Case Study: Segment of One in Asset Management

Mutual funds and asset management are a great use case for n=1 personalization (aka. hyper-personalization, aka. Segment of One).

A leading technology that enables this is SOLUS.ai which was a first mover, and is currently a market leader in the AI-First category of customer engagement software. SOLUS acts as a system of intelligence that sits between users’ existing data sources and their existing engagement channels, generating individual customer-level nudges that combine recommendations, propensity scores and stacked models, rather than broad segments or static rules.

One retail brokerage firm that uses SOLUS achieved a 27% increase in open rate and a 24% increase in click-through rate on marketing emails as a result of implementing AI-powered send-time optimization. Another fund achieved big improvements in content engagement (more than 5,000 upvotes on 250 answer requests per month) from campaigns that employed smart targeting. In addition, an insurance provider that uses SOLUS achieved 3x higher conversion rates from AI-driven personalization efforts, as compared to previous targeting methods.

A very interesting use case we’ve seen is day trading. We were able to tune SOLUS to track significant price movements in real time, for stock or other asset types that each individual investor is known to be holding or tracking, or that they likely would be interested in, and SOLUS was used to send real-time alerts to those users about such price movements. Doing this had a very significant impact on user engagement, leading to very significant improvements in transactions, assets under management (AUM) and customer lifetime value.

In general, the performance boost from smarter messaging by mutual funds and asset management includes a 40-60% improvement in conversion from lump-sum investing to systematic investment plans (SIPs), and 15-25% incremental growth in overall AUM vs. segment-led efforts – even for brands with very sophisticated technology in place already. Bottom line: Asset management companies achieve 25 to 35x ROI (incremental revenue vs. cost of SOLUS), so the solution pays for itself in the first 30-60 days.

Mutual funds and asset management companies that use SOLUS, include ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund, Axis Securities and Aditya Birla Capital. Brands that have adopted SOLUS range in size from 50,000 to over 100 million customers. In each case, SOLUS acts as the core intelligence system, driving all CRM and marketing efforts, enabled by downstream integrations to each brand’s preferred systems that orchestrate CRM, email, SMS, app, website, distributor platforms and onsite communications.

As we saw, one key use case for Segment of One in asset management is n=1 fund recommendations, based on individual customer investment preferences, risk profile, existing portfolio and past investment behavior. Another important use is customer lifecycle management – automated always-on nudges from onboarding, to SIP conversions or lump-sum opportunities, to portfolio rebalancing, to dormant-investor reactivation. SOLUS is also frequently used to drive growth in assets under management (AUM) by cross-selling fund categories or by identifying customers who are ready to increase their investments, replacing other types of methods that underperform at this vs. Segment of One.

So if you’re responsible for sales or CRM in mutual funds or asset management (or for a family of such services including also insurance or banking), then feel free to get in touch, and let’s do a test!

AI Master Group is a B2B channel partner for SOLUS. Full implementation takes one week.