Financial institutions are grappling with a silent exodus: customers are increasingly opening new accounts elsewhere while keeping their primary relationships intact. This fragmentation of financial relationships
SavvyMoney, a fintech company serving over 1,350 financial institutions, is tackling this issue head-on with innovative credit monitoring and customer engagement approaches.
On a recent episode of the Banking Transformed podcast, host Jim Marous spoke with SavvyMoney CEO JB Orecchia about the fintech’s groundbreaking new product Get My Rate — and how it’s reshaping the landscape of financial wellness tools.
Q: Can you share a bit about your career in financial services and SavvyMoney’s mission to make financial wellness more attainable?
JB Orecchia: I’ve been in financial services for 36 years. I started my career in lending, spending 10 years at household, both on the branch side and on the credit card side. I spent a lot of time with consumers, working with them on their finances and really helping an underserved consumer get credit.
My journey in financial services led me to join the founding team at freecreditscore.com and freecreditreport.com, pioneers in delivering credit reports online. This experience laid the groundwork for the vision with SavvyMoney.
Q: How does SavvyMoney’s business model benefit financial institutions and consumers?
Orecchia: When we built the product, we decided we’re not going direct to consumer this time. If you’re a banker, credit union, or FinTech, you don’t want your customers or members to go to Credit Karma. You’d rather retain that traffic on your own site and provide those valuable insights and services to your consumers.
This B2B approach has proven successful. SavvyMoney now serves 1,350 financial institutions, is integrated into 40 digital platforms and reaches 36 million consumers.
Tackling Customer Retention in the Digital Age
Q: How is SavvyMoney addressing the challenge of customer retention in an era where opening digital accounts is increasingly easy?
Orecchia: If I can get a consumer to use my mobile app more than once a month for whatever reason, I’m building engagement and making it harder for them to move somewhere else.
A number of our digital platforms actually ran a campaign. To see your score, you had to download their mobile app. And they actually saw a huge spike in the number of consumers who hadn’t downloaded their mobile app yet.
This strategy demonstrates how SavvyMoney’s tools can drive engagement and provide additional value to consumers, giving them more reasons to stay with their current financial institution.
Q: Can you describe what Get My Rate is and why you introduced this new product?
Orecchia: Everyone’s familiar with Capital One’s Auto Navigator. Pre-qual has been around for a while. But this product is a little bit flawed for a couple of reasons. One, if you get turned down, what do you do? Do you keep logging in all the time? Or what if you’re a high-end consumer and don’t get the rate you want?
Get My Rate addresses these issues by providing a more dynamic and personalized experience for consumers across the credit spectrum.
Q: How does Get My Rate differ from traditional prequalification tools in the market?
Orecchia: The idea for Get My Rate really was not a ‘no,’ but a ‘not now.’ For your lower-end consumers that are the ‘no,’ we say, ‘Hey, what do I need to do to get better? Then alert me when I get there or alert me on my progress along the way.’
This approach is particularly important for younger generations. Gen Z and Gen Y, if they got turned down from your institution, they don’t come back. Get My Rate provides a path forward, helping these consumers improve their credit and stay engaged with the institution.
For prime customers, the tool offers flexibility: If you’re an A credit consumer and the rate you just saw is 6% and you’re like, ‘I really want to pull the trigger on this product, but I’d really like 5%,’ we’ll alert you when the rate gets to 5%.
Leveraging Data for Personalized Financial Solutions
Q: How does SavvyMoney help financial institutions gather and utilize customer data for better decision-making?
Orecchia: We pull that data in, we pull the data in from other institutions and we actually see what the average interest rates are. You can actually look at it and say, ‘Oh shoot, I’m not competitive. Maybe I need to return to my lending department and figure out what rates I should offer.’
This data-driven approach allows financial institutions to stay competitive and responsive to market conditions, ultimately benefiting both the institution and the consumer.
Q: Can you discuss the importance of providing actionable insights to consumers about their credit scores?
Orecchia: We try to drive features in the tool, whether it be setting goals, action plans, a SavvyMoney checkup, or robust content tailored to their specific situation. We’re trying to give them reasons to come back in and get better.
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Q: What’s the typical timeline for a financial institution to implement SavvyMoney’s solutions?
Orecchia: We built the site in a couple of days. The real long pull depends on how many financial products you have because we have to load in all the financial products, credit score bands with all the disclosures and card art.
I estimate that it will take three weeks to a month to get the full end-to-end product up and running. This timeline includes testing and customization to meet each institution’s specific needs.
Q: Why might organizations hesitate to sign on with SavvyMoney and how do you address these concerns?
Orecchia: Some don’t understand the ROI. And so, cost becomes a factor. Priorities within the institution, so they have other priorities and they think that the SavvyMoney solution will be hard to implement.
We do so much more than just a score. Once people realize this is a consumer engagement tool, it’s personalization; it’s actionable insights, it’s marketing, it’s deep analytics — once they buy into that, they’re like, ‘Whoa, the cloud’s clear,’ and they realize it.
Driving Profitability and Customer Retention
Q: How does SavvyMoney impact customer profitability and retention for financial institutions?
Orecchia: Many of our institutions have compared the profitability of their clients and SavvyMoney clients are 3x to 4x more profitable than non-SavvyMoney clients. You could call it correlation, causation, or both.
This significant difference in profitability underscores SavvyMoney’s value to financial institutions. Institutions can build stronger, more profitable relationships by providing tools that engage customers and help them improve their financial health.
Q: How does SavvyMoney’s high client retention rate reflect its value to financial institutions?
Orecchia: We launch 50 to 60 financial institutions a quarter, which is not a small task. And we retain 98% of our clients.
This impressive retention rate speaks to the ongoing value that financial institutions find in SavvyMoney’s offerings. As institutions see the impact on customer engagement and profitability, they’re likely to continue and expand their use of SavvyMoney’s tools.
Q: What excites you about the future of credit and financial services technology?
Orecchia: The buzzword is AI and we’ve been experimenting with AI to answer consumer questions. Why did my credit change? Why did it go up? Why did it go down? Looking at that data over time is super powerful.
We collect a lot of information and where I believe AI is going to be super powerful is stitching all of that together and providing very actionable advice in the short term and in the long term.
Q: How do you see AI shaping the future of financial wellness tools and credit solutions?
Orecchia: Our next phase involves leveraging AI for automated marketing. FIs can run campaigns, but they’re like, ‘Gee, SavvyMoney, could you just do this for us? We’re going to tell you what outcomes we want and let the machine learn and do that personalization on its own.’
We do a fair amount of it in the tool — but taking that to the next step is super exciting for us.
This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.
For a longer version of this conversation, listen to “New Credit Engagement Tool Supports Financial Wellness”, a podcast with Jim Marous, available here. This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Justin Estes is an award-winning writer, strategist, and financial marketing expert with expertise in banking, investments, and fintech. His clients include the NYSE, Franklin Templeton, Credit Karma, Citi and, UBS, and his work has appeared in Forbes, Barrons and ThinkAdvisor as well as The Financial Brand.