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Recent studies showed that 52% of consumers expect their offers to be personalized, and 62% want firms to anticipate their needs. This is excellent news for financial institutions who are looking to leverage innovative approaches to understanding their clients better while deepening their engagement.

Now is the time for your FI to gain a competitive advantage by capitalizing on the power of personalization by offering a more user-centric and solutions-based experience for your customers.

To do that, though, you have to understand the power of personalization. Let’s discuss the concept in more detail.

Personalization in Financial Services

Personalization in financial services focuses on transforming a firm’s customer interactions using data and analytics to anticipate individual needs and build deeper relationships.

It is not all about selling, but providing information about the FI’s products and services on a regularly occurring basis.  By doing so a financial institution can transform itself into the go to source for a consumer or business’s financial needs.  This strategy demands recursive learning, a 360-degree view of customers, and a personalized curriculum intended to change customers’ behavior and attitude.

Numerous firms have shown how personalization is vital. Netflix, for instance, uses personalization techniques to provide movies and TV show recommendations. Starbucks uses digital partnerships and technologies to build relationships with millions of consumers across its 7,000 stores.

That said, while most FI’s are significantly investing in their data and analytics capabilities, the “Netflix of banking” has not yet emerged. The primary reason is that real end-to-end personalization means deploying data science capabilities that utilize clean and accurately categorized transaction data delivered daily.

Eventually, if done perfectly, personalization can offer a direct route to reduced customer churn rates and higher sales. It can lead to yearly revenue uplifts of up to 10% for financial service firms. It will enable firms to truly understand their clients, anticipate their needs, and engage in rich dialogues about their financial capabilities, fostering loyalty that lasts a lifetime.

 

 

What Are the Perks of Personalization?

Here are some of the benefits of personalization:

  • Studies estimate that for every $100 billion in assets a financial institution offers, it can achieve over $300 million in revenue growth by personalizing customer interactions.
  • Personalization also helps drive sales communication, even though these might not be the most frequent interactions. Some financial service firms have used personalization to boost branch sales productivity by over 30%, while others have seen an increase in revenues by 20% in three years.

Examples of How Financial Service Firms Can Deliver Personalization

Three core elements form the foundation of banking personalization at scale:

  • Analytic Engine & Recursive Learning – by using systematic experimentation, financial institutions allow flexibility and create tailored offers that evolve with time. The recursive learning ability needed for personalization constitutes a built-in advantage for individuals who leverage it first
  • Consumer DNA – bank systems need to feed a single, enterprise-wide view of every consumer—a view that systematically reflects every customer at any given time
  • Personalized Curriculum – consumer offerings are customized to one segment. They define desired consumer behaviors and strategize on how best to incentivize those behaviors

Final Thoughts

Financial institutions today are not just competing against each other but against technological powerhouses that harness data to their advantage. To keep up with the changing environment, FI’s have to revamp their approach to serve their customers at a personal level.

With proper personalization, FI’s can decrease friction in their customer journey and attain higher engagement.

For the past 20 years, Insight Financial Marketing, L.L.C., has provided financial institutions with customer insights from the analysis of customer financial transactions such as ACH, debit card, credit card, and wire data.  These insights are typically leveraged to help deepen relationships with consumer and business customers.

With IFM’s data analysis sophistication, financial institutions can better understand the unique changes in their customers’ financial lives as they happen to enable the financial institution to enhance marketing messaging resulting in outreach that is well received by their customers.

 

 

Credit Bureaus have been a bedrock of the financial services industry for decades.  Their insights on a consumer’s creditworthiness and willingness to repay a loan have proved their value a hundred-fold over the past 50 years. However, their ability to measure the creditworthiness of all persons is limited due to various reasons from the lack of reporting to the bureaus to the rapidly changing ways consumers conduct payments and other financial transactions and the explosion of non-traditional financial organizations.

A combination of innovation, technology, and immigration patterns and processes have changed how many in the United States are employed and receive income.  Over the past few decades, these changes have left many consumers unable to get the crucial capital needed to buy homes and get approved for loans or credit, regardless of their steady income and consistent payment history for lifestyle-related expenses.

