Why Your Financial Services Organization Needs a Knowledge Graph

financial services knowledge graph

As advances in AI have made search engines capable of answering complex queries with a higher degree of specificity than ever, new search experiences are reframing consumer expectations in financial services. Your customers are being trained to search for exactly what they want, and they expect answers — because search engines have shown they can provide them. 

Your organization can meet this need by building and maintaining your own knowledge graph, which allows you to manage your information at scale and deliver the right answers everywhere your customers are asking questions. When you deliver these answers, you’re able to meet your customers at the moment of intent — leading to a better customer experience, increased discoverability and conversion, and lower operational costs.

Here’s how a knowledge graph can help your organization.

Answer multi-dimensional financial questions in search experiences.

When your customers search for things like office locations, advisors, and mortgage offers, they’re not searching for those words — they’re searching for the real things those words refer to, with the intent to address a need. They’re showing a strong intent to actually work with your organization. A knowledge graph can help you reach them. 

Let’s use an example: A potential customer searches for “best financial advisors near me who handle retirement planning.” Delivering the correct answer requires information from across your organization: ratings (“best”), professionals (“financial advisor”), office location (“near me”), and specialty (“retirement planning”). How can your financial services organization deliver an answer to a question — on your own site or in search results — that requires information from operations, facilities, and other departments?

With a knowledge graph, you can define the relationships between all these entities (e.g., your professionals, locations, hours, and more) so that an AI-powered discovery service like Alexa or Google can answer this question. In doing so, your organization increases its chances of ranking for that very specific, high-intent query. 

If your information is missing or your entities aren’t mapped to one another in a way that search engines can understand (via a knowledge graph) your organization won’t show up in search results — and a competitor might. This can lead that potential customer, who’s looking for help with retirement planning, to choose a different financial advisor over one of your professionals.  

Deliver answers to customers on your own website.

Customers have high expectations for the kinds of answers they can get from search engines. But now they’re beginning to expect the same thing from your website, too — and that experience often doesn’t live up to these expectations.

Let’s say someone receives a personal recommendation for a financial advisor at Expert Advisors named Sofia Gonzalez. Instead of making a general search for an advisor, they start their journey on the Expert Advisors website, looking for Sofia Gonzalez’s phone number.

After clicking through just a few different pages, however, they’re likely to give up if they can’t find the information. They’ve been trained by Alexa, Google, and Siri to just ask questions, but they can’t do that on most websites. And what do most consumers do when information isn’t easy to find? They give up, bouncing back to exactly where they would have started otherwise — a search engine. 

This could lead to them finding incorrect information about your organization, or worse, finding a competitor. Delivering the answers customers are now trained to expect, directly on your website, leads to a better customer experience and higher conversions — meaning more revenue. So your organization needs a knowledge graph that enables you to take control of this experience. 

If a potential customer searches, for example, for a “financial advisor near me who speaks Spanish,” and your website’s information is structured to answer this question, then they can find Sofia Gonzalez’s individual page (which includes her hours, office address, and phone number). The customer can then call or email to book an appointment directly from the result. 

That’s a great customer experience — and one that leads directly to bookings and revenue.  

Learn how your financial services organization can build its own knowledge graph with Yext.


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