How Micro-Engagements Generate Sales and Build Loyalty

Jim Marous (00:12):

Hello, and welcome to Banking Transformed, the top podcast in retail banking. I'm your host, Jim Marous, owner, and CEO of the Digital Banking Report and co-publisher of The Financial Brand.

Jim Marous (00:22):

Personalized real time micro engagements are more than just a trend, they're reshaping the future of banking. By leveraging technology to create meaningful, timely interactions, financial institutions can build stronger customer relationships, increase loyalty, and stay competitive in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

Jim Marous (00:42):

On today's episode of Banking Transformed, we're joined by two industry leaders. Sarah Martin, the CEO of Pulsate, an Irish company at the forefront of mobile engagement technology. And Eric Givens, the senior vice president of Research and Development at Arizona Financial Credit Union.

Jim Marous (01:00):

We discuss how real-time communications is not just about big data or complex algorithms, but about using new tools to create small, impactful moments that resonate with consumers on a personal level.

Jim Marous (01:16):

Our guests will show how micro engagements will continue to transform the banking experience, making it more human, more relevant, and more valuable for consumers and financial institutions alike.

Jim Marous (01:30):

The power of personalized engagement cannot be disputed. The challenge is how do financial institutions create contextual communication to help consumers on their financial journey?

Jim Marous (01:43):

So, Sarah, I first met you at this year's Financial Brand Forum. I was intrigued when I saw an Ireland based organization on our event floor, engage with community banks and credit unions. Can you share a little bit about your company and your own personal journey?

Sarah Martin (02:00):

Thank you so much for having me on, Jim. I couldn't be happier than to spend this time with yourself and Eric today.

Sarah Martin (02:06):

I'm Sarah Martin, CEO of Pulsate. We are dedicated to deepening the digital relationship that financial institutions have with their customers, with the whole ambition to make sure that they're top of mind with their own customers so that they're top of wallet.

Sarah Martin (02:25):

Our background, yeah, I guess it is a little bit unusual to have an Irish person running a quasi-Irish American entity.

Sarah Martin (02:33):

Our background as a company is interesting. We started actually serving a multiple multitude of different industries, and we had our first financial institution use our platform in 2018. And Eric is here from Arizona Financial. He was our very first financial institution customer.

Sarah Martin (02:59):

And we started slow with financial institutions. When the pandemic hit, we had a handful of FIs live at that time, but I suppose now, it's pretty obvious that the industry itself had to find a way to proactively serve their consumers and members when they weren't coming to the branch anymore.

Sarah Martin (03:23):

And we stepped into that opportunity. And we spent hours, and weeks, and months helping our financial institution customers do just that, proactively communicate with their customers so that they could have a very strong relationship with the FI even though they weren't coming to the branch anymore.

Sarah Martin (03:43):

And of course, now, people don't want to come back to the branch. In fact, studies say as much as 90% of consumers don't want to go to a branch anymore. So, we continue to evolve our product and our services to support financial institutions in that direction.

Sarah Martin (04:01):

We actually work with nearly 300 financial institutions in the United States. And no other geography, so just United States. We do have a growing team in the US supporting FIs like Eric and our partners over there. So, we're definitely more American now, than my accent implies, let's put it that way.

Jim Marous (04:25):

Well, we're a melting pot in the US so every accent is something we'd like to embrace, or at least I hope we'd like to embrace.

Jim Marous (04:31):

Eric, you are a veteran of research and development at Arizona Financial. Obviously, everybody is looking for that way to build engagement and to build personalized communication, but it's really sometimes difficult for a smaller financial institution to be able to make that jump.

Jim Marous (04:54):

What were you trying to solve for five years ago when you decided to work with Pulsate?

Eric Givens (04:59):

Yeah, I mean, especially five years ago, a lot different timeframe, or a lot different times in general. Obviously, that's pre COVID for us, specifically, that is prior to us acquiring two small banks.

Eric Givens (05:14):

And so, at that time, what we were really trying to do is just communicate better with our members. Or just finding other ways in meeting the member where they wanted to be communicated.

Eric Givens (05:25):

And so, we actually started, I want to say it was maybe like back in 2016, 2017, where we were like, "Okay, let's really think through the future here. How do we want to communicate with our members? What do we want to communicate with them about?"

Eric Givens (05:41):

And so, in partnership with our online banking provider, we were finally given an opportunity or a way in order to communicate with our members differently in the form of push notifications.

Eric Givens (05:57):

And so, at first you think, oh, just push notifications go into the phone. Well, no, we had a lot of ambition. We wanted to utilize push notifications based on Bluetooth and location. Like if they're close to our branch, we wanted to welcome them into the branch or as they exit, thank them for visiting us.

Eric Givens (06:21):

But what it really came down to is we just wanted to make sure that we could give them valuable insight or messaging in the time that they needed.

Eric Givens (06:31):

So, for instance, if someone's looking for a vehicle loan or something along those lines, we want to make sure that they know, “Hey, you know what, you do have a pre-approved auto loan with us.”

Eric Givens (06:44):

And so, in order to make that timely, sending that push notification leads to that immediate gratification. People are like, “Oh, okay. This thing popped up on my phone. It's not like it's hidden under a bunch of other notifications, typically. It's not in an email.”

Eric Givens (06:59):

And so, that's what really brought us to Pulsate, who at the time was really starting to grow. And again, it worked out well with a partnership with our online banking provider as well too.

Jim Marous (07:14):

So, Eric, from that perspective, I mean, Sarah mentioned, and many financial institutions don't necessarily agree or think to this point is that people don't want to go in the branch.

Jim Marous (07:25):

They come into the branch because in many cases they have to, either because they think there's a reason that they need to talk to a person in person, or that the financial institution just has made it too hard for them to do anything digitally.

Jim Marous (07:38):

How has your vision of what's possible changed over the last five years? How has your digital engagement strategy changed over the last five years?

