Episode 10: The Intersection of Financial Services and Gen AI with Jon Capaldo

0.03: 

Welcome to Motivation AI Matters, a podcast designed to help you channel the power of language to inspire action. I’m Lisa Spira here to explore the language that drives business outcomes through the lens of what makes language good, because words matter. 

0:21:  

Today’s guest is John Capaldo, a Vice President at Persado, overseeing strategic account sales, management and expansion, primarily focused on creating value for large enterprise clients and financial services. John holds a BBA in finance from George Washington University with a concentration in corporate finance and capital markets. His interest in finance predates his work at Persado and his interest in communication has only grown during his tenure here. I’m excited to share his perspective on the value of language, technology for financial services. 

0:58: 

Welcome, John. 

1:00: 

It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me today. 

1:02: 

It’s great to have you here. So I guess we’ll just dive right in. Persado has a long track record, creating value for financial institutions and you recently returned to Persado after some time away. What was it that pulled you back? 

1:19: 

I am what is considered in the corporate world as a boomerang as I have gone out and, and worked elsewhere and I’ve subsequently come back. And along the way, my role has been fairly focused on the financial services sector and in seeing what else was out there, I stayed in tech but worked in a, in a couple of different types of product offerings. As you so eloquently put it with the podcast introduction, words, matter, communication is such a huge piece of our lives. Every single day. 

1:57: 

We spend over 95% of our time communicating and whether that is at work or at home or even what I think people fail to realize internally with ourselves. You are always communicating, you are always positioning, you are always talking. And again, it can be explicitly implicitly loud or soft, doesn’t really matter and remembering and realizing the impact that we can create that we can assist with. We are part of here at Persado. 

2:27: 

I just find that fascinating and I don’t think I had that drive, that motivation, that yearning to learn in some of the other spaces that I was working in. 

2:38: 

They were certainly very exciting, very cutting edge forward thinking and fast moving. But at the end of the day, the way in which we communicate and the reasons as to why people engage is really powerful and Persado has not lost sight of that. 

2:53: 

That’s what drew me into Persado as well. The fact that this is a tool to make communication more effective and I just thought, wow, there’s so much value in communication. I want to help build something that does that. 

3:08: 

So when you speak about Persado, is that what you focus on? Is that the message or the value proposition that you like to talk about with financial institutions? What’s been the most impactful way that you communicate what Persado does? 

3:25: 

Yeah, I love that question. When you think about Persado and the space that we’ve been in, I don’t want to say playing in, but the space that we are aligned to, I guess we are all playing in the sandbox, right? But the space that we are playing in and how it relates to Generative AI, which is the world’s hottest buzzword of our time right now. I’m sure we’ll talk more about this later. What I really see though is Persado’s way of communication and what I think drives engagement, whether it’s prospects or current customers is how we are known in the market and positioned as not Gen AI, but actually Motivation AI. And what does that mode stand for? It’s Motivation AI and the reason for that and why we have such a massive understanding of what drives our clients, customers or prospects to engage is because our models are trained on action oriented outcomes, plain and simple. We are utilizing whatever engagement metrics we have access to with our customers and clients and those engagement metrics can be opens, clicks, application starts and application submits full conversions. It doesn’t really matter whatever level of information the customer is working on. That’s the same level of information that we are working off of and that’s real engagement, real metrics. Also the language that we are building and that we are putting forth to customers is actually the language that they are going to engage with. 

5:12: 

Definitely real metrics just have huge value. 

 5:17: 

When I talk about Persado, I also like to talk about how we’re measuring, we’re measuring words, which I think that so many people in school say, oh, I’m a words person or I’m a math person and feel like they’re going to pick one of those buckets and that’s going to be a part of their identity. 

5:36: 

At Persado, we’re very much like math informs the words and language informs the numbers. 

5:43: 

That’s one of my favorite things about the solution that we provide. I love that it’s a perfect encapsulation or marrying of art and science and I’ve always felt that in the world in general, in life in general, it’s very challenging to find subjects that are purely black and white, maybe physics. 

