Customers’ financial lives and their personal finance is often a complex and disparate exercise of trying to aggregate many different inputs and make sense of one’s assets, obligations and general spending behavior.
To put it another way, consumers have an infinite amount of tools as their disposal, but often suffer from information overload.
As a financial institution, you should work to unify these disjointed aspects of your customers’ financial ives and serve as the glue that brings clarity to their finances.
Unite Spending Behavior With Goals
Consumers often have a vague sense that they need to be saving more money, but don’t have clarity around the specific things they’re saving for, or how much they need to afford those things.
By creating different budgeting calculators, savings categories and strategies to achieving those savings goals, you can separate your financial institution from the pack by serving more as a consultant on spending behavior.
Any way you can differentiate your core products by giving them context and direction toward improving your customers’ financial lives will make you stand out in their minds as an invested partner.
Bring Investments Together Under One Roof
Customers need a central location for their various financial products. Even if there isn’t a single platform where individuals can trade various stocks and make typical banking transactions, those accounts should be able to link where they can have a better sense of their assets and debts.
By creating a sole platform for these different aspects, your financial institution can separate itself by bringing clarity to a typically disjointed financial picture. This is another way to unite your customers’ financial lives.
Unite Present With Future
One of the greatest frustrations of Americans is the sense that they have already made too many financial mistakes to ever recover and achieve long-term goals like retirement or saving for college for their children.
Instead of presenting customers with unrealistic “best-case-scenarios” that are already out of reach, make an effort to meet customers where they are when considering long-term financial planning.
Be All-In-One
Above all else, try to aggregate as much as possible under your financial institution’s roof in a way that is organized and concise in order to produce the most value for your customers.
Rather than thinking of your customers’ financial lives as a variety of apps, investment platforms, savings strategies, loan platforms and payment options, your financial institution should work to find creative ways to communicate and display those different aspects, if not own them entirely.