Eric Givens (07:50):

Yeah. I mean, that's a difficult question, over the last five years. That's a long time for us, especially throw COVID into the mix here. So, there has been change. But for us, we actually started doing a lot of that transitioning to more of that digital first years prior to that.

Eric Givens (08:10):

And so, I would say that, not that we had everything solved, but we at least felt that we were a little ahead of the game. For instance, like online account opening, we rolled that out back in 2016, where it could have been fully done online for consumer account opening. For a credit union, usually still people had to come into the branch.

Eric Givens (08:32):

So, that was hugely helpful for whenever the world shut down back in 2020 and people were scrambling. We luckily already had a solution there and the uptick was substantial.

Eric Givens (08:45):

So, we lucked out where granted we didn't predict a pandemic, but at the same time we did see trends where people, yeah, they're going more digitally, or they prefer digital first. And so-

Jim Marous (08:59):

They have no options.

Eric Givens (09:00):

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it would be terrible because there are some people that still like, "Yeah, I'd like to come into the branch. I want to have those interactions." And it's like, "I'm so sorry. You're going to have to do this via the telecom through the drive through at this point."

Eric Givens (09:14):

And so, people wanted to be able to do things more digitally. And so, some of the things that we have, obviously we continue to focus on digital communication methods, of course, whether that being push more traditional email and so forth.

Eric Givens (09:32):

Our online account opening pieces, like I mentioned, we fully digital there. We already had engaged membership when it came to self-service on digital methods over the years.

Eric Givens (09:46):

So, at this point in time, we have, we'll just say, 160,000 members. And out of that, we have about 135,000 that are online or mobile banking enabled. So, we do have a pretty heavy centric digital first membership.

Jim Marous (10:02):

That's great. Yeah. Well, it's interesting, Sarah, it's one thing being on digital, being on mobile, it's another thing to be engaged.

Jim Marous (10:12):

How does Pulsate technology enable financial institutions like Arizona Financial to deliver personalized engagement? Because it's one thing just to put things out there, it's another thing to actually have people want to click, want to push, want to engage. How do you enable financial institutions to do that?

Sarah Martin (10:35):

So there's a lot of ways, and the foundation is on the data and the data choices that feed into Pulsate's multiple channels including Push, but the foundation is there.

Sarah Martin (10:50):

So, if you think about Eric's and Arizona Financial's 136,000 digitally active customers, that's across our system, we see consistently that between 80 and 85% of digitally active customers are engaging with digital banking at least once per month. And then on average, 27% of them are checking their digital banking at least once per day.

Sarah Martin (11:21):

And now, I don’t know about our Arizona Financial, but most financial institutions would crumble at that level of engagement at the branch. But they would find a way, you would find a way, Eric, because you do that for your communities, you do that for your customers, to make that work.

Sarah Martin (11:41):

But in the digital environment, it's just, you come in, you go. There's nothing there to kind of deepen the relationship.

Sarah Martin (11:52):

So, we have a number of tools that are designed to make sure that when Eric is checking his balance, and he is in the market for something, that there is an offer served to him, and that is provided by data and how the data is ingested.

Sarah Martin (12:09):

And sometimes that is automated, and sometimes that's an upload or an SFTP file, depending on what the financial institution can do.

Sarah Martin (12:18):

But the fundamentals is turning that date, that moment of micro engagement, as you say, into an opportunity for acquiring a new product. But that's really the end point.

Sarah Martin (12:31):

To be perfectly honest, Jim, really what we encourage our customers, that's why we talk about being a tool and a strategy, providing tools and strategies to deepen the relationship with their customers because we talk about give, give, give.

Sarah Martin (12:46):

If you are building a relationship with an individual, you don't just come up to them and say, Hey, give me your money." You need to court them a little bit first.

Sarah Martin (12:57):

So, you have so many products and services within digital, including financial wellness, wonderful content that our customers use Pulsate to do that. So, they spend more time in digital banking. They have more touch points with the brand that is their financial institution.

Sarah Martin (13:14):

And that in itself is just deepening the relationship and making sure that actually the financial institution is more likely to be top of mind with their own customers when they have a financial need.

Sarah Martin (13:31):

And if they don't do this, like the risk is really, really strong here, because as I said, at the top, 90% of consumers don't want to go to the brand anymore. So, that means 90% of all growth opportunities with existing customers are at risk of being lost if there's nothing in there to kind of say, "Hey, I can help you. How about this? Do you know?"

Sarah Martin (13:54):

And we're always learning. And every time there's an engagement with Pulsate related content, we're learning and we're getting better at serving the user and being more and more bespoke to their needs. And that's really how Pulsate works when it's at full flight.

Sarah Martin (14:12):

And our customers often start just like at the sample thing, like just using it to share new information about a new branch.

Sarah Martin (14:22):

And then we guide our customer success team, and the tools that we have within our platform are there to support the financial institution just to constantly get better at using our products as well. So, you're not just getting a platform with Pulsate, we're supporting you in your journey.

Jim Marous (14:41):

So, you brought up really well that a person goes in and out of their mobile banking app. I mean, I go, I check my balance, or I see if a deposit came through or if a withdrawal came through, whatever it may be.

Jim Marous (14:55):

But your platform actually builds an extended level of engagement that's not just about the sales. In a best case scenario with your best customers right now — and I know that an average is just not a really good way to go about it. But on average, how many times are you trying to engage with each mobile banking customer on a monthly basis?

Jim Marous (15:18):

So, let's say, as you said, the average in a normal world is once a month. What are you working towards with your financial institutions to have them actually push a button, get engaged, or at least see a message out there? What is your normal average?

Sarah Martin (15:36):

We tend to see, and it turns out on a user basis, some users will not receive anything in a period, and other users might receive two to three messages.

Sarah Martin (15:46):

But we do definitely, have controls in place to make sure that nobody's over messaging, in particular, around push notifications. Because Push is one of the features we are most known for and we have a wonderfully robust push notification and geotargeting solution.