Alternative Data For Credit Decisioning

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) held a hearing in 2017 to review the use of alternative data for credit decisioning.  The CFPB recognized the traditional system for reporting consumer credit included lending categories where the credit is provided by banks and financial companies that have mechanisms in place for record-keeping.  By that definition, this excludes rent payment activity, which is a major payment area for millions of consumers across the United States.  Learn more about the outcome of the CFPB hearing here.

The CFPB also recognized that alternative data would help to expand credit opportunities to consumers with little to no credit history.  By leveraging alternative data, FI’s would create a broader financial profile on their customers through the combination of both traditional and non-traditional data sources including ACH, Debit/Credit cards, mobile phones, and the internet resulting in an improvement of creditworthiness reporting and accuracy.

Rise™ Provides Insight Into Non-Traditional Financial Data

Rise™ is an example of a new product by IFM that provides insight to non-traditional categories of financial activities helping FI’s to paint the clearer picture they have been looking for on consumer customers that may otherwise have fallen out of their lending radar.  Rise™ reports on the customer’s various sources of income and the consistency of payments for debt categories including rent, utilities, membership payments, subscription payments, and more.  In essence, Rise™ makes it easier for FI’s to receive intelligence about their customers without having to manage multiple large data sources or the categorization and reporting accuracy of their financial behavior.

To learn more about Rise, a new component of IFM’s Candela™ service, you can communicate with me directly at rreale@infimark.com.

About IFM

For the past 20 years, Insight Financial Marketing, L.L.C., has provided financial institutions with customer insights from the analysis of customer financial transactions such as ACH, debit card, credit card, and wire data.  These insights are typically leveraged to help deepen relationships with consumer and business customers and to strengthen customer insights that are ingested into data environments that are then leveraged throughout their enterprise.  IFM solely analyzes an FI’s data and returns customer insights back to the FI client.  IFM also complies fully with bank customer privacy policies which enable FI’s to develop products and services, using IFM data, that be launched across their customer base.

20 years of innovation, development, and trustworthy business practices mark the milestone.

IFM’s services provide financial institutions with large-scale transactional analysis and consulting identifying opportunities to help strengthen and grow their client relationships. Founded on July 16, 2002, IFM began analyzing Automated Clearing House transactions for marketing purposes and fraud detection, considered a unique capability by the financial services industry. Over the years, IFM developed an extensive and sophisticated processing methodology for translating and categorizing transactions that enhanced their ability to produce customer insights for financial institutions.  As IFM’s capabilities matured, their analysis expanded to include all bank data types.  

Most recently, IFM’s services have been leveraged to enhance A.I. and machine learning initiatives,  advanced analytical capabilities to smaller regional and community-based institutions, and product expansion providing alternative data insights that, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), can provide numerous advantages to financial institutions including enhancements to their credit lead qualification and underwriting.

The foundation of IFM’s success has been the firm’s unwavering commitment to innovation and excellent service, and the founding partners’ focus on enhancing the personal and professional well-being of all of IFM’s employees. 

 

IFM Senior Partner, Michael Uline reflected on the company’s 20th anniversary by saying,

For several years IFM had to educate banks on how to use transactional information to provide a better product and service to their clients.  Today, banks expect to use transactional information to improve their client relationships. IFM is a pioneer in transaction analysis and over the 20 years I am most proud of our team.  We have built a core set of employees that are experts in providing a responsive and accurate result to our clients.  It is because of our team, that we have had loyal clients for more than fifteen years.”

 

John Donohoe, IFM Senior Partner, added, 

I am ever grateful for our successful twenty years and am thankful to our customers and our employees who have not only made our twenty years successful but have provided a great environment to grow our opportunities and build on our historical success. I look forward to many additional years of achievements with our new product offerings, new distribution channels, and our adept colleagues.

 

IFM wishes to thank all its valued customers, strategic partners, and especially those who have been loyal to IFM since its inception.

About IFM

Over the last twenty years, IFM has developed an industry-leading customer intelligence platform for the financial services industry.  From our company’s founding in 2002 IFM has grown to serve many of the largest financial services firms based in the U.S., large international institutions with U.S. operations, and regional and community-focused institutions.  Our analytical sophistication has expanded across all bank data types delivering a wide range of profitable solutions from customer knowledge and cross-marketing leads to campaign management and professional services.  Learn more about at www.infimark.com.

