Wells Fargo Drives AI Transparency with Explainability Tool

The Business Issue

Wells Fargo serves over 40 million digital and in-branch visitors each month through their Customer Engagement Engine. While they recognized the promise of their decision engine technology for delivering relevant, timely customer experiences, they struggled to explain transparently and simply how it worked. The bank needed a way to demonstrate to senior leaders and business partners how the decision engine made real-time selections for millions of daily customer interactions.

Additionally, Wells Fargo wanted access to optimization data to continue growing revenue and improving customer outcomes.

The Solution

Wells Fargo partnered with Pega to develop a groundbreaking industry capability: the Explainability tool. Built on hyper-granular data, this solution captures how each conversation competes for every single customer interaction, providing unprecedented insights into why specific conversations are chosen for each customer.

The implementation involved structuring and recording an entirely new dataset at incredible scale - 32 billion individualized records monthly. This data captures the details of each customer's point-in-time eligible offers for each decision channel and the mechanics of why each was presented or not presented to customers.

On top of the raw data, Wells Fargo built a suite of analytical tools, including their "Win Rate Dashboard" to highlight improvement areas for campaign managers and channel leaders. Their simulation tool allows them to craft new and improved strategies in a fraction of the time of a live market test, enabling rapid optimization of model propensity, financial value, and business weights.

The Results

The Explainability tool transformed Wells Fargo's marketing operations and delivered significant business impact. Incremental channel revenue increased by 40% due to insights generated from the new explainability capabilities.

Beyond financial results, the tool revolutionized how Wells Fargo runs marketing channels, enabling improved targeting and segmentation, enhanced personalization of creative variants, and prevention of ad blindness. Most importantly, it demystified the "black box" of AI decision-making for business partners, providing the credibility needed to make optimal customer decisions on behalf of the business.

By demonstrating transparency with AI, Wells Fargo showcased a replicable model that gained enterprise adoption and enabled expansion of this technology to new channels across the organization.