Yext: Putting Financial Institutions on the Map

“Smartphones not only empower customers to interact with their financial institutions digitally, but also act as a bridge between digital financial services and brick-and-mortar locations,” begins Marc Ferrentino, Chief Strategy Officer, Yext. With the rise of mobile search, ensuring consumers obtain all the required information accurately and instantly through search results creates a better client experience. While financial institutions tend to be proficient at data management in areas like CRM and employee data, they often trail behind in organizing and leveraging their location data effectively.

“Yext was born to put brick-and-mortar businesses on the map, so they can compete in today’s mobile-first world,” asserts Ferrentino. Yext’s platform and product portfolio help firms attract new customers with search-optimized location information while making it easy for existing customers to find their nearest branch, advisor, agent, or ATM.

When consumers come across incorrect information about a bank in a map, their trust in the financial service provider is diminished. To help businesses maintain trust by actively managing their location data, Yext’s Listings offering allows businesses to update the information that appears in search results—name, address, phone number, open hours, and specialties—in real time. “Our PowerListings Network of search engines, social networks, maps, and apps allows businesses to make real-time updates in our system and have them automatically update across over 100 online publishers,” says Ferrentino.

Search engines work by continuously pulling information on a business that their algorithms identify as most up to date, so even if a listing is rectified once, it will change later and could potentially become incorrect again. To prevent this, whenever an institution loads its location data into Yext’s system, the company runs a Match search using its database and software integrations through the PowerListings Network to identify other business listings corresponding to the same location. This makes it possible to Lock listings, preventing automatic changes to information due to subsequent search crawling. Match and Lock returns control to the business over how its locations appear online.