How Focus closes the data divide between branch and app – and why it matters

Financial institutions have come a long way in delivering insightful and well-designed customer experiences through digital channels. As the quality of data improves and interfaces become more intuitive, customers now benefit from a more holistic view of their finances, smoother journeys, and even the occasional moment of delight. Banking apps and web platforms are steadily reaching a point where customer service is available in a seamless and satisfying way.

Yet, this digital progress can inadvertently create new challenges elsewhere. When customers are empowered through advanced digital tools, they come to expect the same level of information and capabilities from the people they interact with: customer service representatives, branch advisors, relationship managers, tellers, loan officers, and others. Too often, the remarkable insights and features available in a banking app are not mirrored in conversations or meetings with staff.

Importantly, the role of quality service in human interactions remains central for all financial institutions. Some put a stronger emphasis on it, sometimes out of necessity due to the cost and complexity of digital transformation. For others, in-person engagement complements robust digital offerings. Despite the rise of digital-only institutions, nearly half of US customers still prefer to conduct their financial business in person. In fact, just 3 of the largest banks in the US intend to open a combined 870 new branches by 2030 – a reminder that human connection still retains its relevance in banking.

This leads to a complex question: how can institutions ensure that human interactions are as empowering as their digital channels? While many customer-facing actions such as blocking cards, opening accounts, or approving loans are now routine in-person and online, access to deeper insights and a truly holistic picture of the customer remains elusive for frontline employees. It is common for customers to see transaction details and financial insights in their app that staff themselves cannot access, creating inconsistency and missed opportunities for meaningful engagement.

At Bud, we see this gap firsthand. Many of our clients have leveraged our transaction enrichment, AI-driven segmentation, and embeddable personal finance tools to enhance their digital channels. Increasingly though, they express a desire to also extend these same insights to the wide range of roles within their organisations that interact with customers in more traditional ways.

This is precisely why we developed Focus, a single customer view product designed to aggregate insights from across the Bud platform and deliver them in an actionable, accessible format for anyone who serves customers directly.

Focus is built to support a diverse set of roles, each with unique information needs and opportunities for impact. For contact centres, it’s about achieving parity with leading digital channels: Customer service representatives gain instant access to the enriched transactions, product information, features, AI-driven suggestions, and concise customer profiles that their customers already experience online. For personal and relationship bankers, Focus saves hours of manual analysis, surfacing not just financial information but also a broader spectrum of insights, covering lifestyle, spending patterns, and geographic trends derived from transaction data. The platform generates natural language summaries, suggests conversation scenarios, and makes relevant answers instantly available, enabling every discussion to be informed by real numbers and context.

In more specialized scenarios, such as financial planning, debt consolidation, or risk assessment, analysts and underwriters can use Focus to obtain tailored summaries and an immediate, deep understanding of a customer’s actual situation, going far beyond topline figures or credit scores.

In creating Focus, Bud aims to bridge the persistent gap between engaging digital customer experiences and the information needs of employees across the entire portfolio. By unifying actionable insights through Bud’s leading financial data consolidation and enrichment capabilities, Focus empowers institutions to deliver seamless, data-driven service wherever and however customers choose to engage.

Get in touch to find out how to get started with Focus in your organization.