New Credit Engagement Tool Supports Financial Wellness

Jim Marous (00:11):

Welcome to another episode of Banking Transformed, the podcast that drives deep into the trends, innovations, and strategies shaping the future of banking. I'm your host, Jim Marous.

Jim Marous (00:21):

We're excited to have JB Orecchia, CEO of SavvyMoney join us again on the Banking Transformed Podcast to discuss their groundbreaking new product: Get My Rate. This Innovative tool offers personalized loan prequalifications without impacting credit scores.

Jim Marous (00:37):

We discussed how the solution allows consumers to get pre-qualified for multiple loan offers simultaneously, receiving ongoing rate alerts when rates change in their favor, and how consumers can benefit from this continuous credit monitoring and expanded financial wellness tool. Finally, we discuss how generative AI is set to revolutionize credit solutions and financial wellbeing across the entire banking ecosystem.

Jim Marous (01:03):

SavvyMoney operates on a business model that provides financial institutions with tools that empower consumers to make informed financial decisions. By offering actionable insights into credit management, debt reduction, and overall financial health, SavvyMoney helps financial institutions improve their customer's financial wellbeing, while also building an engagement platform for helping to retain these same customers.

Jim Marous (01:27):

So, before we dig into what's happening at SavvyMoney, JB, can you share a bit about your career in financial services and share a little bit about SavvyMoney and the mission it is on to make the world of financial wellness more attainable?

JB Orecchia (01:42):

Yeah, Jim, thanks for that question. It just reminds me how old I'm getting because I've been in financial services now 36 years, if you can believe that. In fact, tomorrow, 8/8 is my anniversary for starting work. So, I started in financial services 8/8/88, which is kind of a good luck day, right? How can you get that many 8s? I play the hard eight in Vegas.

Jim Marous (02:10):

Better than playing 6/6/66, I guess.

JB Orecchia (02:13):

So, I started my career in lending. 10 years at household, both on the branch side and on the credit card side. So, I got a lot of time with consumers, working with them on their finances as a lot of household products, even in the early days, household finances, really helping an underserved consumer get credit.

JB Orecchia (02:32):

And so, I had underwriting approval and ran large branches, and then moved into the credit card space. While in the credit card space, I ran a marketing division, which was both all the loyalty programs, the insurance business, as well as enhancement services. And that business focused on products like monitoring your credit.

JB Orecchia (02:55):

Well, one of those products was actually a credit monitoring that was delivered in the mail. So, next part of my career, I was part of the founding team at freecreditscore.com and freecreditreport.com, the first to deliver credit reports online.

JB Orecchia (03:09):

And really, that was solving a problem, which is, “Hey, I want this credit report now, I'm going to apply for a loan. And oh, by the way, can you explain it to me?” So, we kind of pioneered that. It wasn't free, it was a subscription service back in the day. That's how those services were.

JB Orecchia (03:24):

And then a new company came along called Credit Karma, which we all know, and Ken is a fantastic guy and did an amazing job building that business and made it totally free and driving that product through advertising.

JB Orecchia (03:39):

Well, as I thought about SavvyMoney and building this business, I was very intentional to build a B2B business. A B2B business that services banks and credit unions and FinTechs in terms of their journey to really help their consumers with financial wellness and drive loan products for their institution.

JB Orecchia (3:58):

And so, when we built the product, we decided we're not going to go direct to consumer this time. If you're a banker, credit union, or a FinTech, you don't want your customers or members going to Credit Karma. I mean, most of them probably still do, but you'd rather retain that traffic on your own site and provide those valuable insights and services to your consumers.

JB Orecchia (4:19):

So, 13 years ago, we started on this journey with SavvyMoney, and we're up to 1,350 financial institutions, we're integrated into 40 digital platforms, we'll see 36 million consumers. And so, we really try to solve that problem and provide services for those institutions to better service their members and customers.

Jim Marous (04:43):

And it's interesting. Timing is everything. And right now, as consumers are really … it's so easy to open a digital account. I do research with every speaking engagement I have, and I ask bankers, which are already a biased audience: “How many of you have closed a primary financial institution relationship in the last five years?” And virtually, nobody raised their hand.

Jim Marous (05:05):

I ask, “How many of you have opened an alternative financial relationship beyond your primary institution somewhere else in the last two years?” And everybody raises their hands. Now, mind you, this is a biased audience that already has a reason for not moving away from their primary.

