The Name of the Game? Product Value

By Dave Pond During a recent episode of the Marketing Money podcast (helmed by John Oxford, director of marketing at Renasant Bank, and Mabus Agency owner Josh Mabus), I was excited to hear the topic of conversation turn from product naming toward product value.  >> Marketing Money Ep. 125 (31:00) | LISTEN After all, nothing…

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What’s in a Name?

Customers and bank employee reviewing account benefits at desk.

By James Mason My friend and her six-year-old daughter were listening to music. Her daughter said that she’s never heard the song playing and that it was “weird,” so my friend said, “This was a popular song when I was a teenager in the ’90s.”  Her daughter replied and said, “Oh. You mean in the…

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The Rise of the Multi-Account Consumer

Woman with smartphone in office

Research shows that having more than one checking account has become more popular these days. This is true especially among Millennials, of whom 42% have two or more accounts. In fact, among consumers who consider a digital bank to be their primary bank, 42% have more than one checking account, and half of them have…

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Quality vs. Quantity vs. Retail Banking

Banker and customer

By Ryan Harbry The tension between quality versus quantity is age-old, affecting industries of all kinds, especially banking.  Community banks and credit unions are intimately familiar with weighing quality versus quantity. Financial institutions have quite the split personality in this arena if we’re honest with ourselves.  When it comes to lending practices, no stone will…

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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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BaZing’s Got My Back

Car trouble - couple looking under the hood

By Clay Crenshaw Having worked with financial institutions over the last few decades on their retail checking account strategies, I find myself so focused on things like fee income, analytics, and net interest margins that I forget how relevant and impactful our products can be.  If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share a quick…

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Fuel Your Fee Income with BaZing

Customer getting ready to use BaZing Fuel on her smartphone

Imagine your customers or members going to the pump and getting cheaper gas every single month. Think they’d appreciate your financial institution making that happen for them?  Inspired by popular grocery store programs, StrategyCorps’ new BaZing Fuel program takes fuel rewards to a whole new level by letting financial institutions help consumers save money when…

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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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Reinventing the Checking Account

Is it “game over” for mid-size banks and credit unions when it comes to checking accounts? Are the threats from deposit displacement, P2P providers, Amazon, and megabanks insurmountable? No.  Despite the prevalence of free checking accounts, many consumers express interest in switching to that hypothetical Amazon-offered bundled checking account we discussed earlier in this report.…

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