Case Studies
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…
Read MoreNavigating 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…
Read MoreRevitalize Your SMB Checking Accounts and Take on the Megabanks
By Gregg Early A study done by the Independent Community Bankers Association (ICBA) revealed that community banks provide about 60% of SMB loans nationwide. That puts community financial institutions at the center of their communities. It also means that SMBs are a crucial part of a healthy community FI’s portfolio. Both these axioms are the…
Read MoreIt’s Time to Get Beyond Basic Banking
By Gregg Early Few people get excited about basic banking – paying bills, managing account balances. However there is a way to augment these mundane banking functions by extending lifestyle-based banking features so that FIs can help consumers save money when they need to spend it. Doing this offers a unique level of value that…
Read MoreRemember Who Won David vs Goliath
Channel the Power of Organic Growth by Gregg Early Let’s not talk about the past year. Let’s take the long view and talk about the past decade and a half. For nearly all of that time we lived in a “next normal” of quantitative easing, which brought along with it easy money and sustained…
Read MoreThe Big Tech Threat (Opportunity?)
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…
Read MoreInside 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…
Read MoreIs Your Financial Institution Feeling the Burn?
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…
Read MoreCash vs. Credit Card Spending Statistics: Before The Crisis
The COVID-19 crisis will likely ever alter the payment landscape. While it is premature to report usage stats, here’s a look at American Cash vs. Plastic usage as of December 2019, as reported by the Boston Federal Reserve.
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