Contact

Rob Reale
Associate Partner and National Sales Manager
Insight Financial Marketing
rreale@infimark.com
567 Harbor Side Street • Woodbridge, VA  22191 • (703) 490-3226
2626 E 82nd St, Ste 230 • Minneapolis, MN  55425 • (952) 432-1482

 

 

As the U.S. economy slowly emerges from the impacts of COVID-19, many individuals are re-opening their small businesses, others have left corporate jobs to start businesses, and many recently retired baby boomers started micro-businesses as a way to help supplement retirement income.

For traditional financial institutions, there are many opportunities to become the primary bank for these small businesses.  Traditional financial institutions are readily equipped to service these small businesses with checking accounts, credit cards, business loans, and merchant services.  However, the payment landscape is continually changing with modern technologies and new competitors are working to attract more of the traditional banking relationship of these small businesses.  

The Changing Payments Landscape

An example of a company changing the payments landscape is called Ayden, which was highlighted in a recent article by Fortune.  Ayden is a payment company based in Amsterdam that allows businesses to accept e-commerce, mobile, and point-of-sale payments.  The value proposition of the company is that they can make payments choices easy for merchants by providing a full end-to-end solution, managing the entire payment flow from checkout through to final settlement.  A single platform that is a payment gateway, risk management system, and acquirer rolled into one is an alternative to the payment processing offered by many legacy banks that still use disparate tech that was developed as far back as the 1980s.

 

Traditional vs Ayden Payment Platform

 

Ayden is expanding beyond its payments business to specifically target bank services to small businesses that operate on Ebay, Etsy, and AirBNB.  Adyen has grown its payments business by 70% in 2021 and is looking to continue its rapid growth.

The Fortune article also mentions Block (formerly Square) and Stripe are also providing banking services to small businesses.  The primary difference between Block and Stripe is that Stripe is best suited for e-Commerce while Block is a specialist for in-person transactions.  Regardless of the platform, there is a lot of information for small business owners to consider before identifying which solution can best meet their needs.

Small business owners getting started in the post-COVID economy are presented with a jaw-dropping number of options to accept payments into their business.  Innovators such as Ayden, Block, and Stripe are enabling businesses to gain access to hundreds of payment methods and many different currencies to help them streamline operations, reduce costs, and optimize results.

Understanding the rapid change in the payments space is critical to enabling an effective strategy to grow and retain your relationships with existing customers. Financial technology firms and non-traditional financial services firms are providing more products and services that encroach on traditional FI’s core business banking relationships. IFM can provide deep insight into your business customer’s external relationships (merchant services, lending, credit cards, etc.) and assist with leveraging this insight to identify opportunities to deepen relationships with your existing customers.

To learn more about IFM’s strategy and analytical capabilities you can communicate directly with me at rreale@infimark.com, or visit our website at www.infimark.com.

 

 

 

Right now, the transactional profile of a consumer checking customer at financial institutions across the US is likely to include a P2P account with either PayPal or CashApp and a newly established Coinbase account as customers’ education and investment in cryptocurrency continues to grow.  They are making regular monthly payments to a SoFi student loan, Rocket Mortgage, or Prosper personal loan, many are using their Apple credit card, and are regularly adding and storing money onto their Starbucks or Dunkin apps.  From a small business customer perspective, many are using QuickBooks for their accounting and payroll, using Square’s merchant services, or have a small business loan from PayPal or American Express.

 

 

As consumers and businesses have rapidly adopted app-based financial tools and services, many-core transactions are conducted with competing institutions.  Given these customer scenarios, how will your financial institution (FI) grow loans, prevent customer attrition, and maximize profitability?  Can your bank’s strategy compete in today’s digital and fast-changing world

Regardless of the geographic area your traditional bank or credit union serves, these might be the profiles of many of your consumer and business checking customers.  Understanding what attracted them to engage with competitors is paramount to the development of a strategy to win them back.  Proactive strategies that include identifying the changes in your customers’ financial behavior, life events, and lifestyle changes, on a daily basis, can effectively provide your FI with the insight to help implement a direct, specialized, and personalized experience for customers that will in effect strengthen their relationship with your FI instead of continuing to send them to the competition.  

