Every organization wants to be customer centric but far fewer achieve it. Having the right technology solution is critical, but does not guarantee success.
I’m going to describe what separates successful customer engagement transformations from those that fail, with proof from three banks that have accomplished it.
At PegaWorld, I had the opportunity to speak with three client leaders: Bruce Arnold of Citizens Bank, Josh Bain of Virgin Money (now part of Nationwide), and Lisa Marchant of National Australia Bank (NAB). They shared how they made a transformational shift from legacy campaigns to one-to-one customer engagement with Pega Customer Decision Hub™. Their stories vary but the pattern is evident.
Unlock value through organizational alignment
The most successful banks treat AI-powered customer engagement as an opportunity to revolutionize business strategy, rather than a technology project. Each had a clear ambition: NAB wanted to become Australia's most customer-centric company, Virgin Money aimed to be a digital-first challenger bank, and Citizens wanted to drive unified customer communications across every interaction.
Extensive stakeholder and executive engagement and alignment is critical: Josh at Virgin Money created a cross-functional squad spanning product, marketing, legal, finance, and customer value teams. Lisa at NAB paired strong executive sponsorship with early adopter business units to build momentum through quick wins. Bruce at Citizens aligned teams through shared goals, governance, and common metrics.
In every case, alignment came from bringing the right people together around customer outcomes, proving value early, and giving stakeholders confidence that AI- powered decisioning would help them overcome their challenges and achieve their goals.
The results are clear. NAB runs 530 live actions with a 40% engagement uplift. Virgin Money drove a 10% lift in engagement and cross-product holding, a six-fold return on investment, and $1.2 billion in deposit growth. Citizens delivers millions of personalized communications and lifted click-through rates by 10–20%.
Trust is earned through transparency
In highly regulated industries like Banking, handing decision-making to a centralized AI “brain” feels like losing control. Banks can’t afford that. They need to be absolutely sure that every communication and offer they make meets their regulatory obligations.
So how did the panellists earn trust within their organizations?
They brought risk, compliance, and model governance partners in from day one, demonstrating how Pega’s unique combination of transparent AI, business guardrails, forward-looking simulation, and retrospective reporting supports responsible AI. They showed how the AI made each decision, using Customer Decision Hub’s extensive auditing capabilities to explain the data models used in every decision. Predictable AI is what makes autonomy acceptable, delivering better outcomes without taking away control.
Start with the right use case
All three banks started where customer interactions are richest and occur in real time, ensuring the models learned fast and delivered value early.
Lisa highlighted how 98% of their customer interactions take place through digital channels, combining that with home lending (a high-value use case) was the obvious choice. Bruce took this approach a stage further, starting with both mobile and branch to cover two high-volume and critical channels to prove business benefit. At Virgin Money, Josh’s team made a similar decision, focusing on their mobile application as it gave them the largest reach as quickly as possible.
This enabled the panelists to quickly demonstrate business benefit and cement support across their organization.
Don’t wait for the perfect data to start
Accurate data is really important, but it’s important to be pragmatic. Bruce focused on perfecting the data intake process and pipeline, knowing that Citizens will be continually adding data. Bruce's rationale was spot-on, “Waiting for perfect data is the most common way to stall. Data doesn't need to be perfect, we're constantly adding data.”
NAB had an ambition to progress as fast as possible, but they were midway through to moving to a new data lakehouse architecture. Lisa’s solution was to leverage what was available at that point in time while keeping an eye on the future state, knowing that it would be easy to modify the data ingested in the future.
Start with what you have, get the process right, then it’s going to be straightforward to extend the centralized decisioning customer insight cache as you pull in new use cases, product lines, or uncover new customer features.
The panel’s top advice
The bank leaders agreed on what is behind long term success. Bruce’s advice is, “Stay out of the box, limit the customization,” and “Have a strong data discipline and experimentation culture.” Lisa agrees, “Use the tools as intended and do not over-configure anything.” Get people aligned. As Josh put it, “[It’s about] cross-functional collaboration, agreement on outcomes, and clarity on who makes the final decision.” When asked whether this was about operational savings or customer value, all three answered instantly “customer value.” And to continue momentum, keep telling the value story.
In the end, AI-powered engagement enables organizations to treat every customer individually, with empathy and relevance. It can deliver transformational business benefits, running into tens or hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Building support and getting your organization aligned behind customer centricity is the key to unlocking those benefits.
What’s next
The lesson from Citizens, Virgin Money, and NAB is surprisingly consistent. Success came from organizational alignment, trust, disciplined execution, and relentless focus on customer value. Technology enabled the change, but it was people that accelerated it. We can provide solutions to drive that engagement. Pega Customer Engagement Blueprint helps teams build a shared vision. Pega Customer Engagement Studio, the new agentic experience for Pega Customer Decision Hub, takes marketers from brief to live campaign in a fraction of the time with governance built in with Pega's Predictable AI. Pega Customer Decision Hub delivers the decisioning and next best action while Pega Customer Engagement Studio amplifies it. With them, you can ensure that your organization decides to leverage it.