Jim Marous (05:19):

But what it shows is the whole concept of engagement as opposed to simply experience has got to be so much more important. If I can bring a consumer to use my mobile app more than just once a month for whatever reason, I'm building engagement and making it harder for them to move someplace else.

Jim Marous (05:40):

And SavvyMoney really has a digital tool that makes it so you want to keep on coming back to the app.

JB Orecchia (05:46):

That's right. It's interesting, a number of our digital platforms actually ran a campaign, get to see your score, but you had to download their mobile app in order to get it, their banking app. And they actually saw a huge spike in downloads of consumers that hadn't downloaded their mobile app yet. That's obviously changing, but that was really helpful in giving another reason to log into your digital banking app.

Jim Marous (06:11):

As I say, you really like to see more fingerprints over your financial institution's app on a phone from your consumers. And one thing that prompted me to get you back on the show (this is not your first time; this is the second time being on the show) is you just introduced a brand-new product called Get My Rate. Can you describe a little bit about what Get My Rate is, but also around why you introduced a brand-new product?

JB Orecchia (06:37):

Yeah, so everyone's familiar because they watch TV a fair amount, is Capital One's Auto Navigator. And really pre-qual has been around for a while. Get pre-qualified, don't impact your credit, get pre-qualified for a loan.

JB Orecchia (06:53):

Well, as I thought about that and having been in the lending business a long time, I was like, 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 you don't get the rate you want, you're not going to keep logging into a prequalification product every time in order to get the rate you want.

JB Orecchia (07:19):

And in a fluctuating interest rate environment, no better time than now to launch a product like this because we could see interest rates dropping here in the future. And so, the idea for Get my Rate really was not a no, but a not now. So, for your lower end consumers that are the no, ‘Hey, I'm a no and what do I need to do in order to get better and then alert me when I get there or alert me on my progress along the way.”

JB Orecchia (07:46):

And what a number of credit unions (I won't name their names) found is that Gen Z and Gen Y, if they got turned down from your institution, they don't come back. And so, having a different experience to say, “Hey, we can't help you right now, but here's the things you need to do in order to get to a point where we can help you, and we're going to give you a game plan to do that and we're going to alert you when you get there.”

JB Orecchia (08:12):

Again, it’s a pre-qual, it's not a guaranteed offer of credit, you still have to qualify from an income standpoint when we collect that data as well to further clarify in that pre-qual that you have a high likelihood of getting approved.

JB Orecchia (08:27):

If you're A credit consumer and the rate you just saw is, let’s call it 6%, and you're like, “Hmm, I really want to pull the trigger on this product, but I'd really like 5%.” Well, that data gets back to the institution. We say, okay, set the rate for 5% and then we'll alert you when the rate gets to 5%. Or the institution maybe has a plan where if you do direct deposit through your paycheck, we'll drop it another half percent.

JB Orecchia (08:57):

So, getting that data from the consumer, getting information on what it is their needs are and what it is that they want also is very interesting from an information standpoint. Because it may be Jim, that you don't have a competitive product. So, if all the feedback is, “Hey, I expect to get 5%,” and if you look at the data in our analytics platform, we pull that data in, we pull the data in from other institutions and we actually see what the average interest rates are.

JB Orecchia (9:28):

And you can actually look at, “Oh shoot, I'm not competitive. Maybe I need to go back to my lending department and kind of figure out what rates should I be offering in order to get competitive I've got a whole slew of consumers here that have an expectation that they want a rate of X, and they would pull the trigger.”

Jim Marous (09:45):

So, what's interesting is beyond simply a rate monitoring service to say, “Okay, what's my rate today?” It really is a way for finance institutions to find out who's in the market to buy a car, and who's raising their hands.

Jim Marous (10:00):

And I often talk about missed opportunities. I say that when I'm knocking on the door of a car dealership and I do a test drive, they run a credit bureau on me, and you can capture that information. However, only other dealers or other manufacturers tend to reach out to me and say, “Hey, we think you're in the marketplace for a car, how about trying ours while finance institutions have access to this?” Well, this really makes it-

JB Orecchia (10:26):

Well, we actually track that too. In our standard product, we have a triggers solution that if one of your customers or members is in the market and they have an inquiry for an auto loan, the institution can get out ahead of that and reach out and send their own offer. So, we actually have that built in as one of our targeting platforms in our tool.

