How Leading Institutions Supercharge Cross-Sell with Transaction Data
By Caroline Hroncich, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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Your customers are telling you what they need next, in writing, every time they swipe.
A rent payment clearing on the first of every month is a mortgage conversation. A sudden run of airline and hotel charges is a card upgrade. The next products a customer needs are usually visible in the last month of their spending, and most institutions can see it now.
Reality check: Whether they act on it, and when, is what separates a relevant offer from another ignored one.
Financial institutions have gotten good at collecting that data. Turning it into the right offer at the right time is where they struggle, and community and regional players are falling behind the competitors they most need to beat. Just 38% of account holders at regional and community institutions said their provider’s recommendations got more relevant over the past year, against 51% at online only providers and 50% at major national banks, according to a national study conducted by The Center for Generational Kinetics and commissioned by Alkami.
“The ingestion of data, anybody can do,” says Terrance Mendez, chief executive and chief financial officer of Denver-based Safe Harbor Financial. “It’s the purposeful ingestion of the data with an intent that allows that data to become real.”
Need to Know:
- Only 38% of account holders at regional and community institutions say their bank’s product recommendations got more relevant over the past year, against 51% at online-only providers and 50% at major national banks, per a Center for Generational Kinetics survey of 1,500 digital banking adults commissioned by Alkami.
- Reading the signal is no longer the edge. Every institution can do it, and timing, measurement, and building for what customers keep asking for now decide whether the data becomes a sale.
- U.S. Bank tracks cross-sell through percentage multiserve, the share of clients who come back for a second product, which Arijit Roy calls the single most important metric his team watches.
- The strongest signal a bank gets is the same request showing up across its customers, a product brief most institutions read as a marketing cue instead.
The Moment Matters More Than the Message
At Bank Iowa, a $2.4 billion-asset bank in West Des Moines, Iowa, the signals that drive outreach are the plain ones. “The most useful insights are often the simplest: spending trends, changes in balances, product usage, digital engagement,” says Trisha Menke, vice president and retail banking director.
Her advice to an institution just getting started: Begin with the data you already have. A new platform can wait. Reading the signal is easy, and timing is the harder part, since even a good offer misses if it lands too early or too late.
Mendez lets the customer set the clock. Some need something now, some don’t, and the hardest group is everyone in between, worn down by constant pitching. His answer is to hold the pitch and stay in contact. “You want the help, great. If you don’t want the help, that’s okay, too,” he says, and a customer who trusts you picks up when the need is real.
When the offer lands matters as much as what it says. Arijit Roy, senior executive vice president and head of consumer and business banking products at Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank, points to the difference between catching a customer as they’re rushing to check in for a flight and catching them once they’re seated and the trip has gone well.
Key insight: The signal names the need. When it lands, on which channel, and whether the person acting on it can see what the customer sees decides whether the offer ever feels relevant.
- Time the offer to the customer’s moment, not the campaign calendar, and give a relationship manager room to override the automated send.
- Hold the pitch with customers who aren’t ready and stay in contact so you’re there when the need is real.
- Make sure the branch and call-center staff fielding a signal can see the same activity that triggered it.
Measure the Second Purchase
Getting a customer to open an email isn’t the same as getting them to come back and buy again. U.S. Bank measures the second one directly with a metric it calls percentage multiserve, tracking how many customers who opened one account return for another product.
“That’s the single most important metric,” Roy says, “because it actually shows that a client has committed.” For Roy, commitment shows up in how often a customer uses a product, not how big it is. A mortgage happens two or three times in a life and says little about loyalty. A debit card gets swiped every day, and a customer who runs daily spending through you has chosen you in a way no one-time event proves. “It means that they trust you enough to come back and give you a portion of their financial life,” Roy says.
Menke measures success the same way at Bank Iowa. The bank looks past the sale itself to product adoption, relationship growth, engagement, retention, and satisfaction, the measures that show whether an offer solved something rather than just closed. “The goal isn’t to push products, but to identify opportunities where we can help a client at the right time,” she says.
Roy sees the everyday human touch as part of what earns that second product. U.S. Bank recently rebuilt its branch view to mirror its app in real time, so a banker sitting with a customer sees exactly what the customer sees, and someone who got an offer or alert doesn’t sit down with a banker who knows nothing about it. “There’s no substitute for human judgment and the ability to have someone with empathy to have a trust-based conversation with a client,” Roy says.
Why it matters: A campaign open tells you a message worked. The second purchase tells you the customer stayed, which is the only measure that separates attention from commitment.
- Track second-product rate by acquisition cohort, not by campaign.
- Watch how often a customer uses a product, not just how much it’s worth, since frequency signals commitment before size does.
- Measure retention, engagement, and product adoption alongside sales, so you catch whether an offer actually fit the customer.
The Signal You Hear Twice Is a Product You Haven’t Built Yet
The clearest signal a bank gets is the same need turning up again and again across its customers. Safe Harbor kept hearing that cannabis employers wanted a compliant retirement plan and couldn’t find one built for them, so the fintech built one. “If you hear the same story over and over again, that product has a higher probability of being successful,” Mendez says.
Once a customer is ready to take a product, the odds of closing come down to how easy it is to get. A hard onboarding flow loses people at the last step, when the paperwork stalls over a missing form or a signer who never finished. John Bearden, chief banking officer at Thread Bank, a $1.1 billion-asset bank in Rogersville, Tennessee, removes that step by building the product into a platform the customer already uses. “Financial products can be integrated directly into the workflows where customers are already making decisions,” he says.
The data tells a bank what a customer needs. Acting on it well is the harder part. “It’s trust that’s been built over centuries, and I want banking leaders to not take that for granted,” Roy says. “We earn that trust every day, every month, every year.”
What to Do Tomorrow:
- Pick three behaviors you can already see in the core and write down the offer each one should trigger before buying any new tooling.
- Move the timing decision off the campaign calendar and onto the customer’s moment and give a relationship manager room to override an automated send.
- Watch second-product rate, not campaign opens, as the measure of whether an offer built a relationship or just got attention.
- When the same request keeps coming from different customers, treat it as a product to build, and put it where the customer already is.
