Articles
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…
Read MoreRevitalize 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…
Read MoreIt’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…
Read MoreRemember 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…
Read MoreClient Story with CBC Federal Credit Union
Download as a PDF While most financial institutions are grappling to secure deposits in these times, CBC Federal Credit Union, situated in Oxnard, California, faces an unusual yet rewarding challenge – it has a surplus of new share certificate (CD) requests from across the country. CBC upped its CD rates to attract new members and,…
Read MoreDon’t Fight the Tape: Get Beyond Chasing New Deposits
While certainly an arrow in the quiver, community financial institutions can’t solely rely on growing deposits to thrive. By Mike Branton and Gregg Early It has been a wild ride for banks and credit unions. The shift from a low-growth, low interest rate environment to its complete opposite in less than 12 months…
Read More5 Steps to Up Your Engagement Marketing Efforts
Attract and retain consumers with engaging benefits and a plan to educate people about it By Trae Turner It’s not breaking news that people’s lives are tied to their mobile devices. Look around. Whether it’s a phone, tablet or laptop, it seems wherever you go, people are incorporating their lives in one place…
Read MoreRedefining Primary Relationships
By Mike Branton and Dave DeFazio This article originally appeared in Bank Director. Ask 100 bankers to define what it means to be the primary financial institution for a consumer, and you’ll likely get 100 different answers. Ask 100 consultants to bankers what being the primary FI entails, and you’ll probably get 100 more…
Read MoreEvolution Can Be More Dangerous than Revolution: Digital Adoption for US Banks and Credit Unions
By Adam Thompson While there’s a lot of talk about industry or technology revolution, the fact is it’s generally evolution that transforms an industry and lays waste to stragglers and the stubborn. One industry where we can see what digital evolution has done is in consumer retail. At the turn of the century, major…
Read MoreMake Your Financial Institution a Financial First Responder
By Gregg Early When we talk about first responders, we usually envision law enforcement, military, and fire and rescue workers running towards danger as everyone else is running from it. But banks and credit unions can be financial first responders to the dangers – and opportunities – that occur in the lives of customers…
Read More