How FinGoal’s Persona Tags Solves Your Biggest Customer Data Challenges.

So, you’re sitting on a mountain of data. It’s a pretty common position these days, but all the same, welcome to the top! From this height, you should have unparalleled insight on your data, right? Why is it, then, that so many FIs with mountains of consumer data know relatively little about what that data means?

Every financial institution, from the biggest multinational bank to the smallest small-town credit union, has a repository of valuable data. But collecting the data is easy; using it in a way that’s good for your members is more difficult.

Here’s the thing. Those national FIs feel more and more impersonal to users each passing day. With some FIs increasingly treating customers like products with price tags, people are looking for something in finance that feels like it’s actually for them. That’s where FinGoal’s persona tags come in.

Categorize Current Customer Behavior

The most obvious question with any customer transaction data is: What are my customers doing? A lot of fintech offerings answer this question with transaction categorization. It’s a good start. If you can slap a label - say, restaurant, gas, grocery - on a variety of different transactions, you can easily dump them into buckets. Bucketing transactions allows you to build the personal finance apps of ten years ago - hardly groundbreaking, but at least your end users’ spending habits become clear.

FinGoal’s persona tags go deeper. Using categorization as one input among many, our persona tags surface trends in spending data. Beyond assorting data into buckets by category for visualizing data, FinGoal looks at every transaction and, (if the behavior is common enough) assigns a persona tag: Say, High Gas Spend or High Grocery Spend.

Now, rather than having a classification of transactions, you have a description of an end user. The next most obvious question: So what? One application is to change how you communicate with the user. If you’ve got a credit product that gives benefits specifically for gas or grocery purchases, these High Gas Spend and High Grocery Spend users are an obvious fit for the product.

Predict Future Behavior

Once you’re outside of category buckets and into the world of user behavior, you can start asking bigger questions. Rather than, for example, “How much should this user budget for rent every month?” (a relic from the last generation of PFM), you can start asking “How likely is this user to put a down payment on a home in the near future?”

FinGoal’s persona tags move beyond monthly spending breakdowns, with an eye toward the future. Our DIY Home Improvement along with a Mortgage persona tag are specifically designed to surface users who might be looking to take out a HELOC. If you’re an FI, you may have a HELOC product that you can market specifically to this user, and at the moment they need it the most.

At a time when banking is feeling impersonal, these applications of FinGoal persona tags make users feel like their digital banking experience is actually paying attention to what they really need, rather than mindlessly spamming them with offers they don’t really need. FIs can carefully market to them with the financial products that will actually help them.

Look to the Horizon

Call me a dreamer, but I think persona tags have higher applications than the ones enumerated above. Here’s a question specifically for any reader working at a community or small, regional FI: How would you characterize your users’ day-to-day spending? Where else are they banking? What changes have there been recently in your community that you saw reflected in your data?

I’m sure there are small FIs that can answer some of these questions. I’m equally confident that there are small FIs that can’t answer any of them - or at least, can’t answer them with data to corroborate the answer. Too many small FIs don’t look at their user base’s spending in aggregate.

We all know that the big, nationwide FIs are data-mining in aggregate to examine market trends and look at their consumers not just on the individual level, but on the collective level as well. These institutions look at nationwide trends to inform how they market, what they market, and to who. Are the small community banks doing the same thing?

If you’re a community bank, you’ve got access to a wonderfully specific subset of national consumer data - that is, the data of your small community. Small FIs need to carefully hone their brand to their local community. Why not use the data they’ve already got on that community to polish their brand? Are people in your town eating out more these days? Are more people buying homes? And is local coffee more popular than Starbucks now? You can use these data points to craft your digital banking experience into something well-positioned, branded, and messaged specifically to people in your customer base. A polished experience that personal will make most consumers think twice before becoming another price tag in some impersonal nationwide FI’s database.