The MarTech space has made significant strides over the last year. As economies around the globe recover from the pandemic, user behavior has seen drastic changes. For the MarTech industry, this means marketers have had to get creative to engage users that are spoilt for choice, especially when it comes to mobile apps. While competing for user attention, marketers have had to customize/personalize their messaging. As such, growth marketers are placing increased emphasis on hyper-personalization and increased adoption of new-age technologies. As we look forward into 2023, here are a few MarTech leaders sharing their thoughts and experiences on the year that went by and their view on the year ahead.
Anand Jain, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at CleverTap
Marketers have always been drawn to newer technologies and have been adopting Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cloud and Big Data for some time now. And in 2022 the trend of tech adoption has only continued as marketing teams have been focusing on mobile first strategies and hyper-personalized communication with the help of technology.
With respect to trends that have ruled the marketing space in 2022, the adoption of AI/ML, hyper-personalization and marketers trying to find ways to reach and understand their customers in a cookie-less world have been prominent in the space. Consumer expectations are evolving and according to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions while 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. With the help of machine learning, marketing teams have been increasingly focusing on delivering personalized and contextual messaging to draw the attention of users. By moving away from generic (one size fits all) and focusing on contextual communication, brands have been able to build meaningful digital relationships, gain customer loyalty and subsequently increase customer retention. All this eventually has a positive impact on brand loyalty. As we step in 2023, brands will increasingly adopt omni channel marketing strategies to be able to engage with their customers across platforms, uniformly.
Additionally, while the overall tech industry witnessed a large-scale shift to consolidating functions, MarTech stack consolidation has helped ease the life of growth marketers. Consolidating the MarTech stack helps streamline and optimize operations between otherwise siloed data, reducing overall costs and increasing spend efficiency. This was a trend observed even in 2022, and will likely take center stage in 2023.
David Sewell, CTO, Synechron
Digital transformation has significantly impacted the BFSI industry in 2022. With the advancement of technology and the growing adoption of digital technologies, it is important for financial services firms to stay relevant, agile, and resilient in an ever-changing world. Migration of legacy IT solutions and culture to modern, cloud-based, agile IT solutions has gained priority across banks and other financial institutions. Financial organizations have realized the critical need to innovate and efficiently deliver new features, while ensuring that systems are reliable and secure.
Sharing some top trends that ruled the technology space in 2022
- Automation – for reducing dependencies on manual processes, enabling self-services for employees/customers, and automating ever-more-complex business processes for greater efficiency, quality, and cost effectiveness. Also introducing Artificial Intelligence to automate decision-making processes
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) – has grown in maturity and sophistication and moved to mainstream solutions for complex business problems
- AI/ML Process Automation – for automating business and operational processes to remove delivery bottlenecks and access new Application Programming Interface-connected (API) services through platform integration. API-connected systems create repeatable processes and improve quality, reusability, and governance of business processes. AI/ML-led Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools automate manually intensive human-led processes that cannot be easily replaced by API-connected systems
BFSI firms honed their focus on:
- Cloud Native architecture/applications enabling firms to move away from legacy systems and operate in the cloud, while providing for accelerated continuous delivery software toolchains
- Data Democratization for data aggregation across business lines, providing ubiquitous and frictionless data access
- Frictionless Security for security and compliance controls/policies embedded into the cloud ecosystem and delivery pipelines without data leakage
- Observability of modern service management/tracing/monitoring/event management and ‘self-healing’ for the growing complexity and speed of changes for on-prem and cloud operations
Ankur Saxena, Country Leader – India & South Asia, ACI Worldwide
India, the real-time payments poster child, led the way with over 48 billion real-time transactions recorded in 2021. Our Prime Time for Real-Time 2022 report predicts that India will continue to outperform forecasts, with real-time payments slated to grow at 33.5% CAGR, and reach 206.2 billion transactions by 2026. With the pandemic leading to the shift to contactless payments, now it’s all about innovating further to augment consumer experience. This year has seen a rise in newer ways to pay – pay with a wave, voice assisted payments, biometric or facial recognition-based payments – and they are well on their way to becoming mainstream.
But where real-time payments move freely, fraud moves even faster. The net effect: the more ways we pay and more places we do it, the more opportunities for cybercriminals to conduct fraudulent activities. Overall fraud continued to rise in 2022 with a total of 1,46,495 unified payments interface (UPI) fraudulent activities reported on the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (NCRP) during the first half of FY2022, as per the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). Reportedly, MHA said UPI frauds increased by 15.3% between the first half of FY2022. According to our Scamscope report in association with GlobalData, Authorized Push Payment (APP) fraud losses are expected to climb to $612 million in India by 2026 from $330 million in 2021— a record CAGR of 13.15%.
Additionally, the year saw an increasing number of markets setting up their domestic real time payment schemes and adopting the ISO20022 standards. There is a growing need to extend it to cross border payments, effectively helping decrease the time taken to remit payments to respective beneficiaries. Countries such as UAE, Singapore, France and Bhutan have enabled cross border Realtime payment interoperability with India.
Furthermore, with an increasingly tech-savvy customer base, technology will be crucial for organizations looking to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. Banks and financial institutions are rapidly adopting digital payments and technology trends, combined with AI and Machine Learning, resulting in increased potential to proactively fight cyber fraud. It is therefore important for the business to sustain this momentum in 2023 and to adopt relevant technologies to ensure future success.
Ritu Sharma, Country Manager, AppsFlyer India on A window into 2023 and what lies ahead for the Indian app market.
“The Indian app economy provides marketers with tremendous opportunity for growth, owing to a thriving digital mobile ecosystem, an online user base of over 900 million people, and the potential to target untapped users from Bharat. However, 83% of marketers anticipate a moderate to significant impact on their digital advertising efforts owing to privacy-centric measures by Google and Apple. Apple’s ATT update in 2021 has impacted the ecosystem on iOS devices. A year into ATT enforcement, its adoption is widespread, with 80% of apps implementing the ATT prompt. Consumers are increasingly embracing privacy, thereby impacting marketers and the efficacy of their marketing ad campaigns, targeting, personalization, reporting, and more. With SKAdNetwork 4.0 announcement, Google’s deprecation of GAID, the rollout of the Privacy Sandbox slated for 2024, and the retirement of 3rd party cookies on the web all in the same year, marketers need to prepare themselves. First-party data is the unique primary-level data collected directly from the audience. This granular data helps marketers accurately understand their Return on Ad Spends (ROAS) for user acquisition.
To assess campaign performance holistically, marketers need to combine several sources. Mobile Marketing Platforms (MMPs) offer SKAN solutions that provide marketers with aggregated data without revealing the user identity. MMPs provide Lifetime Value (LTV) data via dashboard analytics, reports, and postbacks. MMPs also offer comprehensive measurement methodologies like Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) and incrementality that don’t require user-level data, allowing marketers to measure the impact of their campaigns. For platforms to securely bring their data together for joint analysis based on defined guidelines and configurations, AppsFlyer’s Privacy Cloud is an open and trusted environment for ecosystem collaboration and innovation. Data Clean Rooms (DCRs) are a part of the Privacy Cloud and can be used to maximize insights while respecting the current privacy regulations. Testing and measuring ad creatives are essential to ensure marketers are optimizing for metrics such as Click Through Rate (CTR), Cost Per Install (CPI), and engagement. With contextual targeting, creative performance heavily relies on these metrics instead of ROAS. An ad creative performing well indicates that you’re reaching the right audience, speaking the right message, and effectively engaging with them. As privacy changes continue to transform how app marketers run their campaigns, a sustainable strategy is rooted in a consistent and iterative process.”
