In today’s information age, a challenge confronts banks — how to gain a clear, reliable, and accurate view of their own customers. The culprit? A wealth of data, often fragmented across disparate systems.
While the data is abundant, it often tells an incomplete or inaccurate story. A simple question like “Did a customer’s money stay within the bank or leave entirely?” can be surprisingly difficult to answer. This fractured view of customer behavior hinders banks from leveraging valuable data for smarter decisions and client engagement.
The answer to this challenge lies not just in the data itself, but in a solid plan to unify customer data and then make it actionable. By breaking down data silos and building a comprehensive customer profile, banks can unlock the true potential of information. This leads to a deeper understanding of their clients, empowering them to make intelligent decisions that drive engagement, anticipate customer needs, and mitigate attrition risks.
In an increasingly complex economic landscape, this data-driven approach isn’t just advantageous — it’s essential for banks to remain competitive and achieve sustained success.
Follow the money: The William example
The old “follow the money” catchphrase takes on a whole new meaning with data analytics. By consolidating and analyzing seemingly disconnected data sources, banks can track money movement across the entire organization. This is critical for revealing customer behaviors, patterns, and areas of potential attrition or increased engagement.
Meet William
William wasn’t your average customer. A seasoned investor, he possessed a keen eye for maximizing his returns and a well-honed strategy for moving his money around. As interest rates climbed this past year, William became a whirlwind of activity, shifting funds between accounts in a constant quest for the best yield.
This presented a challenge for his bank. Their legacy systems, while functional, weren’t designed for William’s agility. When William moved money, it often felt like following a breadcrumb trail.
Sometimes, a clear Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfer would appear, blatantly leaving the system for a new custodian. Other times, the path was more cryptic — a series of internal transfers, a check made out to a generic payee, etc.
Paper trails became tangled labyrinths, making it difficult to understand William’s overall financial picture and, more importantly, his relationship with the bank.
This inability to track money movement hindered the bank’s marketing and attrition efforts. Money wasn’t always leaving the primary financial institution, it was simply transferring to a new area (e.g., moving from retail to wealth management, or vice versa). The bank needed to understand: did money actually LEAVE the institution or simply shift around?
Answering that question proved more difficult than they thought and posed challenges making their marketing journey ineffective. The last thing you want to do is try to retain a deposit that just moved to another area of the bank.
The bank was full of “Williams”— clients with complex financial strategies that their outdated systems couldn’t unravel. This lack of visibility made it impossible to offer personalized service, leading to missed opportunities and the potential for customer dissatisfaction.
Enter Data Cloud: The game changer
Data Cloud became the missing piece of the puzzle for this bank. This powerful tool consolidated information from every corner of the bank, weaving together a tapestry of William’s financial activity.
By unifying disparate data sources, they could track transfers in real-time, understand the source and destination of his funds, and most importantly, gauge the overall health of his relationship with the bank, making propensity to attrit models more reliable. No longer were they chasing after breadcrumbs — they could finally see the entire picture.
Data Cloud’s insights were revelatory. While some of William’s money had shifted from savings to a certificate of deposit (CD) within the institution after being withdrawn, a significant portion had migrated to a high-yield account elsewhere after being deposited into another checking account, and some had moved to their own financial advisor group.
Equipped with this knowledge, the bank was empowered to act. They could now tailor personalized offers to William, demonstrating a deep understanding of his financial goals and the flexibility they provided. They could highlight the benefits of consolidating his accounts with them, showcasing the competitive rates and convenient access available within their ecosystem.
A win-win for the bank and William
Before Data Cloud, William was merely a string of account numbers and transactions to his bank. As a savvy customer who always seeks out the best rates, William saw his bank as a place to park funds, not as an ally on his financial journey.
As William interacted across multiple areas for his financial needs, engagement increased. By leveraging Data Cloud, the bank shattered the limitations of a purely transactional relationship with William. No longer a string of account numbers and fleeting interactions, he became a valued client with a clear financial vision. Attrition risk plummeted as the bank could differentiate between money actively leaving the ecosystem versus smart internal movement. William, in turn, began to see the bank not just as a custodian, but as a partner who understands his goals. For him, it meant simplified finances and greater potential for maximizing returns.
Perhaps most importantly, William’s case study became a blueprint for the bank — a testament to the power of transforming data silos into customer understanding that could be replicated across their entire client base. By gaining a holistic view of their customers’ financial pictures, the bank could develop targeted strategies to meet their individual needs and goals, potentially increasing their overall return on investment.
The power of data: Are you ready to follow the money trail?
In today’s dynamic financial landscape, achieving a complete understanding of your customers’ financial behavior depends on overcoming the challenge of fragmented data in banking.
Data Cloud offers a powerful solution:
- Unify customer data: Gain a holistic view of your customers’ financial activity, regardless of internal or external sources.
- Unlock hidden opportunities: Identify areas where you can better serve your high-value customers, like William.
- Strengthen customer relationships: Foster trust and loyalty by demonstrating a deep understanding of their financial goals.
- Mitigate risk, enhance compliance and cybersecurity: Proactively detect and prevent fraudulent activity, safeguarding assets and reputation. Ensure compliance and protect customers from cyber threats with a data strategy backed by strong security.
With an abundance of data available at your fingertips, it’s vital to learn how to harness it and let it tell you the story of your customers. In turn, your customers become less of a mystery — follow the money trail with Data Cloud.
Want to learn more? Check out all Atrium’s solutions for financial services firms.
