This article was originally published in the Brand Finance Canada 100 report and the Brand Finance Banking 500 2024 report
TD retains its position as Canada’s most valuable brand for the 2nd consecutive year, as well as ranking in 12th place in Brand Finance's latest Banking 500 ranking. With a strong focus on building trust, enhancing the customer experience through digital innovation, and integrating sustainability initiatives into its brand strategy, this new brand spotlight highlights how TD is navigating industry trends while staying true to its purpose-driven approach.
Chief Marketing Officer,
TD Bank Group
How does TD build trust among its stakeholders?
At TD, building and maintaining trust with our customers, communities, and colleagues is our purpose. It is ingrained in who we are and what we do – which is why each and every day, we continuously challenge ourselves to deliver ease, value and trusted advice and provide legendary experiences. We do this in a number of ways, leveraging speed, agility, innovation and transparency. We pride ourselves on being a consumer-driven and customer-focused organisation and are continuously evolving to meet the changing needs of our customers.
For us to build and maintain trust, we rely on feedback, data, insights, and regular performance evaluations to help us navigate the environment and identify areas where we are excelling and, more importantly, areas where we can and need to improve.
Customer feedback is critical to us as an organisation and is viewed as constructive and positive input to help us succeed as the better bank for our customers.
With the increasing emphasis on digital innovation in banking, how does TD leverage its strategies to enhance customer experience and stay competitive in the digital banking landscape?
In a time where the pace of technology is accelerating daily, we recognise the impact adopting digital innovation can have on our business performance. Not only does it help us stay competitive in the marketplace, but more importantly it helps to drive and create value for our customers.
At TD, we have built an innovation ecosystem centered on delivering personalised digital experiences to help empower our customers with actionable insights that are tailored to their needs. We harness the power of data and analytics and use technologies like artificial intelligence, voice, chat, and video to support our customers.
Our data shows us that our customers are engaging with us through digital channels and tools more than ever before, many even for the first time. In marketing specifically, we have made major investments into our marketing technology stack to allow for us to do things like act upon real-time signals from our customers with relevant and personalised messaging.
Last year, we launched a new first of-its-kind tool, the TD Accessibility Adapter across North America. Created by TD Lab, the adapter allows users to individualise their online experience to address accessibility preferences.
While all our web platforms meet accessibility guidelines, the tool, designed as a browser plug-in, was created to give accommodation controls back to the user – enabling them to personalise their online experience.
This year, TD created a model that applies a similar approach that underwriters use in the residential mortgage pre-approval process. We use AI to provide a smooth pre-approval process for our customers and get them credit decisions in only a few minutes.
Overall, our goal is always to find a better way, adapting and reinventing ourselves by exploring new technologies and opportunities to add value for our customers – now and into the future.
Social responsibility and sustainable practices are increasingly important to stakeholders. How has TD integrated sustainability initiatives into its brand strategy?
As a purpose-driven bank, we are focused on helping drive progress toward a more socially, environmentally and economically inclusive and sustainable future through our resources as a leading corporate citizen.
As a result, sustainability is an 'all-bank' effort and influences how we run as an organisation, the types of products and funds we offer our customers, the advice and financing we deliver to clients, the daily work needed to build a diverse and more inclusive workplace and society, and the way we approach risk management.
For our brand strategy, that means ensuring that we're integrating the great work we're doing on sustainability throughout all of our customer touchpoints.
Whether you visit one of our branches, interact with one of our key sponsorships, or look at our content on social, the work that we're doing to drive social responsibility is front and center.
What are the key trends you envisage as being the most important in the banking industry over the next three years and how can brands navigate or capitalise on those?
The largest trend we can expect to see over the next three years is rooted in innovation. Fintech, martech, and generative AI, are all aspects of the industry that will be key to the future of banking.
Fundamentally, these are all things that will change the way we as a financial institution will operate. New technologies to learn and integrate across our business platforms will come with other considerations as well, for example a deeper need for cybersecurity, data management, policy considerations, privacy and more.
Evolution and change are always going to seem daunting to anyone, even large scale organisations. Although it can seem like a big undertaking, with change we believe you can uncover new efficiencies, capabilities, and learnings that can support you, your colleagues, and customers.
Looking ahead, what future plans and strategies does TD have in place to further strengthen its brand?
Our TD brand has always been and will continue to be rooted in people – we take great pride in that. That's why we're committed to making banking easier, providing value, and offering trusted advice - whether that's through our product offerings or our customer service standards.
We know that good customer service remains the top customer need and being ‘human’ throughout that process is what drives impact and differentiates our brand.
We are an organisation that understands and hears our customers and are dedicated to supporting them on their unique financial journeys.
In addition, keeping our customer top of mind in everything we do is just as important as having our customers keep us top of mind as well. A part of this is strengthening our brand through innovation and agility. Ensuring we are innovating with purpose, to meet our customers ever-evolving needs as well as outpacing our competitors.
Adopting new technologies across the bank, while adhering to our standards of safety and protection and quality, shows our brand commitment to showing up for our customers when and where they need us.
