Attracting and retaining deposits in today’s competitive financial market is a core problem at many financial institutions. With deposit scarcity and high rates impacting profitability, it’s time to revolutionize your Deposit Management Practices. In other words, it is time to take advantage of advanced analytics capabilities that enable you to adopt more active deposit management strategies and tactics. And lead to a more customer-centric approach.

By bringing deposit analytics from finance and marketing executives and analysts to the front-line staffers, you empower your sales officers to have meaningful conversations with your customers and increase their contribution to your financial institution. Advanced analytics are crucial to staying relevant to your customers and your staff, especially when attracting and retaining new money.

Here are some recommendations to help transform your deposit management strategy:  

• Include activity-based planning in your performance management processes. By analyzing new money patterns at the branch level, you can precisely determine the outreach required to accomplish your targets and effectively measure your officers’ activities. And that is something you can influence instead of looking only at their results.
• Integrate the insights on your customers’/members’ behavior into data-driven personas and segment accordingly. Such an approach will better inform the design of your products and the marketing to current customers/members to attract more new money. Remember that attracting new money – not opening accounts – is your actual business goal. That should also guide your prospecting efforts.
• Think of the battle for deposits as a battle for relevance. Offering relevant advice and being relationship-focused is very likely in your mission statements. Remember that deposits (not loans) drive the relationship with your customers/members. It’s time to adjust some paradigms and focus on growing deposits to fuel your lending rather than borrowing to lend.
• Focus on the value you can deliver rather than the rates you offer. Focusing solely on promotional rates, tiering of large deposits, and new customer-only rates exposes you to higher costs and short-term money inflows. You can do much better than that.

With the total number of federally insured credit unions and community banks decreasing over the past decade, those merged institutions’ assets under management have grown. With that comes the need for repeatable processes and controls and leveraging advanced analytics to offer competitive services. By leveraging the insights from your enriched data and putting it in front of your officers, you can make their lives easier and strengthen relationships with your customers/members.

Join the active deposit management movement to shape deposit management for today’s realities. Don’t get left behind in the war for deposits.