6:06: 

But even there, there is a massive black hole of understanding gray face gray matter for that matter. 

6:15: 

We’ve really done, I think a fantastic job of mirroring art and science together in terms of how our product works, how we position with words and phrases, how we’re working off of content that is sweat over, that is built by copywriters by persons who work with brand, by agencies, by media. 

6:43: 

We need that starting point and to understand what is the human connection, what is the art behind the message that you are trying to drive and then we’ll apply the science to it. So I was a language person who had to find the value in math. But I bet that you come from the other side because your background is in finance, which is very much numbers. So your interest in finance predates Persado. How did you get interested in finance? Walk me through how this numbers guy ended up here, man. 

7:19: 

It’s quite the back story. So as you mentioned with the intro, I was a finance and capital markets major in college and that took me to working for private equity right out of school and the year I graduated was 2008. 

7:35: 

So for those of you in my age class, you might remember that 2009 was not the best year for the world, but I also graduated in 2008. 

7:47: 

Good. So I’m I’m talking to a like minded individual who can remember those tough times. 

7:50: 

I feel you. 

7:51: 

I signed my offer letter and received my starting bonus in November and come February 2009.  When capital markets completely dried up, nobody was lending. There was no need for working on rolling up trucking and transportation companies with leverage buyouts because you didn’t have any money to fund it. The entire organization that I worked with was like a and I realized I needed to reinvent myself and think about some of the other skills and tool sets that I had and I’ll never forget having a conversation with my father and his comment to me, it was actually surrounding communication. He said you have this ability to communicate with people and I don’t think you really capitalized on that during your time in school. I think you were very focused on math and particularly statistics in your world which you excel at and you got this job. 

But Jon, you are a communicator and you can connect with people. Then I thought about one of the aspects of my job in this private equity company was to actually call these small mom and pop trucking and transportation companies and talk to them and hear their stories and hear about their business model. I realized, wow, I’m really good at this because I’m connecting with these people and they’re providing information. I talk about this a lot because I think it relates a lot to what Persado is trying to do. Persado as a company tries to communicate and connect with the customers and that kind of ties back to why I came back here. But it was, at that time, my father asked me, what about consulting? 

9:30: 

I think it’s a great place to talk about art and science, the art of communication and interacting and engaging with clients and the science of applying models and valuations and understanding what can we do to help this particular company or this client out? So I applied for the entry level analyst class at Accenture Federal Services, worked my way up into Accenture strategy and was doing financial consulting. Again, just a lot of relationship building, a lot of what we called stakeholder interviews. And out of the blue one year, a headhunter reached out to me on linkedin and said, hey, there is this fast growing startup that is looking for a consultative approach to its post sales organization. That’s how I found myself at Persado the first time around and what a great place because I came in when we were really just getting our feet under us, we were a much smaller company when I first joined as a director of customer success. 

10:39: 

I ran my first campaign with a Cobra company who is now our largest financial institution client. This was a pilot campaign that we ran with them. I got to be involved in everything in planning and resource allocation and the mathematics of it and work together with data science and with the customers and the clients understanding what their goals were and what metrics were available. We really got to build this from the ground floor up and I just thought it was so cool. And again, taking something that I really had grown to love through my strategy career of communicating and interacting and engaging with clients and applying that to the product that I was now going to be working on. I thought it was super duper. 

11:26: 

Cool. So at the time that you got here, as you said, the product was newer, we didn’t have all of the Generative AI technology we have today, but a lot of the problems were the same. What challenges did that financial institution customer that you were piloting with? What challenges did they face when trying to create language for all their marketing needs, which I’m sure you’ve seen in other companies too. But what are these challenges for financial institutions? 

11:56: 

Yeah, it’s a great question, Lisa because to this day, those challenges have not changed the largest one being. How do we scale? 

12:07: 

Right? 

