Wayne Miller: The Key to Personalized Community Banking

Personalization is the key to customer relationships: According to Accenture, 72% of customers say personalization influences their choice of bank. Fortunately, community banks have a wealth of information at their fingertips to enable such personalization. 

Just look at your transaction data. It provides significant information about customers and their behaviors, particularly if you are their primary bank. For instance, you can see income sources, spending behaviors, loans they may have, investments they make, and so much more. This information is a goldmine for personalized engagement.

Yet, having the information and applying it are two different scenarios. Historically, drawing that data into a usable format has taken countless hours of culling, aggregating and organizing before analysis becomes a consideration. But today, technology like AI and AI agents can seamlessly capture, manage, cleanse and enrich that information while delivering it in a consumable format.

How community banks can turn data into personalized banking

Community banks looking for details of who can help them deliver on the promise of personalization can count on ICBA to help source credible options. Our Preferred Service Providers, ThinkTECH Accelerator alumni and corporate members are here to support your unique goals and objectives. For instance, ICBA Preferred Service Provider KlariVis provides an easy-to-understand picture of a community bank’s daily business for more informed decision-making, and ICBA corporate member Revio Insight offers a platform that transforms bank data into actionable revenue and deposit growth opportunities.

Other providers will help you capitalize on your findings. For example, if your customers are engaging with outside wealth management solutions, you could connect with ThinkTECH Accelerator alumnus InvestiFI, which offers a white-labeled community bank investment solution. Or if you are unsure where to begin, consider ICBA corporate member Vertice AI, which delivers AI-powered predictive analytics to help optimize marketing strategies.

A call to action for data-driven community banking

The long and short of the personalization opportunity? You don’t need to overthink it. You have the information in your systems and tools at your disposal to apply data quickly and effectively in a way that works for you. Best of all, you don’t have to go it alone. Our focus on helping educate banks so they can innovate for the future allows for multiple learning opportunities, including our virtual Innovation Workshop, from April 14­–15, to gain more insights into how to operationalize innovation—and data—within your bank. Visit icba.org/innovation to register.

Data is your superpower, and it offers the advantage you need to compete in an increasingly complex landscape. Relationship banking has grown beyond singular connections to individualized solutions, and fortunately, you have both the personal history and the transactional data to own the future of customized banking. Now, it’s up to you to make that vision a reality.