To Win Against the Big Banks, Smaller Institutions Must Go on the Offensive
By Steve Cocheo, Senior Executive Editor at The Financial Brand
Simple Subscribe
Subscribe Now!
Sean Sanchez faces the same challenges and frustrations that many retail banking executives live every day.
Megabanks like Chase, Bank of America and Capital One have tall stacks of marketing chips and they can lay them down all over the table, he explains. Institutions like his FirstBank, a $16.2 billion-in-assets multistate institution headquartered in Nashville, Tenn., are playing the same game as the giants, but they don’t have the budgets to compete head-to-head.
And the major players don’t just have chips. They have data.
“They know who everyone’s best customers are, and they can slice and dice them, doing all the quantiling and getting really, really specific,” says Sanchez, SVP and head of client services. “And then they can throw a bunch of money and effort into messaging those clients.”
How to fight the megabanks’ advantages? Doing a deep dive on the bank’s own data to target the best clients and prospects with the most appropriate messaging.
At The Financial Brand Forum 2026, Sanchez will describe a system he’s now using at the third bank in a row that has helped level the competition with deep-pocketed big banks. And he’ll discuss how it dovetails with efforts to revamp the bank’s product lineup.
“You have to play defense by going on offense,” says the veteran retail banker. Consumers’ financial needs tend to be episodic, but they can also be anticipated based on behavior and the relationship they already have with your institution.
Key takeaway: “We need to put meaningful messages in front of clients and bring awareness that when new financial needs arise, we are there to help solve their problems. You have to strike a blend between the value propositions the bank creates and the customer problems they are intended to solve and on the messaging that makes them aware of those realities.”
Another takeaway: The battle increasingly isn’t over traditional banking products anymore.
FirstBank “has to close the back door,” Sanchez insists. By this he means the loss of funds to the Schwabs, the Coinbases, the Krakens, the Robinhoods of financial services. Take crypto, which more Americans, especially Zillennials, are moving into. Banks like his must find partners that can help offer such alternatives to customers while maintaining the core relationship.
Need to Know:
- Megabanks and major fintechs spend billions on marketing, from martech to messaging. In response, smaller players have to become educated, equipped guerilla fighters.
- A key FirstBank strategy is tapping outside expertise to make more of what it already has — extensive data about its own customers.
- Getting more products into customers’ hands will also mean putting more products on the shelf, requiring both fresh designs and partnering with outside providers.
Start with Retail Bank Marketing Fundamentals
Sanchez has been with FirstBank for about a year and a half. On arrival he faced the reality of a cold start: The bank hadn’t been doing any significant product marketing. While the bank plays up its local roots, it needed to close the gap between potential and performance.
Day 1 diagnosis. “Their marketing budget was chiefly relegated towards branding,” says Sanchez. As a result, the bank hadn’t been finding ways of building on the relationships it already had.
Missed opportunity. “We weren’t mining the opportunities within our own portfolio,” says Sanchez.
Worse, he says, the bank had been seeing runoff in deposits, especially in savings products, where FirstBank faces not only other financial institutions’ offerings, but also high-yield savings products offered by fintechs and direct banks.
“When your bank has a history of not doing product marketing and you’re starting from zero, that’s a lot of scaffolding to build,” Sanchez adds.
An early priority was improving the bank’s use of its own data. Sanchez brought in OptimaFI, a vendor — he prefers to call the company a strategic partner — to help do that. Sanchez had used the company’s services at two previous banking jobs.
Read more: Why Most Financial Institutions Still Can’t Achieve Data-Driven Marketing’s Full Potential
Uncovering the Best Prospects for FirstBank
Two key ways of drilling into internal data are finding “capacity” and “propensity,” according to Sanchez.
• Capacity entails how much room there is for growth in a relationship. Sanchez explains that, while internal data can’t give FirstBank a sense of share of wallet, past experience and OptimaFI’s extensive industry database can serve as a proxy to help the bank to infer a good deal about the customer.
“Let’s say a customer has $10,000 on deposit with our bank,” says Sanchez. “Suffice it to say that they’ve got $10,000 on deposit elsewhere.”
