Rethinking the Small Business Checking Playbook

By Dave DeFazio This article was previously published on BankDirector.com Even before interest rates rose, community banks and credit unions were battling megabanks, regional banks and the new wave of digital banks and fintechs to keep and attract traditional retail and small business checking account customers. This battle is for only a small percentage of…

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Navigating Beyond the “Free Checking” Era in Business Checking

By Dave DeFazio The era of simply offering a free checking account for business checking customers is done. And community FIs’ biggest competitors – megabanks and digital banks – are well aware of that. They’ve been busy adding value to their business checking accounts, especially in the past few years. Unfortunately, it’s not the same…

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Revitalize Your SMB Checking Accounts and Take on the Megabanks

By Gregg Early A study done by the Independent Community Bankers Association (ICBA) revealed that community banks provide about 60% of SMB loans nationwide. That puts community financial institutions at the center of their communities. It also means that SMBs are a crucial part of a healthy community FI’s portfolio. Both these axioms are the…

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It’s Time to Get Beyond Basic Banking

By Gregg Early Few people get excited about basic banking – paying bills,  managing account balances.  However there is a way to augment these mundane banking functions by extending lifestyle-based banking features so that FIs can help consumers save money when they need to spend it.  Doing this offers a unique level of value that…

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Remember Who Won David vs Goliath

Channel the Power of Organic Growth by Gregg Early   Let’s not talk about the past year. Let’s take the long view and talk about the past decade and a half. For nearly all of that time we lived in a “next normal” of quantitative easing, which brought along with it easy money and sustained…

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The Big Tech Threat (Opportunity?)

piggy bank sitting on a laptop keyboard

In November 2019, Google announced that it was going to launch a checking account. The announcement elicited the typical frenzy in the press about how the Big Tech company and its fellow Gigantosauruses were going to put traditional banks out of business. But — surprise, surprise—that wasn’t the game plan.  The plan was to partner…

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Inside the Digital Bank Insurgency of 2020

The pandemic should get a lot of the credit for this, but 2020 was a good — no, make that a great — year for challenger banks and the broader group of digital banks. At the beginning of 2020, just 3 percent of U.S. consumers considered a digital bank to be their primary bank. By…

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Is Your Financial Institution Feeling the Burn?

Building Exterior in sunlight

When the first so-called “challenger banks” like Simple and Moven appeared on the scene around 2010 they were heralded as “disruptors” that were going to put traditional banks and credit unions out of business. Why? The asserted logic was that they provided a better customer experience, were more customer-friendly in terms of pricing (i.e., no…

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