Deutsche Bank's Mohit Gupta on martech and the power of social

Taking on the role of head of marketing APAC and global head of social media, Corporate Bank at Deutsche Bank was Mohit Gupta. He joined in September 2019, after a stint with Standard Chartered Bank. He was the global head of retail bank marketing, under the wealth solutions and priority banking department at Standard Chartered Bank.

Gupta also brings with him expertise across various global banks as well as a brief stint with WPP in his early days. He has spent 15 years helming leadership roles within global banks. Gupta shares with Marketing the disruption in the banking industry and tying it in with marketing. 

Marketing: What does disruption mean in your industry?

Gupta: Banks are at a crossroad. Fast-paced innovation and new technologies such as blockchain, API and open platform banking, robotic process automation and instant payments are disrupting the market and the way we also interact with clients from a marketing perspective. This trend is likely to continue in the new decade. 

Marketing: How can marketing teams at banks tackle future threats? 

Gupta: The biggest threats to banking in 2020 and beyond are complacency and the unwillingness to change the way banking has been done for decades. Marketing can play a strong role in reshaping the old ways of thinking and breaking the shackles. Banks are largely complex organisations with lots of decision makers and differing viewpoints. But marketers would be well-served by making the customer’s voice through research the final deciding factor. We must leverage research and insights to take away subjectivity in decision-making.

The financial industry also needs to break down walls between departments that have differing goals. Making customer satisfaction the ultimate goal, marketing can encourage communication and collaboration with sales, data scientists, research and customer service to develop a content marketing strategy that truly reflects the needs of the customer. Marketers are also bringing technologies together in a “martech stack” to create an integrated series of tools for data acquisition, email, social media, search engine optimisation (SEO), and more. These can allow banks to cast a wider net and build customer relationships across multiple channels simultaneously.

Meanwhile, data analytics driving a hyper-personalised banking experience will only grow as consumers want their financial institutions to be like the Amazons or Zaloras of the world, showing them relevant products and services. Financial marketers need to leverage the gold mine of data available to them to understand customer behaviour and create hyperpersonalised offers for that “wow” moment. 

Marketing: Where do you see marketing in the next five years? 

Gupta: A marketer today may not recognise the marketing team of tomorrow. I think moving forward, there will be a consolidation of martech. In 2011, the chief marketing technologist blog found 150 marketing technologies available. In 2019, that figure had jumped to a whopping 7,040. My belief is that as marketers, we are losing the human touch and focus on customers in this tech race. Consolidation will take place and only those true marketing platforms that humanise digital experiences and blend services will remain. AI will also drive more personalised datadriven content. Google today uses AI to predict the next word you will type. So does your iPhone.

But in the next five years, AI has the potential to commercially create content at scale, recommend content strategies based on data and hyper-personalise them. The rise of voice search optimisation is also a trend I am excited about. “Voice-activated search assistants are becoming more prevalent. The voice technology market is projected to hit US$128 billion by 2024, according to WARC.  This is having a profound impact on the SEO landscape. Optimising your page to better match the way that people are searching will only lead to more SEO success in the future. 

The article first appeared in the January-February edition of The Futurist edition.

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