Get Ahead of the Sea Change in Fee-Based Banking 

By Adam Thompson In October there were two more clear indicators that banking fees have seen better days as a non-interest income strategy for FIs of all sizes.  First digital banking competition is proving that spotting customers money for OD/NSF fees builds customer relationships and boosts organic growth.  Leading consumer financial technology company, Chime®, announced…

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SMB Accounts Are the Bullseye for Growth 

By Dave Crook With growing competition from megabanks and big regionals, community FIs need to leverage their ability to attract new retail and commercial customers.  We hear this all the time and understand the challenges of going up against these Goliaths with just a sling and stone.  But as in the original story of David…

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Banks Need a SMB Value-Added Strategy 

By Dave Crook In this digital era, banking has been playing catch-up with the significant changes in the broader business community, particularly with SMBs. And for many FIs, SMB checking account products seem more a “blast from the past” than other products. Sometimes it’s because there’s a sense that most SMBs have migrated to megabanks…

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Checks Don’t Matter, Primary Checking Accounts Do 

By Kyle Dentlinger The Federal Reserve says check writing has declined almost 75% in the last 25 years. There were more than 4 billion checks written in 2000. Today, that number is around 750 million.  And recently we’ve started to see both banks and retailers start to cool on accepting these standards of a bygone…

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Give Your SMB Accounts What They Need Most: Information Security Tools

By James Mason It’s very likely that if you ask any SMB owner what their biggest threat to running their business is today, information security, cyber attacks (and liability for attacks), and ID theft will be the ones at the top of their list.  According to Infosecurity Magazine and Orange Cyber Defense, there’s a 77%…

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Take Financial Wellness Beyond “Nice to Have” Features

Digital estate planning can build a deeper one-stop financial relationship with your FI By James Mason The last fintech wave was decidedly driven, like today’s burst of interest in AI, by the follow-on effects of the new digital age that has altered the entire marketplace in the past 20 years. We saw it hit retail…

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How to Win More SMB Business in This Market

By Gregg Early According to a recent Jack Henry article, the top 25 banks in the US account for 84% of primary banking relationships with SMBs.  And community and regional FIs’ share of primary SMB banking relationships are declining due to megabanks and digital banks expanding their market share – from 28% in 2018 to…

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OD/NSF Fees: The False Safety Net of Doing Nothing

By Mike Branton Given the proposed CFPB rules that are going into effect regarding OD/NSF fees, it’s the right  time to find out how banks and credit unions are dealing and planning to deal with this dominant source of non-interest income being increasingly scrutinized (yep, it’s classified as a “junk fee”) and regulated to generate…

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Your Checking Products Must Address SMB Customers’ CyberSecurity Concerns 

By Dave DeFazio   The statistics are sobering about the cyber challenges and data theft realities of being small and medium businesses (SMB) today. According to Infosecurity Magazine: Over three-quarters of cyber incidents impacted small businesses in 2023. Nearly half of all malware targeting SMBs last year focused on data theft.  Researchers observed a rise…

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Research Part 4: Opportunities from Reinventing Business Checking Accounts

  Editor’s Note: This is the fourth and final part in our series exploring market research we commissioned with financial services firm Cornerstone Advisors to get a state of market view through the eyes of SMB leaders across the country. Our main goal was to understand their challenges now and how community financial institutions could…

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