During times of economic uncertainty, customers face anxieties around their personal financial wellbeing. Monitoring a checking account can become a stressful endeavor, and, by proximity, banks and credit unions can become associated with a stressful personal financial picture for customers.
While financial institutions can’t directly impact someone’s income or their spending choices, they can become trusted advisors, utilizing the data they have available about their customers along with tools, professionals and other resources to provide value to customers. By doing so, financial institutions can create a more meaningful relationship with their customers and improve their lives in a way that makes them invaluable.
Consider the following ways to deepen your relationship with your customers and positively affect their personal finances:
Better Utilize Customer Data
A good starting point for any financial institution looking to make a personal finance impact with their customers is by aggregating and organizing customer data. Spending information, coupled with account balances and assets/debts in a readily available and transferable data set provide the framework for creating meaningful tools and services.
Open banking through an API is a great destination for customer data. Once organized, FinTech organizations and other companies can utilize and apply that data in a meaningful and valuable way, such as a tool or an app.
Creating Meaningful Applications
When data is wrangled and easily accessible with an API, FinTech partnerships can utilize your customer data in products/services like budgeting calculators, net worth monitoring, investment performance, and a myriad of other creative and useful ways. FinTech organizations are charged with the task of creating innovative, customer-pleasing applications, while your financial institution provides value through organized and accessible data with existing customer relationships.
On top of tools and apps, your organization can provide other information such as white papers and financial education, sometimes tailored to specific segments of your customer base, depending on their overall financial picture.
Ensuring Successful Use
Once you have meaningful tools and resources in the hands of your customers, make sure you’re continuously learning about customer use of the products and improving them. This feedback loop for modification and improvement will ensure the tools you’ve rolled out are useful, personalized, and creating genuine value for your customers.
Similarly, make sure your customers have support and coaching around how they can best use the tools and resources you’ve created. Getting customers “up and running” on the software you provide will result in higher adoption, increased use, and ultimately, a deeper relationship with your customers.