• Propensity is the sense of how likely a customer will be to expand their relationship with FirstBank, given the right nudge, the right product offering. This, again, hinges on rules of thumb, based on observations at other banks.
“If they have one or two products with us, how likely are they to get a third or a fourth?” says Sanchez.
Add to these two factors a third, which Sanchez calls “modality” — the kind of customer someone is.
“You have your depositors, you have your borrowers, and you have your transactors,” says Sanchez. Each is its own circle, but, he says, just as in Venn diagrams, there are natural overlaps and therefore opportunities to increase the central overlap.
Find the sweet spot. “Not every customer lives at the center all the time, but the more customers you can move towards the center, the better,” Sanchez adds.
From this data analysis comes targeting for the bank’s marketing campaigns. FirstBank orchestrates four master campaigns annually, according to Sanchez. Each has a subset of five to seven sub-campaigns. So far, he adds, each has been successful in terms of impressions and resulting balance growth.
The bank is into its second year using OptimaFI, which also consults on the bank’s actual marketing approaches, media choices and messaging. A plus to the company’s approach, says Sanchez, is that it bases its fees on results delivered, not work done. Added to this, he says, the company doesn’t charge for “halo effects” — products consumers take that weren’t the actual target of each campaign.
Read more: Banks Can Convert Messy Data into Unstoppable Growth
Rewarding the ‘Engaged Customer’ Pays
Product development and management is what Sanchez has focused on over most of his career and he believes it will be a key part of how FirstBank capitalizes on opportunities to gain new customers and expand on existing relationships.
Key point: Banks have to stock their shelves with the products today’s customers are looking for.
The first element of this is improving the design of FirstBank’s banking products to increase their appeal to consumers while meeting the bank’s balance sheet requirements.
Sanchez wants to avoid isolated products, preferring to focus on those that will broaden relationships. He explains that he seeks “engaged relationships.”
What that looks like: The bank has seen some success with its FirstUp Savings, launched last July. The product gives checking account holders an APY of 3.82% on up to $25,000 if they agree to transfer at least $50 a month from a FirstBank checking or money market account to savings.
“We’ve more than doubled our monthly new account unit and balance production” with this and related moves, says Sanchez. He says FirstUp Savings stands out from direct bank and fintech high-yield savings because it’s not a solo offering, but one that rewards the engaged customer.
The strategy: This is the beginning of a longer-term strategy to wrap new offerings around the checking account core, giving customers more solutions to their needs. Sanchez plans to offer tiers — “good, better, best” — to meet the range of demand. He is also working on tools to facilitate switching from other banks to FirstBank and to help customers rein in subscription spending.
Read more: Turn the ‘Department of No’ into the ‘Department of Know’
Becoming FirstBank’s ‘Casting Director’
Part of the relationship expansion effort requires seeking outside help, given the bank’s size and staff limitations. The types of products that more consumers want, such as checking accounts that give access to cryptocurrency holdings and to investing services, won’t be designed and developed in-house, according to Sanchez. But meeting that demand will be essential to building and keeping broadened relationships, so he is working on partnerships with fintechs and other players.
“The part I try to play is ‘casting director’,” says Sanchez.
There are many potential partners FirstBank can choose from to wrap more value around checking accounts. Finding the best mutual fits will increasingly be a key role for Sanchez and many bankers in similar organizations.
Beyond product, he’s also exploring partnerships with fintechs that can help FirstBank improve its digital customer experience, especially important as younger people become the focus. For now, the bank leans heavily on its branches for closing the loop.
Read selected previews about sessions at The Financial Brand Forum 2026:
- Consumers are Using AI to Find Their Next Bank, But Many Still Don’t Trust Its Advice
- Why ‘No’ Is the Most Expensive Word in the Boardroom
- The ‘K-Shaped Economy’ and Other Myths Bankers Should Ignore in 2026
- How Fintechs Disrupt Deposits to Acquire Primary Banking Relationships
- How Citizens Bank Is Blending AI with Classic Business Banking
- Why the Future of Banking Lies at the Intersection of AI and the Blockchain
- Storytelling Is Hot. But Is Your Bank Telling the Right Stories to the Right People?