Sarah Martin (16:04):

But actually, we tend to tell our customers to not use it too much because everybody's had that experience where you're receiving too many push notifications. And it's a financial institution and push notifications is a really essential channel for proactively communicating with their members. So, you don't want a situation where you're having people turn that off.

Sarah Martin (16:26):

So, I often talk about like what's urgent and important to our customers, and I'll tell you in a couple of stories here.

Sarah Martin (16:34):

So, if somebody has a card and they're trying to buy a pair of shoes in a store, and there's an outage and the card won't work, it's urgent and important to that member that you tell them the card is not working and you're working on getting it back up and running.

Sarah Martin (16:51):

So, that's proactively serving rather than that person having to call and get annoyed when having to call. So, that's one side. So, that's urgent and important to the customer.

Sarah Martin (17:01):

On the other hand, if your branch goes on fire, that is urgent important to you as a financial institution, not to your customer base. So, probably don't send them a push notification. And I know it's an extreme example, but it's this idea of utilizing the tools in the way that best suits your customer and just finding that balance.

Sarah Martin (17:25):

So, we have multiple different channels, and one of our channels is the dynamic feed, which actually persists within the digital banking environment. It's a scrollable, beautiful user experience, very similar, very familiar to just about every consumer. And that information persists with content that is relevant.

Sarah Martin (17:44):

So, that information can actually stay there for a week or a month, or even a few months. So, you can actually classify that as content is being shared all the time.

Sarah Martin (17:55):

So, when I say it's hard to know how many messages are being sent on an average basis, because we have many different channels, and it should be on a user basis, but we do see consistently averaging between two and four types of content being sent to a given user in any one month.

Jim Marous (18:14):

The mobile channel is so underutilized overall. I mean, there's so many ways you can use it.

Jim Marous (18:21):

Eric, when you're building a marketing initiative, and I'm going to talk this, yes, there’s communication, yes, it's engagement, but it's marketing to a degree because if you're building engagement, that's one of the marketing's initiatives.

Jim Marous (18:33):

How are you able to track and how does Pulsate help you know the value of what you're doing over time? How do you track the success of a program?

Eric Givens (18:46):

Yeah. I mean Pulsate specifically, their system helps us track a lot of that stuff. So, nice dashboard that can just show you basic stats that you would like to see, how many were sent, how many delivered, push notifications, the click through rate. And so, that's nice.

Eric Givens (19:07):

And it's not one of those old type dashboards. No, it's a nice, elegant dashboard. One screen, you can kind of see all of your overall statistics.

Eric Givens (19:17):

And then the thing that I like, I like diving into the data. Also, have the ability to export those campaigns out, see on a per member basis which members received, which members clicked the dates, the times that they did.

Eric Givens (19:35):

And all of that is obviously important because we then use that. And we're actually, this is one of those initiatives that we're going through right now, what we really want to do is get to a true one-to-one.

Eric Givens (19:47):

For instance, did this particular push notification lead to either an application, we'll say a loan application in this case, let's say it's a pre-approval campaign. And are we sure that it was this push notification or was it another method. We're trying to get down to truly what drove that member to take out a loan application?

Eric Givens (20:09):

And so, as you can probably figure out during the whole we're going digital, big digital transformation, but we're dealing with a lot of different partners, technology partners.

Eric Givens (20:22):

And so, trying to mesh all of those different systems together that's why it's just been taking us a little bit longer, but we are getting there. And so, tools like that, that Pulsate gives us, helps us achieve that.

Jim Marous (20:35):

So, Eric, you mentioned your pre-approval campaign, and we talked about this a little bit before the podcast started.

Jim Marous (20:42):

Tell us a little bit about that pre-approval campaign because I've always thought the ability to provide credit or the availability of credit on a mobile banking app, where it's continuously looking at you, not only helps to get me engaged, but answers a question that at any time can come up.

Jim Marous (21:01):

Because usually when you need credit, it's not something you've planned ahead of time. There's a lot of times when it's the daily life you lead that you need credit.

Jim Marous (21:10):

Can you tell us a little bit about your pre-approval campaign and other types of campaigns that are really working well on the mobile banking app through the programs that Pulsate provides?

Eric Givens (21:23):

Yeah. So, and you mentioned it like what we want to make sure is that our members know that they do have an offer just in case they comes to a time where they're like, "Oh, man, I have to apply for a loan."

Eric Givens (21:33):

And so, part of the communication method to say, "Hey, you know what, you are pre-approved." And so, it's big. It helps out with just making sure that there's awareness around what offers they have.

Eric Givens (21:45):

And so, a typical pre-approval campaign for us, we'll have a list of lists of members that are pre-approved for, we'll just say an auto loan. And this is where the technology partner, all of them come together. We have one particular partner that helps us with those Q-Nexus or TruStage, I believe it’s named now.

Eric Givens (22:06):

But we have one particular vendor that helps us with showing these approvals. We have another one where it's our online banking provider, and then we have Pulsate that lives on top of it.

Eric Givens (22:17):

And so, let's say we start a new campaign, we want to make sure that they all know that our members all know about it. So, we send out that push notification. And what we've done is if a member sees it, like, “Oh, okay, cool. I have pre-approved offers.”

Eric Givens (22:30):

Well, in that time, let's just say they need that loan. If they click on that link, we will deep link them directly into the pre-approval page within our online banking or within our mobile banking. If they do it from a desktop computer, same thing. That's typically more through the email, not necessarily from a push notification.

Eric Givens (22:53):

And so, what that does is that cuts out a lot of that friction. Basically, you click it, you authenticate with your thumbprint or your face, and it takes you right to that page. And then from there, the way we have it set up with another partner, it's just a few more clicks and you have your application submitted.