12:08: 

I think back to the singular campaign that we ran with this bank. As I mentioned, it was a cobra credit card. It was a display campaign. So paid display is an area where you purchase ad space on affiliate websites and it puts your ad there and you want people to click and to drive to your landing page and ultimately through the application process to get the credit card to apply for and to become a new card holder. 

12:33: 

This was a true 16 variant experiment for those of you unfamiliar Persado OS models for our specific customers who are driven off of experimentation.The more we learn and understand about who you’re engaging with the smarter. Our models become better so we can predict what language might work and might not. This is the starting place with a lot of clients or it was back then. We saw the results and I want to say it was 98% conversion left off of a single test with statistical significance, which was absolutely unheard of people falling out of their chairs screaming at the rooftops. I’m being a bit facetious but the excitement was really there and these results really are what supercharged us in terms of growing into an enterprise wide agreement. But during that time, the question kept coming up. We don’t have the resources to implement, putting 16 different variations in place in every single piece of marketing content that goes to the world because we have millions of placements per year that we’re working on. 

13:39: 

So scale became a really big deal. 

13:42: 

Especially if you think about these large complex financial institutions, there’s a lot of legal and compliance you need to jump through in order to get content to market. 

13:50: 

There’s also execution constraints, right? 

13:53: 

Typically they’re running shared services organizations that are responsible for getting content to market for multiple different business units. 

14:00: 

It’s built very differently than retailers and they don’t work with the same speed veracity that retailers do. Again, because the implications of having an incorrect offer are far greater for a financial services organization than a poor retailer, so there needs to be more scrutiny around that. 

14:18: 

But getting back to the issue of how we scale, we would apply something called leverage and leverage was simply a way to not have to experiment on every single campaign but utilize the learnings and the insights that we had from exploration and apply to particular campaigns and just give them one or two different variations. Well, we kind of took that idea and just blew it out a little bit and we said, hey, we are actually going to build and create different product offerings within the tool suite of preso. When we scope campaigns or projects to work on, we are actually going to be prescriptive about what type of preso should be provided. We created this engine where we had full explorations and we had four variant tests, we would typically call them and we would do A B and then we would do predictive swaps or we wouldn’t actually test, we would just give supercharged content, right? We would look at the control and provide one piece of content. 

15:22: 

I think this really set the stage for how we scaled with almost all of our clients and how we have subsequently grown with a lot of the financial services customers that we have today because knowing full well that you cannot experiment on every single campaign that you run. But that being said you do need to do experiments on some. 

15:41: 

I think that’s the important part too is that the only way that we get smarter or your prospects or your customers get smarter is by experimentation. 

15:49: 

It’s very important, it’s a very important foundation to have but with dynamic motivation, essential motivation, right? 

15:56: 

These tools that we’re coming to market with now that show prediction scores. 

16:01: 

How well is this predicted to perform in market and brand alignment scores? How aligned is this to your brand voice? Now we’ve got options such as compliance scoring and how aligned is it to legal and compliance? How much faster you’re getting content out really started from this idea of how do we scale? What can we do with Persado to really change the game and make sure that we can really use it everywhere. 

16:27: 

So financial institutions, their biggest problem is scale, they are so huge and so they can’t test the way Persado originally conceived the testing every individual bit about language. Over time at this company, we’ve scaled by testing so much with so many different companies and across different industries, but with a lot of financial services companies in different parts of the world, even though we’ve been able to create these scores that help people make decisions faster. 

17:02:

The other thing that probably really helped with scale was the addition of Chat GPT and large language model technology to our world. 

17:14:

Do you think that in a post-Chat GPT world, the problems of scale are getting easier, what has changed with large language models? 

