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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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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The Great Deposit Race: Optimizing the “Less is More Strategy”

Choosing a proactive strategy to prune unproductive accounts may seem radical By Gregg Early It may seem counterintuitive to think that the best way to build primacy, grow deposits organically, and generate more non-interest income is to focus on determining which accounts aren’t financially productive and how to fix that relationship with your FI. Community…

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What Banking Can Learn from Amazon Prime

By Mike Branton   Building a fair exchange of value in a subscriber-first ecosystem is a winner for consumers and Amazon. If there’s one program that stands well above all others as the greatest marriage of a digital retail products selling platform and value-based subscription pricing, it is Amazon Prime. The numbers don’t lie, making…

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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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