For 20 years, IFM (Insight Financial Marketing LLC) has worked with financial institutions of all sizes across the US to provide cutting-edge data science technology to financial services firms.  IFM’s data tools offer an industry-leading customer intelligence solution that enables personalized communication with your FI’s consumer and business customers.  

If you’re interested in learning how your FI can leverage daily customer intelligence, data, marketing tools, and strategic guidance to compete more effectively today and in the future, we invite you to communicate with us directly at our website www.infimark.com or contact me at rreale@infimark.com

 

The Rise of Digital Solutions in the Banking Industry: Is Your Bank Positioned Well in Our New World?

In a world dominated by the global pandemic, consumers and businesses have turned to contactless solutions and have minimized the need to conduct business in person, even as we slowly return to “normal”. These solutions have given rise to a swift increase in digital transactions as technology has enabled many financial activities to be conducted on a laptop, tablet, or mobile phone app.

The increase in digital transactions includes bill payments, P2P transactions, money movement, investment transactions, and even gambling and sending money overseas.

Another aspect of the global pandemic has been the need for financial institutions to “be there” for their business and consumer customers.  As banks and credit unions position their products and services to “be there” for their customers, this has given rise to a need for a deeper understanding of their customers’ lives and financial situation in order to provide the best possible service while at the same time maintaining profitability.

How will your Bank or Credit Union compete successfully in this New World?

One asset that is unique to your financial institution is your bank’s data, specifically the unique transactions that your customers conduct.  While the general activities and behaviors of your customers may be like other bank and credit union customers, the quality and quantity of their digital behavior becomes more unique.  Understanding what makes your customers unique is an opportunity for your institution to offer a personalized mix of financial solutions tailored to meet their needs.  This will lead to deeper engagement with your customers and your ability to maintain profitability. 

Insight Financial Marketing provides an industry-leading solution to help your bank or credit union deepen relationships with your customers even while the world is quickly changing around us.  Our innovative technology provides near real-time customer intelligence so that you can “be there” for your consumer and business customers.   

To find out more information about IFM’s solution or to get details on the free no-obligation trial of our service, please reach out to me via our website at Infimark.com.

 

 

As Digital Banking takes off, Personalized Marketing will become more important for the Banking Industry

A recent Bain & Company article mentions that financial institutions should be concerned that “many consumers look outside their primary bank for high-margin products”.   However, the article also contains recent survey results that note “most customers who received direct offers would be willing to buy more from their primary bank if it made a personalized offer”.

The article discusses how the rise of digital banking, in part caused by the global pandemic, has led to the hidden defection of bank customers.   As more consumers turn to digital banking it will be imperative for banks to personalize their messaging to customers to compete more effectively in today’s challenging environment.

What is Personalized Marketing?

The term personalization means reaching consumers with messages, pricing, and offers tailored specifically for them. This form of one-to-one marketing uses sophisticated analytic tools to analyze customer data to determine customer needs.

Banks are moving rapidly to leverage personalized messaging by using machine learning and data science tools to process a vast amount of customer data. Insight Financial Marketing is a leading innovator in this segment of the industry. IFM’s service enables banks to analyze the patterns in their transaction data to anticipate specific customer needs. A customer is more likely to purchase a bank product or service if the right offer is presented to them at the right time. This creates a win-win situation where the customer gets the service or product they need, and the bank generates revenue.

The Future of Bank Marketing

By leveraging IFM’s technology, financial service firms will be able to utilize customer intelligence to structure their products, services, and pricing based on customer needs.

For instance, combining artificial intelligence and machine learning with customer insights via IFM’s service has the potential to be a real game-changer. By leveraging IFM’s technology, financial institutions have greater precision in assessing risks, predicting life events, and lifestyle changes.

Personalization has made it possible for customers to save money by presenting the right products and services that meet their current and future needs, while also allowing financial institutions to prosper by developing deeper relationships with their customers. The future of marketing in the financial services industry is being shaped by a rapid shift to the personalization of communications brought on by modern data analysis tools provided by IFM.

Conclusion

With IFM’s industry-leading customer intelligence solution, financial institutions will have the technology and experience to leverage personalized marketing that will drive revenue growth and enable your firm to compete more effectively in today’s challenging environment. To discover how your firm can engage IFM’s solution please contact me via our website, Infimark.com, or via my LinkedIn page.