17:27: 

This is something I think we could spend a whole podcast series on Lisa personally, I’m fascinated by it. I think everybody else is too, as I said earlier. Generative AI is the generational buzzword that we are experiencing these days. These open source models that are still, I wouldn’t even say they’re in their infancy stage yet they’re still a newborn in terms of what they can and can’t accomplish. I think it’s a double edged sword to be quite honest and I’ll tell you why, one of the reasons that we’ve had success in working together with some of these more highly complex, highly matrixed, largely regulated industries is because Persado’s 70 billion parameter, large language model, it’s actually closed source, which is crazy to think about that we had that many parameters in a closed source model. It’s because we’ve been doing these types of explorations for 13 years as a company. 

18:29: 

I think going back to when we were incubated in an additional five or six, so we’ve built up this massive library of language primarily focused on motivation. AI, not Generative AI, but what type of language words and phrases actually engages with customers. We’ve cataloged and scored this model with our own developed ontology. We talk about emotional language, we talk about formatting descriptive elements, functional brand narrative, right? 

19:02: 

All these things that are important in the Persado world. Yes, could you establish an ontology and apply it to the database that chat Qi has or any of the other LMS out there? Sure. But again, coming back to these very regulated industries, there are guard rails and I would say 99 out of 100 clients have these A I guard rails which are limiting the ways in which you can use open source models rightfully. 

19:31: 

So, right, if you’re a financial analyst and you’re working at Barclays and your boss asks you to put a 10 year forecast together for this particular business unit. Do you copy and paste your income statement, your balance sheet and ask Chat GPT to tell it to put together a 10 year forecast? 

19:50: 

I mean, that would be incredibly easy. But at the same time, now, all of Barclays income and balance sheet information is part of that model and it is now open access and you have no idea who is using that information or what is being used for. 

20:04: 

So that’s been a really interesting differentiation piece for us in terms of how we work together with some of our customers in the space. 

20:10: 

The other really cool thing is that as I mentioned, the iterations of our tools of being able to move faster and apply our learnings in a more precise way. 

20:22: 

We’ve developed plugins with some of these open source models and we are able to utilize them in spaces where we are allowed to move much faster and to bring that information in and to fully understand what is going on. 

20:34: 

So I think that’s fascinating. 

20:36: 

The last point I’ll add to this, which is something that I’ve shifted in the way that I think about this. As I mentioned, we work best typically when looking at what we call a control or a piece of content that is generated by our clients or customers to go to market with. Now, we do have tools and products where you can generate content on the fly without any inputs, you can select what is the goal of this campaign. 

20:59: 

What does the customer profile look like? What are you trying to drive? What is a product you are selling and, and Persado will generate content for you either with or without open source models. This utilization of content to start, we have a team. They’re aptly named brand content strategists, which I have renamed in my own little world to Persado prompt engineers. Actually, these are the individuals that are interacting and engaging with our 70 billion parameter model. They’re the ones who are trained to really understand and grab that impactful language and know full well how the model is working and what’s going to be most important for those campaigns. Our high touch model in which we’re driving the highest results, the highest impact and the highest insights for our customers are all coming through our prompt engineers. 

21:52: 

It’s just, it’s fascinating, I really agree with the change in the space and how content is generated. 

22:01: 

Persado’s recent press release stating Persado AI drives 2.5 billion in revenue for financial services brands is pretty impressive. The press release claims the company’s Motivation AI which is how you’ve referred to it pinpoints optimal message, copy with the trifecta of potential Gen AI for marketing benefits, productivity, performance and compliance. Is this how your clients think about what Gen AI can accomplish or how would you speak to Gen AI?

22:34: 

It’s fit for financial enterprise marketing. It’s a great point and I’m really glad you brought up the press release. 

22:43: 

We had quite the event in front of NASDAQ where our co-founder Assaf took a wonderful picture with his hands raised in the air. He’s raising his hands and celebration and just all the value that we have created $2.5 billion that is massive, that is just an astronomical amount through the product, right through what we’ve come to market with what we put together and it’s all marketing, these are real dollars, real impact that we are driving for some of the use cases that I talked about like that display campaign, driving to sign up for co-credit cards or a paperless campaign that goes across the entire breadth of a bank’s credit card portfolio. And that if you can drive a singular person to stop receiving a paper statement and move to an online statement, well, you’re going to save $5 a year on that person and you’re gonna save generally for the world. 

