What you need to know

• Suncorp Bank is exploring replacing some traditional marketing briefs with outputs from Pega’s AI-powered Blueprint tool to streamline ideation and delivery across marketing, CX, and compliance.

• The insurer has moved from a centralised to decentralised decisioning model, enabling non-technical teams to help build customer journeys using simplified AI tools.

• Three years into its Pega Customer Decisioning Hub rollout, Suncorp Bank has developed 78 personalised actions, with a new target of 1,000 by next year after inspiration from peers at Pegaworld.

• Blueprint, launched last year, is seen as a key enabler for scalable personalisation and navigating complex regulatory environments, particularly within Australia’s stringent advice/no-advice frameworks.

• CXM and personalisation manager, Aimee Ross-Taylor envisions a future where compliance and creativity co-exist, with Blueprint accelerating ideation, testing, and learning, replacing whiteboards and Post-it notes with AI-led insights.

At Suncorp Bank, some marketing briefs may soon be relics. The insurer is considering replacing them with outputs from Pega’s Blueprint, a move that highlights how, in an era of generative AI, marketing, customer experience, and compliance are no longer gatekeepers of ideation, but co-creators in a decentralised, AI-augmented ecosystem.

Suncorp Bank CXM and personalisation manager, Aimee Ross-Taylor, pulled back the curtain on this potential transformation at Pegaworld. According to Ross-Taylor, “We’ve even been floating the idea of, could we perhaps use the outputs of Blueprint to replace our marketing brief, and again, in that conversation with our legal counsel, they’re quite open to that, which is really exciting for us. It will help streamline that ideation right through into delivery with the same tool.”

Blueprint, which was released at Pegaworld last year, is a strategic planning and execution tool that helps businesses turn high-level goals such as improving customer experience into detailed, actionable workflows that are easy to build with AI and automation. Ross-Taylor said she wants to move beyond the idea of personalisation as a strategic pillar and instead ensure it becomes something that’s second nature to Suncorp Bank.

“Currently, personalisation appears in a lot of people’s strategy as a strategic pillar to focus on. I want to make sure that personalisation way of working. I think it’s something that we all need to think of naturally, rather than be reminded to think about,” she said.

Decentralisation

Three years into its Pega Customer Decisioning Hub journey, Suncorp Bank is moving from a centralised model where one team controlled the full spectrum from ideation to execution to a decentralised architecture.

“We started off as a centralised delivery system, so we did the whole ideation to delivery, end-to-end within our team, but we’ve tried to move now to a decentralised delivery model. And of course, that means taking our stakeholders on a journey with us. And education becomes incredibly important,” Ross-Taylor explained. 

Non-technical teams are now actively involved in creating decisioning logic, aided by tools that simplify complexity. “It really helps break down what we do in decisioning and make it easier to understand,” Ross-Taylor said. 

Suncorp Bank has already built 78 personalised actions with a goal to get to 150 in the next 12 months. That target didn’t survive a hallway conversation at Pegaworld. After comparing notes with fellow attendees, the new number is 1,000 – and Ross-Taylor is embracing the challenge.

“It’s about having the right AI for the right job. And so we see it as an opportunity to help us get past some of those blockers and the ideation stage and really scale quickly.”

The real opportunity lies in marrying compliance and creativity. Ross-Taylor saw Blueprint not just as a tool for personalisation, but for navigating regulated terrain. “In Australia, we have a concept of advice or no advice model, so we’re actually not allowed to necessarily recommend a particular product to a customer unless they’ve signed up for that advice.. And there’s a process in which they’ll need to go through to sign the right documentation to say they’re ready to receive that personal advice. My crazy idea there is, I’d love Blueprint to have some kind of toggle that would help us during our ideation sessions to flick between an advice and no advice model.”

She also sees a time when business process automation tools like Blueprint can help teams navigate often fraught regulatory environments as they ideate.

“That’s where blueprint, particularly integrated with all of our data systems, can actually help us talking about working with our customer experience teams to do that ideation if they have access to a tool that’s already populated with our taxonomy, our legislative, legislative obligations, and has a real awareness of the environment that we’re working in, I think that’s going to generate better discussions,” Ross-Taylor said.  

“We can take it out of the whiteboard and the post-it notes, and we can have a conversation that hopefully makes it faster to test and learn, so the ideas get better. We have more to choose from. We can test and learn quickly and at scale, and it helps us do that faster than perhaps what our humans can do.”