Top Things to Know from InfoTrust + Google’s Virtual Crypto, Finance, and Insurance Summit

Financial services make up one of the economy’s most important and influential sectors today and the need for established data governance and analytics practices is ever-growing.

It’s crucial for finance, insurance, and crypto organizations to be up to date on current regulations which is why InfoTrust and Google recently hosted its first-ever Crypto, Finance, and Insurance Summit.

This fully-virtual summit brought together the brightest minds from some of the top finance organizations in the world. Presenters shared best practices and learnings on how to advance your organization’s analytics and data governance.

Did you miss the event? No worries! We’ve got the top things to know from each presentation and a recording of the summit in its entirety.

Intro/Keynote: State of Finance Industry Digital Marketing

Shauna Gerry, Head of Industry, Financial Services, GMP, Google
Pete Crofut, Director of Partnerships, InfoTrust

1. Modern consumers have more choice and control than ever before—and they expect personalized content from brands they love and trust. So as marketers, we need to respond and renew trust. 
2. As a company you should prioritize performance and privacy at the same time.
3. “Modern Marketers” are the ones who realize that the best way to navigate disruption and challenges is to invest in advancing digital maturity. They are the ones that embrace data and technology in order to meet consumer needs and drive impact.
4. “Status quo thinking is a lack of thinking.” Don’t be afraid to connect, innovate, and experiment. 
5. Embrace the concept of the ‘modern mindset’—define your vision and have a detailed roadmap!
6. You don’t have to do it all alone—lean into partners like InfoTrust to help develop agendas and strategies together!

Why and How Finance and Insurance Orgs Should be Utilizing Server-Side GTM in 2022

Ben Fisher, Product Manager, Google
Tyler Blatt, Lead Analytics Engineer, InfoTrust

1. Consider using sGTM to limit the nesting and processing that slows down pages, ultimately increasing site performance and SEO scores. 
2. Governing the data configured on your website can be difficult when using traditional TMS systems. Some tags fire more tags, and understanding what data you’re collecting and where you’re sending it can be a compliance nightmare.
3. Consolidating the event stream to a single pipeline into the cloud means data validation and standardization is centralized into one place.

How Marketing Could Change with Web3 and DeFi – Cryptocurrency Marketing Panel

Dan Held, Head of Industry, Financial Services, GMP, Google
Brad Michelson, Head of US Marketing, eToro
Michelle O’Connor, VP, Marketing & Communications, TaxBit

1. The space has evolved in the past 12 months and new offerings/opportunities have presented themselves. NFTs, crypto-assets, stocks, equities … so many options that provide access to different markets around the world (while overlaying with community!). 
2. People believe in the value of an asset and the asset grows, which allows for more development. This is the ‘community model’ and the cryptocurrency world utilizes it frequently.
3. The use of .gifs is a creative approach to gain traction! (GIF Engine Optimization)
4. We’re now living in a space where we must engage a digital community in a physical world. Host events that are curated experiences with a goal of coming away with additional knowledge and new relationships (it’s not the same as networking!).
5. Create content! Analysis and educational content makes all the difference to marketing efforts.
6. Incentive models are the bread-and-butter of cryptocurrency rewards for customers (access to events, subscriptions, tools). They provide stickiness in your platform/connection to your brand.
7. The crypto ecosystem may be small, but these efforts will increase the size of the pie and bring more visibility to the industry. 

Google Analytics 4  for Finance and Insurance Orgs

Melanie Bowles, Industry Team Leader, Finance, InfoTrust
Federico Bianco, Strategist, Team Lead, Finance, InfoTrust

1. The rapidly evolving marketing and data landscape—with shifting user preferences and regulatory technical changes—produces fragmented user journeys, loss of user data, and affects personalized targeting, retargeting, and attribution.
2. Google Analytics 4 helps to address these issues through its events-based data model and privacy-centric focus, and offers additional machine learning and AI capabilities.
3. Universal Analytics (UA) is sunsetting in 2023. Be sure to know these important dates:
   • If you have Google Analytics free:
     • Data processing ends July 2023
     • UI access ends 6+ months later
   • If you have Google Analytics 360:
     • Data processing ends October 2023
     • UI access ends 6+ months later
4. Universal Analytics is a separate set of properties than GA4, so any usage of UA including the interface or exported data and/or downstream systems leveraging UA data will need to be rebuilt/recreated. This is why dual-tagging now with GA4 is so critical. There are solutions, however, to preserve your UA data long-term, and strategies to adopt GA4 as your new source of truth. In short, we recommend focusing efforts on a T-ETL-T approach: