The way companies track and measure their websites and apps is in transition, and financial services firms have more at stake in it than most. Data is the raw material of pricing, underwriting, fraud detection and customer insight - so a change in what you're allowed to collect isn't a marketing inconvenience. It's a strategy question.
What actually changed
Apple started this earlier than most people remember. Intelligent Tracking Prevention arrived in 2017, limiting third-party cookies in Safari. But it was iOS 14.5 that made the industry sit up, because it let users simply opt out of cross-app tracking.
And they did. Flurry's research suggests around 96% of iPhone users opted out. That's not a nudge - that's a verdict. With Apple holding around half the UK smartphone market, and the smartphone now most people's primary computing device, the effect is seismic.
Google has moved in the same direction, if more reluctantly - rethinking third-party cookies in Chrome, and replacing Universal Analytics with Google Analytics 4, which is built around a rather different model of what you can know.
The regulatory direction is one-way. Anyone planning on the assumption that this reverses is planning on hope.
Why this matters more in financial services
Because the sector runs on data more than it admits.
Monzo's growth - from £100m to a multi-billion valuation in a few years - was built on data-led decisions, and their data team went from one person to thirty in three years. The expertise was the strategy, not a support function for it.
In insurance, PwC has described data as the lifeblood of the industry, and it's not hyperbole: pricing, fraud detection, customer insight, risk assessment and underwriting efficiency all depend on it. Willis Towers Watson found more than two thirds of companies reported that predictive analytics had increased sales and profitability.
So when the supply of third-party behavioural data thins out, financial services firms feel it in places that actually cost money.
The regulatory direction is one-way. Anyone planning on the assumption that this reverses is planning on hope.
The reframe I'd offer
Most of the industry treats this as a loss to be mitigated. I'd argue it's a correction that favours firms willing to do the harder thing.
What's being restricted is third-party data - information gathered about people by following them around. What isn't restricted is the data customers give you willingly, because you've earned it and because they get something back.
That's a meaningful shift in who wins. It rewards firms that have a direct relationship with their customers and a reason for those customers to share. It punishes firms that have been substituting surveillance for a relationship. In financial services - where trust is the entire product - that trade seems rather favourable.
What to actually do
Get your first-party data house in order. If you're going to depend on what customers tell you directly, the systems that hold it need to be trustworthy, integrated and complete. Most aren't.
Define your data goals before your data tools. Predictive analytics is not a purchase, it's a discipline. Be clear what you're trying to predict and why, then build the infrastructure - and integrate as much as you sensibly can, because the more you can connect, the better the predictions.
Start predicting early and accept it'll be rough. Predictive models improve with use. A cautious firm that waits for perfect data waits forever, and learns nothing in the meantime.
Maintain it. Data decays. A model trained on a picture of the world that's eighteen months out of date is not neutral - it's confidently wrong.
And treat privacy as part of the proposition. Consumers and regulators have both become conscious of how data is used. In a sector built on trust, a firm that can explain plainly what it collects and why has an advantage over one that can't - and that advantage will grow.
The question
If every third-party signal disappeared tomorrow, how much would you still know about your customers? If the answer is "not much", the tracking changes aren't your problem. They're just the thing that revealed it.
Worth talking through? Book a short discovery call with the team at Distinction - no pitch, just an honest read on your data foundations.
