In the competitive landscape of modern banking, delivering personalised customer experiences is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity. Yet many established financial institutions find themselves constrained by their data infrastructure. With customer records spanning decades, siloed and incompatible legacy systems, and the constant influx of new digital touchpoints, creating a unified customer view seems like chasing the horizon.

The Data Dilemma in Banking

The typical established bank faces several critical data challenges:

Historical data exists in multiple formats: Customer records scattered across systems implemented over multiple decades, often with inconsistent formatting and identification methods, making integration particularly difficult.

The systems don’t talk to each other: The average bank maintains 10-15 separate core systems that don't naturally communicate with each other. Retail banking, wealth management, mortgage services, and credit cards often operate as distinct data islands.

Legacy technology and regulatory requirements add complexity: Strict compliance requirements create additional hurdles for data integration and usage.

Organisational Silos: Beyond technical limitations, departmental boundaries often reinforce data isolation.

The scale of these challenges often leads to big transformation projects. With typical "rip and replace" solutions costing billions and spanning many years, many financial institutions remain stuck with suboptimal customer engagement.

Starting Small: Incremental Approaches to Customer Data Unification

At Merkle, we bring our Data, Technology, Strategy and Design capabilities together to develop solutions that solve our client’s most pressing and complex challenges. Our deep experience in composable technology ecosystems, and our industry specialisation and knowledge, allows us to be a partner that drives pragmatic and phased transformation for adaptive organizations by modernizing technology to create competitive advantage

Organisations don't always need to solve their entire data infrastructure challenge at one go. Here are practical steps that can deliver value while working toward larger transformation:

Purpose-specific data recipes and focus on high-value use cases

Rather than attempting to build a complete 360-degree view immediately, focus on building data sets that solve specific problems. Begin with initiatives that deliver tangible business value quickly. 

“The most valuable data strategy isn’t about collecting everything but collecting purposefully. Begin with clear use cases, then gather and map only what enables those specific outcomes. In data, strategic restraint isn’t just most efficient but also leads to more actionable insights.” Zinia Bhattacharya, Braze Practice Lead, Merkle

Implement modern integration layers

API gateways and middleware solutions can create connections between legacy systems and modern engagement tools without replacing them. These can be implemented incrementally, starting with the most critical customer data points.

Adopt flexible customer ID resolution systems

Identity resolution can serve as a critical bridge in financial services, connecting disparate customer records across legacy systems, by creating consistent customer identifiers that link interactions from multiple sources-key to delivering personalised experiences

Select tools designed for data flexibility 

The most effective modern engagement platforms are designed to work with imperfect data environments, offering progressive enhancement as data quality improves.

Modern customer engagement platforms like Braze provide customers with a scalable, extensible architecture to consolidate or complement their existing technologies. Underpinned by composable design principles, each layer of the Braze tech stack can operate standalone, or by interfacing with external tools, giving customers a full range of choice. 

Conclusion: Pragmatic progression

The journey from fragmented legacy systems to a unified customer view doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. By adopting an incremental approach focused on delivering business value, banks can enhance customer engagement today while building toward more comprehensive transformation.