Three ways for banks to drive lasting growth

Your bank likely serves a wide range of customers—each with varying financial needs and goals. But not all customers offer the same potential. Especially when they face inflation and economic uncertainty. 

In fact, according to Equifax, about 20% of households hold over 84% of the nation’s wealth. These are the consumers who 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.

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

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

If you’re looking to expand your customer base for 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 who 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 situations to fuel acquisition campaigns, expand access to credit, and better address risk. 

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.* Also, 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.

*Equifax analysis