Hyperpersonalization in Colombian Digital Banking: How AI Is Redefining the Customer Experience in 2026
Colombia is undergoing the biggest overhaul of its financial system in a decade. Mandatory open finance, the partial liberalization of usury rate caps, and payment interoperability through Bre-B are generating an unprecedented volume of transactional data.
That data is the raw material of hyperpersonalization: a bank’s ability to tailor products, messages, and channels to each customer’s actual behavior, rather than to an average profile. In Colombian digital banking, this shift has already stopped being an optional competitive advantage.
Banks, neobanks, and fintechs are now competing to turn open data and behavioral signals into relevant customer experience. This article reviews what hyperpersonalization requires, what the financial inclusion figures really show, and what security challenges real-time personalization brings.
What Hyperpersonalization Means in Colombian Banking
Hyperpersonalization goes beyond segmenting customers by age or income level. It combines open data, transactional behavior, and real-time context to dynamically adjust interfaces, offers, and service channels.
In the Colombian context, three regulatory pieces build the infrastructure that makes this possible: the mandatory nature of open finance, the consolidation of instant payments, and the push for open data — already analyzed in detail in Facephi Observatory’s analysis on fintech regulation in Colombia 2026. Without that foundation of shared, consented data, personalization remains stuck at basic segmentation.
The table below summarizes the path a Colombian financial institution typically follows to go from scattered data to real personalization.
| Stage | What it involves | Example in Colombia |
| Open data aggregation | Explicit, traceable customer consent to share their information across supervised entities | Mandatory open finance framework as of 2026 |
| Dynamic segmentation | Models that update the customer profile with every interaction, not just at onboarding | Alternative scoring using consumption and digital behavior data |
| Real-time personalization | Adjusting the interface, offer, or channel based on each session’s context | AI-assisted conversational banking in mobile apps |
| Data governance and audit | Traceability of which data was used, under what consent, and for what decision | SFC audit requirements on open finance |
It’s not enough to assess the individual borrower’s character or macroeconomic figures. If there’s a recession and people lose income, their ability to pay will be affected regardless of their credit history.
— César Ferrari, Financial Superintendent of Colombia
The quote sums up the principle underpinning hyperpersonalization: static models, trained only on credit history, stop reflecting the customer’s reality as soon as the context changes. The same logic that pushes the Superintendencia to incorporate dynamic variables into its supervision is what demands personalization based on behavior, not on fixed snapshots of the customer.
Colombian Digital Banking in Numbers
Official data confirms that Colombia has a broad base to personalize on. According to the 2024 Financial Inclusion Report from the Superintendencia Financiera and Banca de las Oportunidades, 96.3% of Colombian adults had at least one deposit or credit product in 2024, up from 94.6% in 2023.
That headline figure, however, aggregates very different realities by region, gender, and age. Any personalization strategy that ignores this breakdown risks reinforcing existing exclusions rather than reducing them.
| Indicator | 2024 figure | Source |
| Adults with at least one deposit or credit product | 96.3% (94.6% in 2023) | RIF 2024 |
| Access to financial products, urban area | Practically universal | RIF 2024 |
| Access to financial products, rural area | 65.6% | RIF 2024 |
| Effective product use, urban area | 89.3% | RIF 2024 |
| Effective product use, rural area | 53.4% | RIF 2024 |
| Gender gap (access / use) | 6.9 pp / 4.4 pp | RIF 2024 |
Source: Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia and Banca de las Oportunidades, 2024 Financial Inclusion Report.
The insight: hyperpersonalization alone won’t close the rural-urban gap
The jump from 94.6% to 96.3% in formal inclusion is real, but it lumps very different populations under a single number. Rural access (65.6%) still lags well behind urban access, and the gap widens further in effective use: 53.4% in rural areas versus 89.3% in urban areas.
This matters for hyperpersonalization because AI models learn from the data that exists. If the bulk of digital transactions comes from urban users, an uncorrected model can end up offering better products and a better experience to those who were already better served.
Avoiding that requires the same open data that drives personalization: incorporating alternative signals from consumption, telecommunications, and digital wallet behavior to build risk and product profiles that also represent the rural and informal population.
| Indicator | Urban area | Rural area |
| Access to financial products | Universal | 65.6% |
| Effective product use | 89.3% | 53.4% |
| Risk for personalization models | Abundant data, mature models | Scarce data, risk of bias if uncorrected |
Omnichannel and Instant Payments: The Infrastructure That Enables Personalization
Hyperpersonalization needs a payments infrastructure that generates real-time signals. Bre-B, the Banco de la República’s instant payment system, serves that function: it connects banks, neobanks, and digital wallets under a single interoperable layer.
Bre-B surpassed 100 million registered keys in the months following its launch, with sustained growth in users and participating merchants. Each instant transaction is also a behavioral signal that feeds personalization and risk management models.
Asobancaria, Colombia’s banking association, places omnichannel and hyperpersonalization as one of the pillars of the sector’s technology agenda for 2026. Its 16th Congress on Access to Financial Services and Payment Methods devoted an explicit session in March 2026 to artificial intelligence and open data as drivers of that transformation.
Well-executed omnichannel isn’t just a cosmetic improvement to the experience. It turns every channel (app, web, branch, WhatsApp) into a coherent touchpoint, reduces friction between channels, and increases the likelihood that the customer will concentrate more products with the same institution — a direct effect on customer loyalty.
Security Challenges of Real-Time Personalization
The more behavioral signal a bank uses to personalize, the larger the surface an attacker can try to exploit. Hyperpersonalization and security have to be designed together, not one after the other.
| Challenge | Why it matters | What it requires |
| More sophisticated identity spoofing | Generative AI makes it easier to create deepfakes and forged documents aimed at feeding fake profiles | Continuous identity verification, not just at onboarding |
| In-session fraud, not just at onboarding | An attacker can take control of an already-validated account and exploit personalization to go unnoticed | Behavioral and contextual analysis on every interaction |
| Excess friction if security ignores context | Raising verification at every step destroys the experience personalization is meant to improve | Adjusting the friction level to each session’s actual risk |
This type of dynamic defense is known in the industry as continuous identity verification, an approach that, according to a recent Facephi Observatory analysis on AI in digital banking, shifts identity from a one-time event at onboarding to a living process present in every interaction.
Behavioural biometrics (navigation patterns, device usage, typing rhythm) is one of the signals that make it possible to sustain that continuous verification without adding visible steps for the user. This type of technology analyzes thousands of signals per session to distinguish a legitimate customer from a fraud attempt, without interrupting the personalized experience the bank wants to offer.
Frequently Asked Questions About Hyperpersonalization in Colombian Banking
It’s the use of open data, transactional behavior, and artificial intelligence to dynamically tailor products, messages, and channels to each customer, instead of applying the same profile to broad segments.
The open finance framework, mandatory since 2026, allows banks and fintechs to access customer data at other institutions with explicit consent. That expands the information available to build more precise product profiles.
The 96.3% formal inclusion figure lumps together areas with very different levels of actual use: 89.3% in urban areas versus 53.4% in rural areas, according to the 2024 Financial Inclusion Report. The aggregate figure hides that imbalance.
Bre-B generates real-time behavioral signals (frequency, amounts, counterparties) that feed personalization and risk management models, in addition to enabling payment interoperability between institutions.
The more behavioral signal a bank processes, the larger the surface exposed to identity spoofing and in-session fraud, not just at onboarding. This calls for continuous verification and behavioural biometrics.
Yes. When it reduces friction and maintains consistency across channels, hyperpersonalization increases the likelihood that the customer will concentrate more products with the same institution, an effect associated with omnichannel banking models.