22:42: 

Exactly love that Lisa, most importantly, environmental service, right. They got to take my math hat off again for this. But it’s true that even non traditional metrics are money saving. 

23:54: 

I don’t think you think of someone signing up for the credit card as value. You don’t think of someone signing up for paperless statements as actual monetary value for the organization, which it is, right? 

24:08: 

But there is an associated cost savings with that. 

24:10: 

As I mentioned, the $5 per person and a singular paperless campaign across an entire credit card portfolio drove $2.5 million in value. 

24:20: 

That’s just really remarkable. 

24:22: 

Yes, they drove double digit millions of people to sign up for paperless because of a Persado campaign. I think 60% of the action was driven by the change in the call to action, the actual CTA button in the email that was sent out. 

24:37: 

It’s just fascinating and I would be curious too to that point, Lisa, the environmental impact, I wonder what the carbon impact would be. 

24:46: 

Yeah, because a lot of the campaigns that these organizations run have more value than just the value to that institution. Some of them have really high value to the end user. To that consumer to potentially sign up for information. 

25:05: 

Financial services can be really confusing to consumers and some of these campaigns that I’ve worked on that are about finding the right advisor and wealth management can be impactful to the financial institution, but can also really be educational to the person and help them with their life and their finances. 

25:26: 

Yeah, absolutely. 

25:27: 

I love the way that you talk about that balance of not only information to our clients and customers, but information to the clients and customers, clients and customers too. And we talk about what RTBS of what we’re trying to push what we’re trying to sell. 

25:43: 

Why would you purchase this product over another reason to believe? 

 25:46: 

Right. 

25:47: 

That’s the acronym. 

25:48: 

Exactly. 

25:49: 

What are the reasons to believe? 

25:50: 

Some of those reasons are really important to the end users and to the consumers and the customers and the way in which we experiment and we understand these reasons helps drive information for our clients and what’s important and it gets the end user to the information that they’re actually looking for of what’s important. 

26:10: 

So mirroring that symbiotic relationship is really super cool to understand too. 

26:16: 

I think a lot of people think of marketing as evil, but the right marketing at the right time is actually quite helpful to everybody involved. 

26:24: 

It’s about putting information in front of people and if you do it right, it motivates them to take action which might be aligned with your key performance indicators. 

26:32: 

Sure but also gives them information that they were likely seeking or needed when they take that action. 

 26:39: 

It’s about cutting through the noise. 

26:41: 

Yes. 

26:42: 

Yes, absolutely. 

26:43: 

Cut through that noise and you want to drive engagement with the people who are actually interested. 

26:48: 

What are your tips for communicating effectively with stakeholders at financial institutions? 

26:55: If I think back to that conversation that I had during my career fresh out of college and I mentioned this earlier, but that ability to connect with people, which is really driven by curiosity. 

I’m not pretending to be interested in you talking about your marketing program. 

27:18: 

I am genuinely interested and curious about how you talk and speak with your customers. I want to soak up everything that I possibly can to understand what is the problem that you are actually trying to solve. Because at the end of the day, it’s usually not just, oh, well, we need more credit cards or oh, we need more paperless signups, right? 

27:41: 

There are all these different goals that are tied to these things and so many different stakeholders that are tied to these different goals. 

27:47: 

And again, financial services, highly complex, highly matrix, right? 

27:51: 

You can drive more credit card acquisitions. 

27:53: 

If you offer 50,000 bonus points, the cost to the business of those 50,000 points is massive. 

28:01: 

So all of a sudden now you’re impacting bottom line dollars and is that going to be that good? 

28:07: 

Probably not. 

28:08: 

So what if I told you that with Persado, we could actually offer different tiers of points and introduce our language to see if, well, maybe the actual points offer richness isn’t as important as you think.