Eric Givens (23:09):

So, that's in the case where somebody's immediately like, “Oh, perfect. I've been waiting for somebody to send me a message, so I know that I can now apply.” But on top of that, a lot of times people just are like, “Okay, cool. This is nice to see. At least I know that I have offers. I don't need it now.”

Eric Givens (23:28):

But that's where it's nice where that push notification was sent out and maybe we send another one just as a reminder. And again, sending it enough times they will now know, and they can log in right into their mobile banking app at any given time and still see their offers that are there.

Jim Marous (23:44):

That's a very cool functionality that it doesn't like offer and then it goes away because email, as soon as you've clicked, it's gone. I get an email, I say, “I don't need a loan right now.” It's gone.

Jim Marous (23:58):

In mobile and even SMS text, which is a much better engagement vehicle than an email is once you've gone through it, it's gone. In fact, you don't even know if the institution's going to validate it.

Jim Marous (24:10):

You put on a mobile banking app, and you keep it there and you keep bringing it to the top of the feed, it's something that says, I may have had timing wrong, but I'm not completely gone on it. A person's shopping for a car, it may be a three-month process, it may be a one-day process. You're going to stick with them until they get rid of it, so to speak.

Jim Marous (24:30):

Sarah, Eric mentioned we sometimes take it for granted, the whole issue of partnering with other providers. This is something that we talked about in the financial brand forum. We have a floor filled with solution providers.

Jim Marous (24:45):

And one thing that we saw four years ago, five years ago, was vendors speaking to each other more than even they were speaking to prospects, because they realized it's a big pie.

Jim Marous (24:57):

And if we don't realize how to partner with a sales force, we don't understand how to partner with an NCR, or a Q2, or a Alkami or whoever it may be, we're going to be at a disadvantage because it's not like the people we work with are going to say, “We're going to give everything to you.”

Jim Marous (25:14):

And even your core provider, your core provider's going to say, "Oh, we can do what Sarah's doing." But the reality is they're not going to be as good at it. You got to be a specialist.

Jim Marous (25:25):

What have you done as a company to really build these relationships so that Eric or whoever it may be, could bring you any mix of providers and you're going to go, "We got it. We're good."

Sarah Martin (25:38):

Well, actually, it's very timely that you asked that question because the FinTech that Eric refers to is TruStage digital storefront, previously known as Q-Nexus. And because of exactly that, we haven't integrated directly with their system, with their APIs.

Sarah Martin (25:56):

And our Pulsate can automatically create segments from their data. We can also, identify any interactions with any offers, and we capture that as interest. And then our journey product automatically will retarget those that have expressed interest for that exact reason to support them on that financial decision making journey because it doesn't happen in an instance.

Sarah Martin (26:22):

It's actually rare that a financial decision happens in an instant. And that's one of the things about being bespoke to the industry as well.

Sarah Martin (26:30):

When we were working across different industries, we were push and inactive might be more important, but because of the FinTech space, because its financial institutions and understanding the consumers decision making process, we've evolved our product in a slightly different way.

Sarah Martin (26:51):

So that, for example, the feed is a core aspect of our platform, because the information needs to persist because the consumer needs to be able to consult that information later that day or later that week.

Sarah Martin (27:04):

But that's also, why our journey product has been developed and why we integrate with other parties, because it's the data silos that calls the delays, it's Q-Nexus, SavvyMoney. They all have amazing, amazing tools and amazing value to bring both to Arizona Financial, but also, to their consumers.

Sarah Martin (27:26):

But there's like such gaps in the data and creating data silos that actually it's very hard for an FI to keep up with signups, adoptions, engagements at conversions. And we work with these other providers to ingest that data so that the teams at the financial institution can handle that and actually serve their members digitally.

Jim Marous (27:54):

So, you mentioned you have a lot of financial institutions now, that are using your platform. I would imagine that like Eric, because he was the first, he obviously was a collaborator to make your platform even more powerful.

Jim Marous (28:09):

You kind of work together and co-innovation to say, "Hey, I want to do this. Let me help you do this." And you take it on. But this happens on a multitude of basis.

Jim Marous (28:20):

When you're specializing in financial institutions, you never know where the next great idea is going to come from. You go, "Oh, we never thought about using this platform for this, but it's really worked well."

Jim Marous (28:30):

How about a couple examples, Sarah, of some things that you've seen that maybe you hadn't seen, or maybe you were holding to the wayside saying, "We'll get to that eventually," that you really see people using your platform to really make an impact with their members or their customers?

Sarah Martin (28:47):

I think we would always look at the results that they achieve over and above the different little bits of the system that they use. Like right now, there's obviously I read your article that was published last week about trillions of CDs that are maturing, and how are the FIs going to handle that situation?

Sarah Martin (29:07):

We work with a number of our customers to be able to automate rollover campaigns. Maybe they want to extend the CD or maybe they want to set offer something as a follow on product. And our customers are doing that and doing that quite well.

Sarah Martin (29:22):

Last year in particular, we saw a number of customers use Pulsate to identify who may be in the market for a CD or a deposit product, and automatically targeting them with an offer that's bespoke to them and seeing great traction.

Sarah Martin (29:39):

Like Credit Union, New Jersey, they ran a three-day campaign with Pulsate and they got 3.5 million in incremental deposits in three days. And they're a half a billion-dollar credit union.

Jim Marous (29:52):

That's pretty good.

Sarah Martin (29:53):

So, it's not nothing. But a time where deposits were to fight for, and they would see that a large part of that was thanks to the support and that the tool and the team have given them.

Sarah Martin (30:03):

So, it's really make your say, like identifying who they need to do what, but also, deepening the digital relationships.

Sarah Martin (30:11):

So, we work a lot with our FIs at Pulsate a lot to make sure that all of the products and services are being used, not just the loans, cards and deposits. Because we can see, and it'll be a 50% lift almost across the board for those three types of products. And when Pulsates used to drive conversion.

