Code and Theory and Adobe Bring AI-Powered Creative Intelligence to Financial Services

The gap no one built for

Few industries have invested more in customer understanding than financial services. Unified profiles, behavioral data, real-time segmentation — the infrastructure to understand audiences at scale is mature and getting more sophisticated every year.

But that customer knowledge bookends the creative process. It doesn't run through it.

Research informs the brief. Analytics explain what happened after launch. In between — where strategic direction is set, where message framing is chosen, where creative is actually made — the decisions that shape what customers see are still made without customer input.

Across industries, that gap carries a measurable cost. Research consistently identifies creative quality as the single largest performance variable marketing teams control — outweighing channel mix, spend level, or timing. High-quality creative delivers up to 5x more profit and ranks as the #2 driver of advertising profitability overall. (Source: Kantar, "Break the Formula")

In financial services specifically, the consequences are compounding. Attention to FSI campaigns has declined 31% year-over-year. Only 51% of household decision-makers find financial advertising relevant to their actual lives. And FSI ads are three times less likely to evoke strong customer responses than creative from top-performing categories. (Source: Kantar Financial Services Creative Trends and Insights Report, 2025)

The industry with the most at stake is delivering the least resonant creative. And the structure of the creative process is what keeps that gap open.

To help financial services organizations close it, Adobe and Code and Theory have partnered to introduce a new class of AI-powered creative intelligence, combining Adobe's data and content infrastructure with Code and Theory's persona technology, resonance framework and experimentation technology, and deep FSI domain expertise.

“Financial services teams are generating more personalized content than ever — but too often they’re still forced to make the final call with limited intelligence about how that content will land with real customer segments. By partnering with Code and Theory, Adobe is helping brands bring audience intelligence earlier into the creative process so teams can validate, iterate, and launch with greater confidence, especially in environments where compliance makes every launch a one‑shot decision.”

— Mark Masterson, VP of Financial Services Sales, Adobe

What the Creative Intelligence System does

The Creative Intelligence System (CIS) enables financial services brands to evaluate creative resonance before any creative assets launch, using the audience intelligence and segments already in Adobe Experience Platform.

Here's how it works: synthetic AI personas — generated from AEP audience segments and enriched with additional behavioral and psychographic data — simulate how real customer segments would respond to creative at any stage of development. From early-stage strategic direction, to message framing, to final assets, CIS doesn't just score creative, it explains the response: which segments connected, which didn't, and which specific elements drove the difference.

This isn't post-launch A/B testing. It's pre-launch creative validation: customer-grounded input at the stage when changes are still possible, still affordable, and still fast.

By integrating Adobe Experience Platform with Code and Theory's creative intelligence layer, the joint solution enables financial services marketing teams to:

• Validate creative before production using synthetic personas built from real AEP audience data

• Surface resonance signals by segment to understand what performs and why

• Reduce costly late-stage revisions by moving creative decisions upstream

• Work inside the tools creative teams already use (e.g., GenStudio, AEM, via a browser extension) so audience intelligence enters the workflow without disrupting it

“When you build audiences in Adobe Experience Platform, you’re not just creating a list for activation, you’re defining a living, real-time picture of your customer in this moment. That segmentation and streaming data foundation is what makes synthetic persona modeling practical and trustworthy: the personas aren’t generic archetypes; they’re grounded in the same signals you use to personalize journeys. The impact is that audience intelligence can move upstream into the creative process, so teams can pressure‑test strategy, messaging, and early concepts against customer personas before they commit to production.”

— Matthew Loewengart, Principal Solutions Architect, Adobe

Built for the compliance reality of financial services

Every industry would benefit from better creative decisions. Financial services faces a structural constraint that makes it urgent.

In most categories, a campaign that underperforms can be adjusted in-flight. New variants can be tested, messaging can be refined, creative can iterate in real time. In financial services, that option doesn't exist. Compliance review cycles and legal approval chains mean that once a campaign is approved, it's locked. There is no iterating after launch.

That constraint transforms creative quality from a performance lever into a make-or-break variable. Once compliance approves, the campaign is locked. The decision made before that review is, for all practical purposes, the final decision.

The Creative Intelligence System was designed for this reality. Synthetic personas mean no real customer data is used in the testing process. Validation happens upstream of compliance review, not after it. And the output isn't a recommendation to change direction mid-flight. It's intelligence that strengthens the campaign before it enters the approval chain, so the version that gets locked is the strongest possible version.

“In regulated industries, speed can’t come at the expense of trust. Adobe is committed to compliance‑first workflows that help teams move faster while staying in control. This includes from governed data and audience activation to content operations with the right approvals, auditability, and policy guardrails. Partnering with Code and Theory adds deep financial services expertise to that foundation, so clients can modernize their marketing and creative processes with confidence.” 

— Lisa Sheth, Head of Digital Strategy, FSI at Adobe

Why now

The pieces that make this possible have converged only recently.

Adobe Experience Platform has matured into a true enterprise-scale customer data foundation: unified profiles, real-time segmentation, and activation infrastructure that financial services organizations are already investing in. Generative AI has accelerated the volume of content that marketing teams can produce, which means more creative decisions being made, faster, with the same (or fewer) resources to validate them. And the science of synthetic persona modeling has advanced to a point where AI-generated audience simulations can be grounded in real segment data and benchmarked against historical campaign performance.

None of these capabilities existed at this level of maturity two years ago. The technology to unify customer data, the pressure to produce creative at scale, and the AI infrastructure to simulate audience response have arrived at the same moment. The Creative Intelligence System is built at that intersection.

A partnership built for what comes next

The Creative Intelligence System is the first joint solution from Adobe and Code and Theory, but it reflects a broader shared commitment.

Code and Theory brings a rare combination: equal parts engineering and creative, with deep expertise in regulated industries and a track record of building enterprise-grade solutions that operate within the Adobe ecosystem. Adobe brings the platform infrastructure — data, content, orchestration, and measurement — that financial services organizations already depend on.

Together, the partnership is designed to activate Adobe's platform capabilities at enterprise scale, helping financial services organizations and other relevant industries move from reactive creative production to proactive creative intelligence. This means not just solving for one campaign or one channel, but building connected systems where audience data, creative production, and campaign intelligence operate together.

The Creative Intelligence System is where that vision becomes tangible. And it's just the beginning.

“The creative industry has always operated on a version of garbage in, garbage out, we just never called it that. For decades, creative insight meant cultural intuition and human truth, which is real, but it’s also incomplete. And the only way to test whether you got it right was to launch, watch a panel react, and optimize after you’d already spent the money. That’s not a feedback loop. That’s an expensive post-mortem. What’s changed isn’t just the technology, it’s what’s now possible before a single dollar is flighted. Synthetic personas grounded in real segment data, combined with historical performance signals and live market context, means creative can be pre-optimized in a way that was never achievable before. This is an operational shift and a philosophical one. Every campaign builds a knowledge base that makes the next one stronger. That compounding intelligence is why we built the Creative Intelligence System with Adobe: because the organizations that figure this out first won’t just spend smarter. They’ll get better at it every time.”

— Michael Treff, CEO, Code and Theory

Creative intelligence is available now

For financial services marketing leaders, the opportunity is concrete: bring customer intelligence into creative decisions at the moment those decisions are actually being made, not after the budget is spent, not after the campaign is locked, and not as a retrospective explanation of what went wrong.

The Creative Intelligence System is built on Adobe, built for FSI, and built for the reality of how financial services marketing actually works. Book a demo with our team and see what smarter creative validation looks like in practice.