Cutting edge technology has fostered rapid innovation throughout various industries over the past ten years. This rapid change is impacting the financial services industry with full force, especially during this difficult COVID environment. Consumers and businesses are rapidly searching for solutions to meet their needs. Examples of this change include real-time P2P and contactless payments, investment robo-advisors, free stock trading, and app-based financial technology such as Dave™, Chime™, and Square’s CashApp.  

Additionally, historically low-interest rates, coupled with an uncertain economic environment that has stunted the appetite for lending at many institutions, have put pressure on banks to find ways to generate revenue.

Deepening relationships with existing customers is one avenue financial institutions will travel as they revamp their strategy to generate revenue while also helping customers navigate their financial journey. One challenge with this strategy is the fact that every customer has a unique journey. A one-sized approach to helping consumer and business customers in their time of need is no longer effective. Data-driven intelligence is necessary in today’s world to create personalized solutions for customers that meet their immediate and future financial needs. A powerful way to develop insights that will assist FI’s in deepening relationships is through analysis and evaluation of electronic financial transactions. IFM provides an easy to deploy solution that provides near real-time customer insights.  

Using IFM’s service and capabilities, FI’s can –

  • Utilize powerful customer insights to aid in the development of new and innovative products and services
  • Identify changes in customer behavior and predict future needs in near real-time
  • Have a resource that provides clean data to power AI and machine learning initiatives
  • Know whom to communicate with and when to communicate personalized messages

If you’d like additional information on IFM’s service and capabilities, or would like to learn more about IFM’s free, no-obligation evaluation of ACH and Card data, please contact us via our website, or reach out to me directly via my LinkedIn page or my email address at rreale@infimark.com. I’ll look forward to communicating with you and helping you along your journey toward developing an enhanced data-driven customer intelligence capability.  

Check out my latest vlog where I share more about the challenges customers are facing during the global pandemic.

 

 

 

Consumers and Businesses shift to enhanced digital functionality

Even before the COVID crisis, consumers and businesses were rapidly shifting to solutions provided in a digital transaction environment. For traditional financial institutions, adapting to these fast-moving changes is paramount to consumer and business banking customer retention and deepening relationships.

How is competition evolving as the shift to digital financial services has been accelerated during the COVID crisis?

Intuit’s QuickBooks Cash:

Earlier this Summer, Intuit’s QuickBooks™ rolled out QuickBooks Cash™, a component of their service to small businesses. Intuit partnered with Green Dot Bank to integrate access to a bank account directly within the QuickBooks platform.   Within QuickBooks and QuickBooks Cash, businesses now have access to a debit card, instant deposits, and bill payment. Many small businesses leverage QuickBooks to help manage their accounting, payments, and payroll within the digital platform. The addition of QuickBooks Cash may entice businesses to move more of their business banking relationship to Intuit’s ecosystem.

SoFi Money:

SoFi is a fast-growing fintech firm that began by offering student loans on a digital platform. Since its founding, it has rapidly moved to become more bank-like by expanding its digital payment services. This includes its new offering of SoFi Money™ a high-interest cash management account that also includes a debit card, integrates P2P transfers, and a mobile app.

What strategy can your Financial Institution deploy to compete more effectively:

As your financial institution shifts to offer more digital functionality, your FI has a wealth of information about your customers that is unique to your firm. By leveraging this information, your FI can identify shifts in digital behavior and target communications and messaging to specific segments of your customers. As an example, many of your customers have an existing relationship with QuickBooks and SoFi, and the growth of engagement with these companies continues at a rapid pace. By using a data intelligence service like the one offered by IFM, you can identify which of your customers have a relationship with these firms and track any changes in activity to enable targeted communications to be delivered in near real-time to limit relationship depletion as new services and capabilities are added by competing non-traditional financial institutions.

For more information on how your FI can leverage IFM’s services, we’ve added additional information on our website at infimark.com. IFM offers a free evaluation and analysis giving FIs a detailed view of competitive customer relationships and identifying opportunities for the retention and deepening of consumer and business banking relationships.

Check out the latest vlog from Rob Reale where he discusses how consumers and businesses are finding digital solutions to their financial services needs.