7 Types of financial market personalisation

Give your users a more relevant and engaging experience by personalising the financial markets.

What does it mean to personalise the financial markets for a customer? What options do you have and what data do you need. Here are some of the best ways to provide a personalised view of the markets for every customer. If you can do these well you are miles ahead in terms of customer engagement, understanding and lifetime value. Personalisation is all about controlling the flow of information from the market to the user - lets get stuck in.

Entity

All financial market coverage concerns an Entity. There are many different types including instruments and securities (equities, commodities, foreign exchange, indicies, crypto), economic events (Non Farm Payroll, Interest Rates, Retail Sales) and Topics (Ukraine, China, Covid, ESG, Green Tech, Batteries). Market content and data such as news, analysis or financials is released and will impact price. Each user over time will develop a unique set of market and interests which will present as a list of Entities ranked by importance to the user and is updated in real time.

Entity based personalisation ensures that you only show information to the user that is relevant to their demonstrated interests. In the same way showing trainers or dress ads while on Facebook will be targeted to user behaviour, so too should be news about Nvidia or Barclays.

Velocity

If you have developed a financial experience platform you are really creating the capability to control information about an entity such as an instrument (Nvidia) Topic (Ukraine) or Economic Event (Non farm Payroll). The Entity is the ‘what’ and the Velocity is a good example of the ‘how’. For example you might be able to illustrate how user engagement drops off when content items in a feed exceed 30 per minute and they increase at closer to 15 per minute. Ideally, true personalisation will be done on a per user basis with some being more engaged at different content item velocity than others.

Analysis

When analysing markets there is generally two types, technical and fundamental that is used to asses a potential trade. Technical will likely have pricing data and a price chart and fundamental will reference some underlying information about the instrument that might support its value. A user might not be a technical trader and therefore prefer longer economic or company performance over a technical chart analysis and therefore be more engaged with more fundamental analysis in their financial experience than technical.

Format

The financial information ecosystem comes in many different shapes and sizes. Being able to filter content format will enable personalisation for users who prefer long form over short form or video over charts for example. This i the difference between a user having more long form articles in their feeds or tweets.

When leveraging Generative AI in your platform this can be a more in depth consideration because you will be wanting to creating or generating the optimal format for the user - for example 500 characters and highlighted entities might not work as well as 250 characters for some users - generative AI gives you much more control over content format.

Source

A good Financial Experience will be ingesting and personalising as much high quality financially relevant information as possible, however it is often the case that a user will have a preference between one provider and another - lets say Benzinga versus Dow Jones. User interaction will begin to show preference towards source and unfavourable providers should be filtered out of the financial experience.

Important note here on the ROI of a financial experience platform where you can personalise every content item. You are able to determine if each source is performing - eg engaging the user because you will be able to determine at the content item level if a user has interacted and acted on the information.

Channel

In the previous we have discussed modifying the flow and the nature of information from the markets to the user based on the user behaviour (market interests and preferences. We can also personalise and optimise the financial experience for each user on the channel, such as the trading platform on desktop versus mobile app. Good examples here involve including preferences for sources or generative AI lengths in the personal mobile experience of the user such as a topic feed such as Airlines in a mobile friendly tab.

Market

A more obvious personalisation is across global markets - such as being a US or European trader. While technically an Entity based personalisation strategy the rolled up view for only including Entities for a market such as Japan or Germany is very effective as most user will want to focus on a specific market.

Personalise Everything

Almost all of our digital experiences are personalised for improved engagement by the provider, except for financial market customer and user experiences. By adopting some of the above methods you can cut the market noise and engage the user in risks and opportunities that they are interested in.

Cheers

Adam