Sarah Martin (30:34):

But more importantly, I think is the relationship. Because again, the first time you ask somebody for something shouldn't be, give me all your money, which is a deposit situation. But things like card controls, credit score, peer to peer payments, like there's so many products.

Sarah Martin (30:52):

Eric, how much of your life is dedicated to making sure that your customers have the products they need digitally, not just the loans and deposits products, but all of those other features. And you do that because you know your members need it.

Sarah Martin (31:08):

But then more often than not, when we need an FI, they don't have merely the adoption that they would like. So, Republic Bank out of Kentucky for example, they had an 11% adoption of their card control product, which is just an example. And they wanted it to be at 15 because that was the industry standard at this time.

Sarah Martin (31:29):

So, when they launched Pulsate, they said, "Oh, let's see if it'll help with the adoption of this card control products." And they didn't just go from 11 to 15, but they went to 60% adoption of that and above it.

Sarah Martin (31:42):

So, that's a free service. It's important to the FI because it gives the consumer the ability to protect themselves from card fraud, but it's also a free product. And it's bringing value, and the FI puts a lot of hours and time into it.

Sarah Martin (31:58):

So, it's just driving behavioral change. That's everything that we do, and we always count for that. And it might be a variety of different tools that they used to do that, but it's the outcomes that we are most focusing on. Impact, we call that, internally.

Jim Marous (32:15):

It's interesting, Sarah, because your platform really is about engagement, your mentality. I'm sitting down with you, I realize it wasn't about generating sales. The sales will come if you have engagement, but it's very hard to get those sales opportunities if the consumer is not engaged.

Jim Marous (32:35):

So, if I'm just going to my mobile app and just going in and out, or if I'm just getting emails every once in a while, which I may have yours blocked at a financial institution, the reality is the engagement will get me sales. But if I only go for sales, they're going to disengage.

Jim Marous (32:49):

I liken it to a dating app where if you ... I've never been on a dating app before because they weren’t in existence when I started. But the reality is, if you're simply trying to make the sale as opposed to try to build a relationship, it's not going to get there.

Jim Marous (33:04):

And I think it's important from a perspective for an organization you work with, such as Pulsate, to have that as the foundation, so you don't have to fight that battle.

Jim Marous (33:16):

But you work with a lot of smaller organizations and many small organizations will say, "My data is all crap. I got to wait till I start to work with you because it's just not ready."

Jim Marous (33:29):

If I'm a small financial institution and I know my data is crap, I go to you, how do you work with me to fix or recommend what I do with my data or my back office to make this happen?

Jim Marous (33:44):

I mean, Eric is a great example of a person that he already has these quick digital back-office engagement tools that make it so that if I want to get a loan, I push it, I get it, I'm done. Nothing's that easy.

Jim Marous (33:59):

How do you work, Sarah, with smaller financial institutions to make them better and to make it so that they can quickly use your platform, even if they're in their own minds not ready?

Sarah Martin (34:11):

Well, first of all, our go-live process is quite light. For the digital banking providers that we work with, we can be live, and you can be using Pulsate to engage your customers within two weeks.

Sarah Martin (34:23):

And especially on Q2 in particular, at the minute, we're seeing that cadence happen which is light, and most of the work is handled by us because it's our project.

Sarah Martin (34:37):

But when it comes to the data, I think it's really interesting to think about the minimum amount of data to create the maximum amount of rewards for the financial institution, but also, for the customer.

Sarah Martin (34:50):

We're currently working with a couple of credit unions that around just one data point. Now, at first, I was skeptical of one data point, which was the birthday data point. Which I mean, I know it's my birthday, don't tell me it's my birthday. But it's not that.

Sarah Martin (35:09):

What we've been working with, and our CS team has been fantastic on this, working with these couple of credit unions, just that one data point which everybody has. And just being able to send a message, be it an in-app, or be it just through the feed post saying happy birthday.

Sarah Martin (35:27):

And one of them is doing here we offer you free skip of payment to celebrate your birthday. And the other one is offering double reward points just to celebrate their birthday for a period of time.

Sarah Martin (35:41):

Extremely cheap. But it's that kind of thoughtfulness that makes people tell their friends that they're having a great experience. So, even just one data point can make a big difference.

Sarah Martin (35:56):

And we have so many examples and so many use cases with FIs across every shape and size. We can really bring value to just about every one of them very, very quickly minimizing for them the effort.

Sarah Martin (36:14):

We do have a multitude of different ways in which we can ingest data. And for some, utilizing our APIs is just easy for them. For others, SFTP file upload is far more convenient. But actually, for a lot of them, a list upload on a regular basis, that's also possible and also fine.

Sarah Martin (36:35):

So, we really understand their market. We know that we have to offer different tools and different solutions based on their capability and their time and their team size. And that's what we do. So, we maximize reward for minimum efforts across everything that we do.

Jim Marous (36:54):

I love that whole concept of what we look at is how can we take the least amount of data and make the biggest impact. And a birthday message, as you said, not a big deal. Everybody has the information.

Jim Marous (37:06):

The thing is though, no financial institution wishes me a happy birthday. And I had it happen once on an ATM, and I'm going like, “That was pretty cool.” It's not hard.

Jim Marous (37:18):

But the reality is you're actually putting offers, and if you put it on a mobile banking app, it's even more important because if you find out they clicked, then you go, they bought into the happy birthday, and we're going to make it better and better.

Jim Marous (37:30):

So, let's take a short break here and recognize the sponsors of the podcast.

[Music Playing]

Jim Marous (37:37):

Welcome back. I'm joined today by Sarah Martin, the CEO of Pulsate, and Eric Givens, SVP of Research and Development at Arizona Financial Credit Union.

Jim Marous (37:46):

We've been discussing how financial institutions of all sizes can build real time communications that will focus on micro engagements using the mobile banking platform.

