Behavioural Effects of Agentic Messaging: A Case Study on a Financial Service Application

TL;DR

This study evaluates how agentic messaging influences customer engagement and retention in a financial app during tax season, showing it reduces unsubscribes and encourages earlier action.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that agentic personalization can improve user retention and engagement in financial services during critical periods.

Findings

Agentic messaging reduced unsubscribe rates by 21%.

It increased early filing behavior before the deadline.

The approach modulated engagement intensity effectively.

Abstract

Marketing and product personalisation provide a prominent and visible use-case for the application of Information Retrieval methods across several business domains. Recently, agentic approaches to these problems have been gaining traction. This work evaluates the behavioural and retention effects of agentic personalisation on a financial service application's customer communication system during a 2025 national tax filing period. Through a two month-long randomised controlled trial, we compare an agentic messaging approach against a business-as-usual (BAU) rule-based campaign system, focusing on two primary outcomes: unsubscribe behaviour and conversion timing. Empirical results show that agent-led messaging reduced unsubscribe events by 21\% ($\pm 0.01$) relative to BAU and increased early filing behaviour in the weeks preceding the national deadline. These findings demonstrate how adaptive, user-level decision-making systems can modulate engagement intensity whilst improving long-term retention indicators.