By Yair Tal CEO, BLEND Localization
In today’s globalized business landscape, reaching customers in international markets is essential for sustainable growth. However, successfully expanding into new markets requires more than just a basic understanding of the local language. To truly connect with customers and drive conversions—especially in the areas of finance and fintech—businesses must also understand and navigate the nuances of culture and currency.
Enter artificial intelligence (AI). With the ability to process and analyze vast amounts of data in real time, AI has become a powerful tool for businesses to accelerate their multimarket growth. By leveraging AI-driven localization, culture, and currency insights, companies can create natively-authentic user experiences that resonate with customers and drive higher conversion rates. In this article, we’ll explore how AI is revolutionizing the way businesses approach international expansion and the key benefits it provides for driving growth in the global marketplace.
Combining the Right Words with the Right Numbers
For fintech to grow with new audiences in new markets, it’s essential that prospective users feel informed of its benefits, ease of use, and security. It’s no surprise that the right messaging is key here—in other words, words. But not only words—numbers, too. Currencies, exchange fees, and how other markets process payments are confusing, and AI and automation play a critical role in putting the puzzle together. With fintech and e-commerce, currency conversions and full visibility into exchange rates and fees provide the clear picture users need to trust, understand, adopt, and feel satisfied using fintech.
Using Machine Translation for Faster, More Secure Service
The global marketplace is highly competitive. The finance industry looks to AI for the same reasons as others—to manage high volumes faster and more economically. In the past, this barrier prevented fintech companies from delivering service as quickly as possible to as many cross-border markets as possible. Today, AI helps businesses close this gap. It provides efficiencies of scale while allowing companies to optimize costs. Faster turnarounds and higher conversions. It’s a win-win scenario.
Fintech companies that use localization to grow beyond their borders benefit from AI, primarily through machine learning and machine translation. Today companies that expand into new markets must adopt the local language, subtleties, and nuances to reach customers. In most business contexts, high-volume content is usually a cause for stress or concern, but for AI, it’s useful. Through repetition, translation memories and glossaries can be built. The “machine” is trained, and finance organizations can better face the issues of Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements, UX/UI conversions, and risk management ramifications that impact the entire business and its various stakeholders. Particularly with a multinational user base, and secure, AI-driven KYC workflow is hugely important to activating a global account base, as different countries deal with numerous government identification forms, requirements, and legal processes—all in their native languages.
How Humans & AI Make Each Other Better
Humans aren’t perfect, but neither is AI (though it’s evolving and improving at a staggering clip). The best solution for finance, security, and where they converge includes both. Like any machine, AI does the heavy lifting and makes our lives easier, but it still requires regular maintenance and oversight. Tuners, testers, linguists, and developers oversee and refine the process. Frequent quality assurance testing is essential, especially as new workflows are implemented. It’s important that fintech brands and localization providers work closely to share feedback and make continuous enhancements. For speed, accuracy, and security, the best results for KYC, multimarket content, an app’s user interface, you name it—are when AI can discern with human-like nuance and when humans work with machinelike precision.
Sense & Sensibilities: Culturally Aware AI
A key advantage of AI-driven localization for finance is its ability to adapt marketing messaging and the user experience to fit the unique cultural norms and preferences of its target audience. By analyzing customer feedback, purchasing behavior, and other data points, AI can identify patterns and insights that can be used to tailor marketing messaging and UI design to better resonate with customers in new markets. For example, AI can identify cultural preferences for certain colors, images, or design elements and use this information to create a more culturally relevant UI. Additionally, AI can discern specific messaging that is more likely to resonate with customers in different regions, helping finance and fintech brands create content that is more impactful to prospects. This level of personalization enables companies to stand out in crowded markets and build trust with customers.
AI Is Here to Stay
By leveraging AI to address the challenges of language, culture, and currency, businesses can better connect with customers in international markets and deliver services with global demand, charting a course for higher conversions and sustainable growth.
As the world’s markets become increasingly interdependent, the importance of AI will only continue to grow. By embracing this technology and understanding its strengths, limitations, and opportunities, businesses can unlock new avenues for growth, increase their customer base, and deliver a superior customer experience.