Jim Marous (37:59):

So, Eric, obviously the beginning of our podcast, we talked a lot about the successes, how everything's going well, how easy is to implement, how important it is to build these micro engagements over time that will eventually lead to sales and greater loyalty. But nothing's as easy as it seems, or maybe it is.

Jim Marous (38:20):

What are some of the challenges you faced in building this personalized communication platform for your members? What hurdles did you have to succumb and what challenges have you faced over the last five years?

Eric Givens (38:35):

Yeah. And first I did want to say, Jim, you mentioned that nobody has wished you happy birthday. If you open up an account with us, I promise you, I will personally give you a happy birthday message. Okay? So, you do that you qualify.

Jim Marous (38:47):

There you go.

Eric Givens (38:48):

But I digress. I just wanted to point that out.

Eric Givens (38:52):

So, yeah, some of the challenges. So, for us, obviously let's just talk with Pulsate, since we were one of the first, I think our journey might've been just a little bit longer, because we were building this out with Pulsate and it was great. I mean, obviously great partnership, how we built these things out.

Eric Givens (39:12):

And so, things that we had to kind of overcome this is going to kind of sound funny, is well, how many times should we communicate? We now, have this ability to send messages constantly. How much is too much? Is it too saturated? When will people be like, "Okay, these are enough push notifications."

Eric Givens (39:31):

Now, I will say that was five, six years ago. Nowadays, as you know our younger generations, they are expecting to receive these types of messages. Especially if it's pertinent to them.

Eric Givens (39:49):

And so, the use cases were there, so obviously trying to figure out some use cases, but those weren't that difficult. But it was more of, when's the timing? How do we easily gather this data?

Eric Givens (40:00):

Like we mentioned, we do have a business intelligence group with an extremely intelligent team that helps us gather that kind of data and then obviously partnering with our marketing team and say, “Okay, here's how we want to utilize that data.”

Eric Givens (40:13):

And then getting the buy-in from the rest of the institution to say, “Hey, guess what? We're going to send out these types of communications.”

Eric Givens (40:21):

When we first launched it was, “Beware, we don't know what to expect here. You may get phone calls still, you may get emails even though we're sending a push notification or a interstitial screen from whenever they log in to the mobile app.” But it was really just trying to feel it out.

Eric Givens (40:39):

And so, we just ran some pilots. And we just wanted to see how big is this impact going to be? But it was the unknown. That's really the biggest hurdles that we had to overcome.

Eric Givens (40:50):

And then just get it down to a routine where we have a purpose. How do we get the data? How do we put that data into the system? And then what's our timing and when are we going to send those types of messages? So, hopefully that helps.

Jim Marous (41:06):

It's interesting because I've been in the banking industry my whole career and I think as a banker, you tend to be more frightened of the boogeyman that never exists, rather than the opportunities that present themselves.

Jim Marous (41:20):

I mean, I remember working with financial institutions on digital marketing in the past, and they'll go, "Oh, we have a limit of only one communication a month, or one communication a quarter to any customer."

Jim Marous (41:31):

Well, the reality is the customers should be able to determine how often they get engaged with. It's very infrequent that we over communicate, unless it's something like emails or text.

Jim Marous (41:43):

But if you're talking about the mobile of banking platform, if you don't sign in, you're going to see it anyway. And the reality is, if it's all positive news and it looks like it's coming from a place of empathy as opposed to sales, it's going to really work well.

Jim Marous (42:00):

So, Eric, I asked you about the challenges. Give me one or two of the biggest surprises you've had in this journey of micro engagements, this engagement communication process?

Eric Givens (42:11):

Yeah. Honestly, in the beginning, and as we read with obviously generations, like I'm a millennial myself, like I get a zillion notifications. I like it. It's like, "Okay, cool, yeah, send it to me. I'm fine with it." Obviously even Gen Z, they're kind of used to it.

Eric Givens (42:26):

So, the biggest surprise, honestly, is the fact that, like you said, don't be scared of the boogeyman. Like we thought, oh man, if we send something that is sales focused or loan focused ...

Eric Givens (42:38):

And again, we're a credit union, we're not in it for trying to make just profits like we are to please stockholders and things like that. We're truly trying to do it to try to help them out. So, a surprise was people, they're okay with receiving those types of communications.

Eric Givens (42:55):

The other one is how interactive the most benign type of communications are. Like, "Hey, guess what? Hopefully have a good holiday. Our branch X, or our branches are going to be closed during this time."

Eric Givens (43:09):

Or even like board elections, something as simple as that. Like I know I just sit on my phone waiting, “Man, I can't wait till my institution sends me the next board elections push notification.” Like things along those lines, I couldn't believe how engaging it is. People were clicking on it, they want to get their votes.

Eric Givens (43:29):

And you've touched on it, I think it's more that human interaction where it not as much empathy on everything, but even just things that aren't the normal, oh yeah, I'm so used to getting these sales notifications. It's the things that aren't sales driven that actually lead to some of that engagement. And so, it does help.

Eric Givens (43:51):

And the last piece I'll take on that is that I would say, and I know we may get into that, but like early numbers, I was shocked just from the first pre-approval campaign, how much more of an increase in applications there were after the push.

Eric Givens (44:13):

And it gets to the point that even our VP of lending's, like, "Hey, when you going to send the push out?" Because we just see this huge little surge. And I mean, we figured, yeah, it's going to lead to something like that. But we had about 155% increase in applications after a push notification during our first campaigns.

Eric Givens (44:32):

And so, again, the push, I knew it'd be engaging, but I don't think we anticipated it'd be that engaging.

Jim Marous (44:42):

What's interesting, Eric, is the value of this is as opposed to having programmatic marketing, you're able to actually touch a person, whoever it may be, within your base at the time of greatest need.

Jim Marous (44:59):

Which means you're maybe not having that 80 applications in one week situation, but over time you're getting 2, 3, 4, 500 more applications over a period of time because you're hitting when they want to be.

