Consumers’ demand for convenience extended to financial services as well, FICO research found.  While 41% are more likely to open an account using digital channel, 25% will actually abandon the process if they have to use a non-digital channel to complete the process.  Concern about identity theft is so high that 75% will provide their bank with a biometric such as facial scan, fingerprint or voiceprint to secure their account.

You haven’t been terribly interested in funding announcements recently, Dear Reader. But surely you’re intrigued that marketing automation vendor ActiveCampaign just raised $240 million at a valuation of more than $3 billion. That’s close to 20x its $165 million annual recurring revenue, which is nearly double the $90 million it had one year before. Apparently marketing automation isn’t quite a commodity after all.

Salesforce has announced a new solution, Unified Knowledge, that will pull data from third-party systems thus supplementing Salesforce Data Cloud with external information sources. Initially, this is mainly aimed at helping Service Cloud users in combination with Einstein for Service’s generative AI. It was developed through a strategic partnership with AI vendor Zoomin.