brands back then? As the results show, a lot of the limitations may be coming from other teams within the organization. Nearly half of finserv respondents (47%) cited general concerns from other teams as a reason they can't deliver more advanced personalization. With heavy regulations and compliance concerns it comes as no surprise that many teams within these institutions are extremely cautious about what data is being leveraged and what ideas are being broadcasted within their messaging strategy.

In summary, personalization for these brands needs to rely heavily on segmentation and real-time personalization while also being able to navigate the compliance requirements that are often unique to this industry. With the right marketing tools to drive this strategy brands can focus more on messaging that builds brand equity with every interaction, and meets customers where they are.