Jim Marous (45:16):

And that's the beauty of using a mobile banking platform, using real time engagement, using these micro engagements. And actually, getting a mindset of saying, you know what, loan department, we're not going to give you your fall loan push, but we're going to give you your annual loan push that's going to happen 12 months a year.

Jim Marous (45:34):

Which really changed the mindset of the organization overall to a point of saying the opportunity to expand because everybody's on the same page that we're going to get you your goals. In fact, we're going to supersede what you ever thought in the past. It's just not going to be timed in a very small window.

Jim Marous (45:51):

Sarah, I asked Eric about the challenges that he faced. To me, and this is why you're on the podcast, is as I'm really enthusiastic about what your organization offers and the difference compared to what's in the marketplace, just from the mobile banking component.

Jim Marous (46:12):

But you go beyond the mobile banking to be able to provide this engagement. But not everybody says yes as you knock on their door. What are the challenges you see in the financial services industry that gets in the way of saying yes?

Sarah Martin (46:27):

So, I can empathize very heavily with this industry. I know the people very well. I know Eric very well. I know so many of our customers very well. So, I can empathize with the hesitancy that we come across when we're engaging with new FIs.

Sarah Martin (46:46):

It's been a massive digital transformation, and it is relentless. And we're talking about community financial institutions, none of them have teams that are substantial.

Sarah Martin (47:01):

Even you guys, Arizona Financial, you could never say you have a substantial team. You've got small teams, you've got contracting profitability caused by a number of different factors, including higher costs of acquisition and new members, and then lower number of products per member.

Sarah Martin (47:22):

And I can understand why there's a hesitancy because mobile engagement, it can kind of sound like just another nice to have project. And it's not like another magical loan product that's going to give you magically new loans or another magical deposit product that's going to magically give you more deposits.

Sarah Martin (47:48):

It's not that, and it's not an anti-fraud deal that people are very, very keen on. It's not that. And it's hard for an FI to find a place to hang Pulsate's hat on. But it is a magical tale because it does do all of that.

Sarah Martin (48:10):

You've heard from Eric about loan growth. You've heard me tell you a story about Credit Union, New Jersey and their deposit growth and Republic Bank and their digital adoption. Like it is very, very effective.

Sarah Martin (48:22):

And it worries me that there is this hesitancy because actually the digital transformation, without the effective tools to tell your customers about all these products and services in the most effective and most efficient way, your digital transformation, regardless of how many products you launch digitally, is going to be hampered.

Sarah Martin (48:44):

So, yes, I see a lot of hesitancy and I understand, and I empathize with the massive digital transformation.

Sarah Martin (48:53):

But we are here with the one goal in mind to help an FI with that journey, to make sure that their efforts are getting the returns that we know that they can get when they have the tools and the partners, because we do partner with FIs to actually achieve that success.

Sarah Martin (49:11):

So, we can start to turn the tide, start turning the tide across per member, start turning the tide profitability. Just nudge, nudge, nudge, chip, chip, chip as we talk about with our FIs, just moving the needle every day a little bit more towards that digital transformation.

Jim Marous (49:30):

It's interesting, Sarah, in meeting with a couple of your clients at the Financial Brand Forum, I realized that you really getting the boat with them. For instance, Eric's talking about the success of a pre-approved program. That only is successful if you have the back-office fixed to be able to really quickly digitally get that loan booked.

Jim Marous (49:51):

But what's nice is I talked to some finance institutes you worked with that didn't have their back-office in order, and they said you work with them very closely to say, by the way, your results did not meet the expectations that we thought. Let's talk about how easy is it for once they click for them to actually get the loan.

Jim Marous (50:10):

And you realize that they were forced to get in the branch and all of a sudden you're going ... and you've also, partnered with other organization. You would say something like, “Contact Eric at Arizona Financial because he'll help you with what they did to make it so it was easy to get that second part.”

Jim Marous (50:27):

Because you can lead the consumer to the product, but it doesn't mean they're actually going to open it because you may have made it too hard.

Jim Marous (50:36):

And this is what's really important, the partnership of a third-party solution provider to be able to say, “We now, have enough clients to tell you why you are falling short. It's not that your consumers aren't going to respond, sorry, it's usually something that's happened in your organization that makes it harder to finalize the process.”

Jim Marous (50:57):

And I'm sure, Eric, over the last several — you've been at the organization for 16 years, I'm sure there's been more than a few surprise, you go, "Oh, that marketing program would've worked a whole lot better if we made it a little bit easier."

Jim Marous (51:10):

I find that in our research around onboarding, everybody says they want to implement onboarding in the next year, and yet we continue to have only about 50% of organizations truly having a really good onboarding program.

Jim Marous (51:23):

Pulsate really makes it so that onboarding becomes super easy because you stay in communication with a consumer on the platform that they just signed up for.

Jim Marous (51:33):

So, you're really making it easier rather than a traditional email or SMS program, even though they all may supplement. And Eric's gone to the next level and he's going to actually peel back the layers to say what was the order of communication that works best.

Jim Marous (51:48):

So, Sarah, as we look forward and we look at what the future looks like, how does generative AI, if you look at the next two to three years, because we can't look 12 months in advance and know what's going to happen.

Jim Marous (52:05):

But from your perspective, what is your vision for what Pulsate's going to be able to do with the technology that's coming out with the clients you're working with, with the examples you have in the marketplace?

Sarah Martin (52:16):

Well, our vision is always around the consumer financial success and how we enable the financial institution to make that happen.

Sarah Martin (52:28):

So, it's really our passion and my passion to really give the financial institution the capabilities to be able to have the individual consumer at the center of their business, being able to deal with every single consumer in a personal way.

Sarah Martin (52:48):

Like at the branch, it was super personal because you would go into the branch and you would tell somebody there what you needed and they would give you what you needed and find two, three other products in that moment that might help you. And you built a relationship with the person, and it was very personal.

