Customer Growth: 3 Ways for Financial Service Firms to Drive Growth

(This blog is the first in a two part series.) Your financial services firm likely serves a wide range of consumers – each with varying financial needs and goals. But not all consumers offer the same potential for your brand. Especially when consumers face inflation and economic uncertainty, like many are currently. 

In fact, about 20% of households hold over 84% of the nation’s wealth. These are the consumers that hold the most opportunity for growth – they invest more, spend more, and pose less risk than other consumers. Despite higher prices, these consumers continue to buy their desired goods and services while still accumulating wealth for the future. 

The challenge is to attract these valuable consumers, meet their savings, investment, and credit needs, and provide exceptional customer service.  This will  result in long-term relationships and a higher ROI for your firm.

Actionable, data-driven solutions to attract the right customers and grow share

With so many financial products and services available to today’s consumers, financial marketers need additional data insights to help drive their strategies and focus on high-potential consumers. By using advanced insight on the overall asset and credit picture for prospective and current customers, marketers can support many customer growth initiatives. In part 1 of this 2-part series, we will explore the first three of seven ways for financial marketers to drive customer growth. 

1. Target affluent, high-value consumers for new investment and banking relationships

If you are looking to expand your customer base for your wealth management or deposit businesses, then incorporating a more complete view of consumers’ asset potential can help you reach wealthy audiences. For example, target prospects that are likely to hold over $1 million in assets. Leveraging asset insights (instead of survey information) has helped leading firms steer their prospecting campaigns toward affluent investors and savers.

2. Expand and refine your lending audiences

Consumer borrowing is on the rise. But, consumer finances have fluctuated over the past few years due to inflation and job turnover. At the same time, over 77 million consumers have thin files or are unscored. However, lenders have plenty of options to expand their view of consumers’ credit situation to fuel acquisition campaigns, expand access to credit, and better address risk in today’s world. 

For example, lenders can refresh their acquisition models with more recent credit data. This could provide a 15% lift in performance right from the get-go.* Additionally, lenders can go beyond credit scores to explore data on a household’s likely affluence or that sheds insight on everyday payment behaviors, employment, or income. Gaining a broader view of household credit can help lenders refine audiences while managing risk.

3. Uncover hidden opportunity to grow wallet share

If a financial marketer could assess its current customer base and capture 1% of held-away asset and credit balances, that could translate into millions of dollars. After all, many consumers  spread their wealth and their borrowing across multiple firms. This “spread” can be a puzzle for financial marketers. 

Adding insight on households’ likely total assets or ability to meet financial commitments to a firm’s own data can open new doors for cross-sell efforts – and help capture both incremental assets as well as low-risk credit balance transfers.  

Watch out for Part 2 of this series where we will discuss four additional ways that financial marketers can drive customer growth. In the meantime, check out our eBook: Drive customer growth – Best practices for financial services firms to acquire the right customers and grow share.

 

*Equifax analysis