28:23: 

Maybe we can introduce some emotional language, maybe we can change the reasons to believe. We have an actual case study that showcases this where a less rich offer one with Persado language against the control of the original offer, right? 

28:36: 

So remarkable. 

28:38: 

Very cool. 

28:39:

And again, you can see how excited I am getting by this. Honestly, for those of you not in marketing, be curious, get to know the person you’re talking to on the other side of that phone or the other side of that screen or the other side of that table. 

28:51: 

I cannot tell you how important a skill that has been in my career and throughout all the different products that I’ve worked with and my life with consulting, which has shipped me around from industry to industry and place to place, right? 

29:07: 

If you’re passionate, if you show genuine curiosity, you will gain that other person’s trust. 

29:13:

That’s such a wonderful tip. 

2915: 

Like you mentioned, we are a math company and we’re driven by engagement and communication and the results speak for themselves and we touched on this lately, but the insights speak for themselves too. 

29:28: 

That’s what I also really love is that let’s just get something clear. 

29:32:

There is not a single product in the entire world that is going to win every single time, full stop doesn’t exist. 

9:42: 

It’s a unicorn. 

29:43: 

However, in the cases where we do lose what Persado offers and what I love is that insight analysis, why didn’t this actually work? 

29:57: 

What did we maybe rely too much on or what is an area that we can maybe focus on next time to drive performance and drive results. All of these items are feeding into the model for your particular company to help make it smarter, to help it get better, to help drive performance nd results down the line. 

30:15: 

We have these rank orderings of the different formats, the different types of functional language, the different emotions that we put into the market but those change and shift over time. The only way that we truly understand that is if we continue to test and to learn and to xplore, and I’ll tell you there are a lot of our clients and a lot of business units or lines of business or whatever you want to call them that are just as jazzed or excited by the insights as they are by the results. Because they’re feeling like they’re truly connecting with their customers then in the same way that I feel like I’m truly connecting with the stakeholders of the business, they’re learning about them. 

30:56: 

That’s really great as a takeaway that there is more than just the math and getting it right and getting those results to drive more actions. 

31:06: 

But there’s really understanding when it did or didn’t work and why and learning from that and just continuing to hone in on the messages that are going to work at any given moment. 

31:08: 

Yeah, as not only financial services but other large institutional organizations with a lot of money are putting a lot of focus on AI and data structure and customer profiles. 

31:35: 

There’s a particular link there in terms of the type of data and information that Persado captures through its engagement, that should be enriching your customer profiles that should be helping you understand and inform as to what works, what doesn’t work with your customers and deep segmentation, even down to individualization, we’ve had the privilege of working with a couple of customers on that personalized, 1 to 1 messaging it works and I’ll be honest sometimes it doesn’t. 

32:05: 

I think that’s because we are not enriching the data or they are not utilizing the data strategy in the way that relates to what Persado information is providing. 

32:13: 

But it’s a heck of a ride and it’s a lot of fun. 

32:15: 

That’s great. 

32:17: 

Yeah, there’s a lot there that we can do in terms of data as well. 

32:21: 

Thank you so much for joining us on this podcast episode and sharing your background and your experience working with financial institutions and really helping us understand how language can matter so much to a math person. I think that’s really the value of Persado is bridging that gap and helping people see that marketing language is science and art and really valuable. Tools like Persado that provide a leg up in that way are really cool to work on and really interesting and really valuable to our financial services customers. 

33:03: 

Thank you for having me, Lisa. I really feel I started as a science guy. I found art in terms of the art of communication and now sometimes I forget that I came out of school as a math person, but it’s really great to see the conjoining of the two and, and be at a company like Persado. 

33:18 

Thanks for joining us. We’ll catch you next time here on ‘Motivation AI Matters’ until then, make sure you’re subscribed and learn more about how to find the right language to motivate your customers and how Generative AI makes this possible by checking out the resource library at Persado.com.