Sarah Martin (53:06):

That's not coming back, but it is still so important to this industry, and it is what sets it apart from the tier one banks and from the neo banks. And at Pulsate, it's our vision and our ambition to give the FI of every size, large and small, the ability to put that customer back at the heart.

Sarah Martin (53:29):

So, using the data tools that we have to under the hub, just constantly knowing what's possible, what's needed, what's possible, what's needed, so that it's automatically occurring in a personal way for the consumer.

Sarah Martin (53:45):

So, Jim, next time you log into digital banking, you're offered free tickets to Coldplay in Helsinki and Eric is offered something else.

Eric Givens (53:58):

Steelers tickets. I think Steelers tickets than anything.

Sarah Martin (54:00):

Tickets to the sun. There you go. There you go.

Eric Givens (54:03):

Sorry.

Jim Marous (54:03):

Oh God, she’s just killing me. You're killing me here.

Eric Givens (54:05):

I know. I figured that might. I'm from Pittsburgh, so.

Sarah Martin (54:07):

Maybe not, but that's the ... but just really being able to understand and a light lift really, really important in our product for vision and our roadmap.

Sarah Martin (54:20):

That it's light lift for the financial institution, knowing that there's a small team, knowing that this can't be another huge project. We have to be adding incrementally value for the consumer and for the FI always in that direction. How do we make the consumer central to this industry success?

Jim Marous (54:43):

Yeah. Eric, final question, but in the same vein as what I asked Sarah. But from your perspective, you have finance institutions across the country, across the world that wanted to do better from a personalized engagement perspective. What one suggestion would you give them to make this happen?

Eric Givens (55:05):

One suggestion for me equals like 10, but I'm kidding. One big one, honestly, finding right partners. Obviously, depending on your size, for instance, we have some developers, we don't have a whole litany of developers.

Eric Givens (55:22):

And so, we need to make sure that any partner that we go in with for anything, can they integrate with our other partners that we need, can they integrate with our core system? What about online banking? What about our CRM?

Eric Givens (55:36):

What I have found, especially when we talk about through digitization and moving forward, that is by far the biggest impact especially if it's a startup organization, something to that degree, who are they going to get bought by? And if a financial partner gets bought, are they going to cease? There's a lot of fear in a lot of that stuff.

Eric Givens (56:03):

And so, vetting through that and seeing and having a game plan. What is your end goal? How do you plan to integrate other systems? And does it make sense that yes, there's a great potential partner right here. They have this great product, but you know what, there's going to be an incredible amount of work to make this work to our vision.

Eric Givens (56:25):

And so, sometimes it's a hard decision to say we may need to go to somebody else that may not have all the bells and whistles as this one, but it integrates better-

Jim Marous (56:32):

We can implement it. Yep.

Eric Givens (56:33):

Exactly, yeah. But we can implement it. Yeah, that's probably the best way of saying it. But can we implement it to what we want? And so, that's the first thing that comes to my mind every time.

Jim Marous (56:44):

That is such a great message because at the end of the day, you got to do something. Every day somebody waits is a day that you've lost that you can't make up.

Jim Marous (56:55):

And what's interesting is solution providers, be it Pulsate, be it anyone else out in the marketplace, number one, find the one that you're going to be able to trust to hand the ball off to (I'm going to use American football analogy) and they're going to go down the field for you as opposed to you having to hold on the ball.

Jim Marous (57:16):

It's not a rugby game. You're not going to have a bunch of people run down the field together with it. You got to be able to let go of the ball.

Jim Marous (57:22):

Secondly, don't spend any time waiting for this decision. I'm frustrated by the fact that over the last 15 years, I continue to ask the marketplace, how many of you have onboarding programs? How many of you plan to implement in next year? How many don't have in the plan?

Jim Marous (57:40):

And the numbers are right around the same for the entire 15 years, which is around 52, 55% have one, another 30 some percent say they want one in the next year, and the ones after that say they're going to do it later.

Jim Marous (57:53):

But how do the numbers stay the same? It's because your priorities continue to shift, and you never put the program in place.

Jim Marous (57:59):

We need the communication, we need people to engage on a regular basis. And if you don't own the mobile banking relationship from an engagement platform, you'll lose it to another player because people are continually open up other accounts, open other relationships, stem that flow immediately and do it now.

Jim Marous (58:20):

Sarah, Eric, my team will tell me this, this is one of my longer podcasts. I hope everybody has stayed on and listened to it all because this is extraordinarily important and different, and it's not impossible.

Jim Marous (58:36):

I know from talking to Sarah and her team, they can implement something in three months or less. As she said, start small, build incrementally.

Jim Marous (58:44):

Eric, you're absolutely a master at your domain of what you're doing right now, but I have no doubt that you're not settling. It's not done yet. You're continually evolving to say, “Okay, now, I want to find out what sequence of channels a person looks at to make something happen.” But you're getting the data to take action.

Jim Marous (59:04):

Thank you both so much for being on the show today.

Eric Givens (59:07):

Thank you.

Sarah Martin (59:07):

Thank you, Jim. Thank you so much.

Eric Givens (59:09):

It's been awesome.

Sarah Martin (59:11):

Thank you, Eric.

[Music Playing]

Jim Marous (59:13):

Thanks for listening to Banking Transformed, the winner of three international awards for podcast excellence. If you enjoy what we're doing, please be sure to give Banking Transformed a positive review.

Jim Marous (59:24):

Finally, be sure to catch my recent articles on The Financial Brand and our amazing research we're doing for the Digital Banking Report.

Jim Marous (59:31):

This has been a production of Evergreen Podcasts. A special thank you to our senior producer, Leah Haslage; audio engineer, Chris Fafalios, and video producer, Will Pritts.

Jim Marous (59:41):

I'm your host, Jim Marous. Until next time. Remember, at a time when consumers are bombarded with impersonal messages, it's the personalized communications that will break through all the noise.