Composable CDPs in Financial Services: Empowering Marketing

Marketers at financial services companies have their work cut out for them. Their companies have a wealth of data, but that data is often fragmented among different systems and divisions, and protected-class data has a wide range of restrictions on how it can be used for different product lines.

Some of the most effective companies in the financial sector are preparing their strategy for long-term success by centralizing first-party data in the Snowflake AI Data Cloud for Financial Services. One way companies can empower marketers to act on that data is with a composable customer data platform (CDP). A composable CDP governs data and can limit the marketers’ access to the data they’re allowed to use, reducing compliance risk while enabling marketers to move faster and more confidently with their trusted data. 

In this blog post, we’ll explain how a composable CDP works and how it can empower financial services marketers to fully leverage their data and AI to improve performance. 

How a composable CDP works on the AI Data Cloud

Snowflake is one of the best places to centralize and govern business data from transactional processing systems, customer relationship management platforms (CRMs), data marts and more. Composable CDPs enable you to turn that data into action to power marketing, sales, advertising and operations within Snowflake AI Data Cloud. Based on your use cases and existing technologies, you can choose which CDP functions to employ to complement your AI Data Cloud:

  • Data activation: Build audiences and sync customers and their attributes to email and messaging platforms, CRMs, advertising platforms, operational tools such as Slack or any other end destination that powers your business. 

  • AI decisioning: Continuously experiment to find the best message that moves each customer to take action. Automatically personalize messages, channels and journeys based on historical data and customer interactions. 

  • Campaign intelligence: Analyze marketing campaigns across channels and platforms. Turn insights into actions by creating new audience segments directly from self-serve dashboards. 

  • Event tracking: Collect user behaviors from your website or mobile app and store those actions directly in the AI Data Cloud.

  • Identity resolution: Unify data into 360-degree profiles for customers, households or other entities that matter to your business.

As you examine this architecture, it’s important to emphasize again that Composable CDPs are also unbundled and modular, meaning you can choose which capabilities to add to your tech stack that align with your specific use cases and needs. Regardless of which features you need, the job of a composable CDP is to empower business teams to make use of their customer data in their AI Data Cloud to deliver impactful experiences.

Why a composable CDP is purpose-built for financial services

Composable CDPs can gather, unify and activate data all from within Snowflake. This is a marked contrast from CDPs that are siloed from the AI Data Cloud that require copying data between systems.

Centering CDP on the AI Data Cloud offers several critical benefits for financial services companies.

Enable marketers to use data ethically and with strict governance. Many financial products are subject to additional regulations about how “protected class” data, such as age and gender, can and cannot be used in marketing. A composable CDP makes it easy to leverage the power of built-in governance in Snowflake to manage how all data can be used; this therefore enables marketers to act freely, because they know the data they have access to is permitted by their company. 

  • Snowflake Horizon provides a built-in framework for data security, compliance and privacy management for all data stored within Snowflake, for use cases such as marketing campaign activation via Hightouch.

  • A composable CDP does not require any data storage; when brands build audiences, analyze split tests, orchestrate journeys and more, all of that data and analysis can occur within the governed AI Data Cloud. 

  • Composable CDPs support streamlining of governance processes that manage marketer workflows. These can include inheriting global data access controls for different user groups, rules for which types of data can be sent to different marketing and operational destinations, and data usage filters based on features like protected-class PII and the status of each user’s opt-in consent to marketing messages.

Bring your own schema. Established financial institutions have a robust existing set of data with their own schema or semantic layer. For example, data may vary between product types, such as personal credit lines and investment accounts, or based on customer relationships with a personal adviser or online banking. While SaaS tools that aren’t integrated with the AI Data Cloud often have rigid data models that only perform in simple “user” and “event” data models, a composable CDP can utilize data in whatever way you’ve already organized it in Snowflake, allowing you to rapidly act across product lines and your company’s unique entities.

Use all of your data. Financial institutions collect and manage data in many transactional processing systems, CRMs, data marts and more. Some large institutions may buy redundant SaaS tools or multiple CDPs that operate on the silo of data relevant for each division. In contrast, the AI Data Cloud could centralize all financial services data in supported regions. Rather than working with a silo of data, marketers can use a composable CDP to build audiences and analyze results directly from their source of truth in the AI Data Cloud. 

Leverage native machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). Data teams at financial services companies often build robust ML and AI models in-house, which is becoming even more impactful with the rapid adoption of Snowflake Cortex AI. Marketers can use a composable CDP to turn model outputs into action, building audiences for campaigns based on predicted customer behaviors, propensities and more. Composable CDPs may bring their own features for AI, such as Hightouch’s Snowflake-native AI Decisioning, which operates in the AI Data Cloud without copying any data. This enables marketers to define goals, set strategic guardrails and leverage AI to automatically optimize and personalize campaigns for each customer, all while continuously experimenting and optimizing over time to maximize impact.

Proof points: Financial services companies driving results with a composable CDP

Chime

Who they are: Chime is a financial technology company founded on the premise that basic banking services should be helpful, easy and free. Founded in 2012, Chime serves the 80% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and offers a product experience designed to help their members make it to their next payday or rebuild their credit without monthly service fees, overdraft fees or minimum balance requirements.

Who they market to: Individual consumers in the market for online banking, credit cards, savings accounts and more. 

What they’re using a composable CDP to do: Build audiences in the AI Data Cloud to automatically sync to paid media platforms for both retargeting and suppression. 

Outcome: Chime improved performance marketing match rates by 20%, and marketers can create and deploy a new campaign to all paid media channels within 20 minutes (as of August 2023).

Source

Ramp

Who they are: Ramp is the first and only finance automation platform and corporate card designed to help businesses spend less time and money. With over 1,000 integrations with financial products like NetSuite and QuickBooks, Ramp makes it easy to issue corporate charge cards, make bill payments, automate accounting processes and monitor expenses.

Who they market to: Accounting teams at other companies.

What they’re using a composable CDP to do: Power data-driven marketing with A/B testing in automated outbound emails and paid media campaigns. Ramp also keeps data aligned across teams by using a composable CDP to trigger Slack notifications for key events and to update records in Salesforce and HubSpot.

Outcome: Migrating to the AI Data Cloud reduced Ramp’s data platform costs by 20% and increased data transformation speed by 33%; the personalization powered by a composable CDP is now responsible for 25% of Ramp’s sales pipeline (as of December 2022). 

Source

Power your marketing with the AI Data Cloud

Ultimately, a composable CDP grants marketers self-serve access to all of their company data in Snowflake. They can act confidently because they are working on trusted source-of-truth data that is automatically filtered and governed by their company. They can achieve better results because they have access to complete data and can fully leverage AI and ML to optimize their campaigns.

To learn more, please read about the Snowflake AI Data Cloud for Financial Services or try our quickstart: Marketing Orchestration and Campaign Intelligence with Hightouch and Snowflake.

LATEST ARTICLE

See Our Latest

Blog Posts

admin February 11th, 2025

Credit: Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority An upcoming Google Messages update will remove the convenient SIM selector from the compose […]

admin February 10th, 2025

NAKIVO, the leading backup and disaster recovery solution provider, recently launched agentless backup support for Proxmox virtual machine data to […]

admin February 5th, 2025

AI is here to stay. While 2023 brought wonder and 2024 ushered in widespread experimentation, 2025 will mark the year […]