Dynamic Customer Embeddings for Financial Service Applications
This work addresses the need for better customer insights in financial services, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing embedding methods for a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding customer behavior in financial services by proposing Dynamic Customer Embeddings (DCE), a framework that uses digital activity and financial context to learn customer representations, resulting in performance improvements in predicting customer intent, call center calls, and fraud detection.
As financial services (FS) companies have experienced drastic technology driven changes, the availability of new data streams provides the opportunity for more comprehensive customer understanding. We propose Dynamic Customer Embeddings (DCE), a framework that leverages customers' digital activity and a wide range of financial context to learn dense representations of customers in the FS industry. Our method examines customer actions and pageviews within a mobile or web digital session, the sequencing of the sessions themselves, and snapshots of common financial features across our organization at the time of login. We test our customer embeddings using real world data in three prediction problems: 1) the intent of a customer in their next digital session, 2) the probability of a customer calling the call centers after a session, and 3) the probability of a digital session to be fraudulent. DCE showed performance lift in all three downstream problems.