JB Orecchia (10:51):

But the other audience which we missed, so you got A credit over here and you got your subprime that needs to work on their credit, is the one that's in the middle. They're like, “I'm a 680, I need to get to a 720 and I'm only this far away. Give me those things and alert me as well.”

JB Orecchia (11:09):

So, you're really running the spectrum of hey, satisfying the needs of that lower end consumer as well as the high-end consumer. 50% of the consumers that monitor their credit within our product, are A paper, they're the high end. Everyone thinks, “Oh, is this product just for people with bad credit?” No, actually, the ones that have the best credit are the ones that are so focused on, “I want to be above 800 or I want to be 850, how come I'm not 850?”

Jim Marous (11:39):

And the key here is you help to inform the consumer on how to make that move. I mean, the number of times I look at my credit report and look at my finance, it's insane, and I'm obsessed by it. I've never quite figured out, “So, why if I drop balances at a place, does it hurt my credit rating?” All these things.

Jim Marous (12:04):

But the thing is there's so many things that depend on your credit score that you tend to monitor it. And I think for me, the one thing that I really found interesting with Get My Rate was the financial wellness aspect of it. It's not just to help a person get the rate they want, it's getting there.

Jim Marous (12:23):

And one thing we talked about before we got on the podcast today was there's a lot of providers out there that provide you tools to get from point A to point B, but they don't really help you get there. They don't give you the deployment capabilities or help you with the deploying. They just think, “Okay, here's what you got to do and good luck with it.”

Jim Marous (12:46):

How do you as SavvyMoney work with your financial institution clients, not just for Get My Rate, but for any of your products to actually help them implement and make their relationship better, not only with SavvyMoney, but obviously with their consumers.

JB Orecchia (13:02):

So, a couple of ways, Jim, and it's a great question because just launching the product is just the starting point. Engaging that consumer and enabling the financial institution to really communicate with the consumer about the benefits of the program is half the battle.

JB Orecchia (13:19):

So, we've got a marketing portal built on Salesforce, it's called The SavvyMoney Hub, and I've got 9,000 pieces of marketing, training videos. We've got all the content for the 40 platforms that we're on already pre-done.

JB Orecchia (13:36):

And so, they can drop in their logos, they can drop in their colors, they can drop in their card art. And so, half the battle with institutions is like, “We're busy. We think the SavvyMoney product's great, we don't have time to manage it.” We're like, “We're going to help you do that.”

JB Orecchia (13:49):

We do monthly webinars where we bring on other financial institutions and they actually talk about their success. It could be around analytics, it could be around marketing, it could be around loans. In fact, we just had one institution do an entire video on their own on the success that they had with SavvyMoney.

JB Orecchia (14:07):

So, they're very proactive. They set up user groups within our portal as well. So, if they have a specific topic that they're trying to solve for, they'll set up a user group. One of them was created during one of our webinars where an FI was asking something in the chat and the other financial institution said, “Oh, I can help you with that.”

JB Orecchia (14:26):

And then 50 financial institutions all went to this group section and started talking about how they were solving the problem. So, you get 500 institutions on these calls and they're like, “We love this. We'd rather learn from people that have already done it and then provide us all the tools.” And they're very vocal about, “We need this image, we need this email, we need this creative.”

JB Orecchia (14:49):

And so, our marketing team is working on providing all of that. And then we send out videos also monthly on, “Here's what's coming up in the hub, like stay tuned for this or that, or here's how you leverage the benefit.”

JB Orecchia (15:03):

And then last thing, Jim (I'm probably talking too much), is that we monitor within our analytics platform and within our marketing platform, what are financial institutions using? So, if they're not going into specific things that we know are driving really good results, the partner manager calls them up and says, “Hey Jim, I see you’ve logged into the tool and you're not leveraging this feature or that feature. And the clients that leverage, let's say retargeting are getting an 8% conversion rate.” “Oh, really? Wow.” So, they run the program and they're like, “You're right, that works.”

JB Orecchia (15:38):

And so, monitoring how they're actually leveraging it and drawing that correlation to success, because we see all the loans, all the click activity, everything in the tool, so we can actually measure all of those things and be able to provide actionable insights even to the financial institution on how they can be better.

