Blog

Having a clear, accurate understanding of overall profitability is essential when making strategic business decisions in any industry. It can be particularly difficult for the financial industry to gain this insight, as a 2018 survey from Temenous and Accenture found that profitability was the biggest challenge facing banks today.

One reason this can be challenging is because there are many different areas across which a bank or credit union can evaluate profitability, including individual accounts, customers, relationships, products, officers, and branches. When and how you measure profitability for each of these will depend on your organization’s business priorities.

There are few questions to ask yourself when determining profitability on a macro level, and for specific segments of your business.

Replacing or implementing a technology solution can be a game changer for financial institutions. In many cases, the initial investment in a platform is dwarfed by the gains in productivity, effectiveness, and profitability. But to get there you’ll need budget, resources, and support — which means you’ll need the executive team on your side.

Research shows that one of the top reasons that software implementations fail is due to a lack of executive buy-in. That's because all major organizational changes have to happen from the top down. In this blog, find out how to convince leadership that a new technology solution is worth the investment. Here are a few ways to win executive support:

How do you focus limited resources on those opportunities that will drive profitable growth in a competitive marketplace? How do you identify those opportunities within your customer base and within your market?

In today’s highly competitive financial marketplace, you need a competitive edge built on strong analytics, sound strategies, and well-executed tactics. Analytics becomes “actionlytics” when the right data is integrated with your marketing and sales strategy effectively to achieve desired results.

Let’s explore the top three elements that are key to equipping your team with the actionable data they need to grow your business.

Does your bank’s value proposition sound something like this? “We have great relationships with our customers. We treat them like family: We know their names, their kids’ names and their birthdays.”

If so, congratulations — that’s no small feat! You’re likely building loyal customers and brand advocates that will help you grow your business and maximize your bottom line. But what happens when you expand past the point of being able to know every single one of your customers?

If you’re like most financial institutions, visibility into your customer’s profitability is limited. Core data alone just doesn’t show you the full picture. As a result, you likely don’t have the right information to assign costs to their accounts and come up with a specific net profit for that relationship to get a full view of your customer. In this post, we’re offering some ideas for tapping into the data to see your customer.

See the True Value of the Relationship

Years ago, customer profitability was based on industry standards but now, with the latest technology, you have access to the data to make this bank-specific and tailor those benchmarks to your institution. By bringing in information on costs, fees, and rates from your core system — along with the ability to create soft costs parameters such as overhead, data processing, and loan loss provision — you are able to gain unprecedented insight into your customer’s profitability.