From Financial Products to Brand Experiences: How Banks Are Rethinking Customer Engagement

As financial products become increasingly commoditised, financial institutions across Asia are exploring cultural partnerships, lifestyle experiences and technology to build stronger relationships with customers. South Korea’s Hyundai Card offers an example of how this strategy can extend beyond conventional banking.

Financial institutions across Asia are facing a more demanding customer engagement environment. Digital banking has made transactions faster and financial services more accessible, but convenience alone is becoming less effective as a differentiator. Customers increasingly expect financial institutions to understand their needs, communicate relevant offers and provide experiences that extend beyond routine transactions.

The challenge is reflected in Personetics’ 2026 Global Banker Survey. Among its findings, 46% of Asia-Pacific banking respondents identified irrelevant offers as the leading reason customer campaigns fail to convert. The report also found that APAC institutions take an average of 12 weeks to move a personalised offer from concept to launch, highlighting the gap between customer expectations and banks’ ability to deliver relevant engagement at scale.  Financial institutions are rethinking how they build relationships with customers. Some are investing in personalised digital interactions, while others are using cultural programming, entertainment, design and lifestyle partnerships to create more distinctive brand experiences.

South Korea’s Hyundai Card provides an established example of this approach. Its strategy brings financial services together with cultural spaces, creative collaborations and technology, reflecting a broader shift in which financial institutions are seeking a place in customers’ everyday lives rather than limiting their relationship to payments and account management.

Financial institutions are competing beyond products and pricing

As digital banking becomes standard, customers can increasingly compare financial products and services across providers with relatively little friction. This puts pressure on institutions to distinguish themselves through the quality and relevance of their customer relationships.

The challenge is not limited to digital infrastructure. FICO’s 2025 survey of APAC banking executives found that only 11% considered their institutions highly advanced in hyper-personalisation. Meanwhile, 72% said their customer communication channels were siloed or only partly integrated. The findings suggest that although banks are investing in data and predictive analytics, many still struggle to turn customer information into consistent, relevant interactions.

This creates an opportunity to rethink engagement across the entire customer journey. Rather than treating each interaction as a separate transaction or marketing opportunity, financial institutions can build more continuous relationships through services, communities, partnerships and experiences that reflect customers’ interests.

Hyundai Card’s strategy: Building a brand through culture and design

Hyundai Card has developed a brand strategy that extends well beyond its credit card products. Its cultural initiatives include the Super Concert series, Culture Project, Da Vinci Motel and a network of branded spaces such as its Design, Music and Cooking Libraries. These programmes give the company recurring opportunities to engage audiences through music, art, design, food and other cultural interests.  The significance lies in the continuity of these initiatives. Rather than relying exclusively on advertising campaigns or promotional offers, Hyundai Card has built physical and cultural platforms that give people reasons to interact with the brand outside conventional financial transactions.

Design is another part of this positioning. Its collaboration with creative collective CEKAI for the NAVER Hyundai Card Edition3, for example, brought motion-inspired visual concepts onto a physical card. The project illustrates how a functional financial product can also serve as a medium for creative expression.

While conversing with AsiaTechDaily, a Hyundai Card spokesperson described the design challenge behind the collaboration:

“The most important creative insight was that motion could be expressed without any actual movement. By carefully designing perspective, depth, composition, and the flow of the viewer’s gaze, we found that even a static physical card could evoke a sense of motion. Through repeated experimentation, we were able to explore how far CEKAI’s distinctive motion-based visual language could be translated into a physical card while working within the constraints of card manufacturing.”

The company’s approach also extends into data and technology. Its UNIVERSE hyper-personalisation platform, which was exported to Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company in 2024, demonstrates how its technology capabilities complement its broader brand positioning. Together, these initiatives point to an effort to connect cultural engagement, product design and more personalised financial services.

Across Asia, engagement is taking different forms

Hyundai Card’s cultural infrastructure is one approach to experience-led engagement, but financial institutions elsewhere in Asia are experimenting with different models. In Singapore, Maybank marked its 65th anniversary with a campaign connecting banking to local food culture and communal dining traditions. Its Kopi Kakis engagement sessions brought customers together over food and coffee to share feedback and contribute ideas, linking the bank’s brand positioning around humanising financial services with a familiar social experience. 

UOB has explored engagement through its digital platforms, using gamification and culturally themed campaigns to make interactions more participatory. Its UOB TMRW app has incorporated initiatives such as the City of TMRW game in Indonesia and Thailand, demonstrating how financial institutions can use digital experiences to encourage customer interaction beyond conventional banking functions. 

In Hong Kong, Dah Sing Bank’s partnership with Hello Kitty brought interactive experiences and promotional activities into selected branches during the 2026 Labour Day holiday period. The campaign combined banking services with entertainment and social-media-friendly activities, using a familiar cultural character to attract customer attention. 

These examples differ in scale and execution, but they share a common objective: creating additional reasons for customers to interact with a financial brand. They also reflect the diversity of Asia’s markets, where local culture, customer behaviour and digital adoption influence how institutions approach engagement.

Measuring the commercial value of brand experiences

The strategic appeal of cultural and lifestyle engagement is clear, but its commercial impact is more difficult to establish. Event attendance, campaign reach and social media interactions can indicate visibility, but they do not necessarily demonstrate stronger customer loyalty or improved financial performance. Financial institutions need to connect these initiatives with outcomes such as repeat engagement, customer retention, product adoption and brand preference. They must also assess whether experiences reach the audiences they intend to attract and whether those interactions lead to sustained relationships.

Technology can help establish this connection. Personalisation platforms and integrated customer data can link physical experiences, digital channels and financial products. However, the ability to collect and analyse customer information does not automatically make engagement relevant. Institutions must ensure that personalisation is useful, transparent and respectful of customer privacy. Financial institutions will continue to compete on security, reliability, pricing and convenience. Cultural experiences cannot compensate for poor service, confusing products or a lack of trust. Instead, they can complement the core financial relationship by giving customers additional reasons to recognise and interact with a brand.

As financial services become increasingly digital, differentiation may depend not only on how efficiently institutions process transactions, but also on how meaningfully they engage customers between them. The challenge is to turn those interactions into lasting relationships while ensuring that reliable financial services remain the foundation of the brand.

Quick Takeaways

• Financial institutions across Asia are looking beyond digital convenience and competitive pricing to differentiate their customer experiences.
• Hyundai Card combines cultural spaces, concerts, creative collaborations and design-led products to build engagement beyond financial transactions.
• Its UNIVERSE hyper-personalisation platform demonstrates how technology complements its broader brand strategy.
• Banks in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Hong Kong are experimenting with food culture, gamification and entertainment to create new customer touchpoints.
• Experience-led initiatives can strengthen brand visibility and engagement, but their impact on customer loyalty and retention needs to be measured.
• Integrated customer data and personalisation can connect physical experiences with digital banking, provided privacy and relevance remain priorities.
• Long-term differentiation will depend on combining meaningful brand experiences with reliable, secure and relevant financial services.