Jim Marous (15:58):

That's an interesting concept that with all this crowdsourcing of ideas, financial institutions, you can only lead the consumer to water. You can't make them drink. We were talking about this yesterday at another meeting that if you have a bad back office, if your back office has not made it easy to get a loan or get at a deposit product, whatever it may be — if you have not digitized that process, then, yeah, I'll get you a lot more leads, but your conversion rates going to be way lower than your counterparts because you make them come into the branch to get a loan.

Jim Marous (16:32):

So, you're starting off with this great digital tool and then it breaks. And with all the customers you have, with all the financial institutions you have, people can compare their notes, and you help them with that in your monitoring service to say-

JB Orecchia (16:48):

Jim, you touched on something else that was kind of interesting. We keep trying to solve those little problems in the funnel that are impacting conversion rates. So, one of the things that we did was kind of hard, we built integration into the loan origination systems, and so what we saw was a 60% increase in conversion rate when we shorten the application.

JB Orecchia (17:08):

We already know name, address, social, date of birth — why am I asking you, Jim, these same things that you already have — just ask for those incremental things, hit enter, send that data in, and then get that data back in terms of what got approved, what got funded, what people are actually engaging in that. That data is powerful to do retargeting campaigns or to reach out to that consumer in the future.

Jim Marous (17:33):

It's interesting, you said 60%, which is the number that we see as well in our research that both for the new account opening and digital loans, you lose 60% of the people that want to do business with you if you have a broken process that takes 15 minutes. And that 12 to 15 minutes seems to be the difference between you pre-filling the upfront information and you not pre-filling.

Jim Marous (17:56):

So, it's interesting because there's a lot of providers out there that have great digital new account and new loan application tools, and yet companies will sign up and say, “Hey, we want to have your product.” And then the company comes in and they go, “Well, we still require the driver's license on the front end.” You go, “Okay, unfortunately what we said we'd provide you, we can't do it if you use old non-digital related tools.”

Jim Marous (18:20):

So, let's say take Get Your Rate product, what differentiates what you you're offering versus other products out there?

JB Orecchia (18:28):

Well, I think a couple of things. One, it's not a one and done. So, pre-qual is kind of a one and done situation. So, big differentiator is did I get what I wanted? If I did, then I take them through the path, and they transact with the institution.

JB Orecchia (18:45):

The other thing that product does too, is because you're enrolled in a service and you got one product, we then still mine that data and offer up incremental products. So, it may be, Jim, you came in for an auto loan, but we identified an opportunity for you to consolidate credit card debt or do a balance transfer, or do a home equity loan or something like that. And so, we can then follow up with that user and say, “Thanks for doing business with us. This is great, but now we've got another product for you that could save you money.”

JB Orecchia (19:19):

The other thing that differentiates it as our ongoing analytics. So, if a consumer came in and didn't transact, you're going to know maybe they didn't transact because their credit was bad or you didn't get the rate you wanted, we're capturing that feedback. Capturing that feedback is going to give you informed decisions.

JB Orecchia (19:39):

You also have visibility in our analytics tool to where's that consumer borrowing. So, I know that they came in and I have visibility in aggregate of that population, not at the individual level, but in aggregate — of where are the consumer population that's coming in, where are those loans going? Are they going to Cap One, are they going to Ally, are they going to Citibank?

JB Orecchia (20:01):

I've got a little bit of visibility into what do I need to do in order to convert these consumers because clearly, where they're borrowing and what they're doing isn't with me.

Jim Marous (20:13):

So, it's interesting because at a time when every financial institution is trying their darnedest to make a more personalized engagement, trying to make it so that we know more about the consumer than we ever have, but actually we take action on it, you take care of both ends of that equation.

Jim Marous (20:30):

Number one, you feed the institution information they would not have access to on a normal basis unless they put a lot of resources toward it, but even more importantly, it's what do you do then, you help them with that as well from the marketing perspective.

JB Orecchia (20:43):

With the marketing, for sure.

Jim Marous (20:47):

And on top of that, you integrate with all these different banking platforms to make it so that integration is easy.

Jim Marous (20:53):

So, let's say I'm a small mid-size financial institution and I want to work with SavvyMoney, not just with Get My Rate, but with other products you offer as well; how long does it take me if I put my resources to it and you put your resources to it — on a normal basis, how long does it take to get something up and running?

JB Orecchia (21:13):

Yeah, I mean we build the site in a couple of days. So, the site gets built. Where the real long pull in the 10 is depending on how many financial products you have because we have to load in all the financial products, my credit score band with all the disclosures, the card art.

JB Orecchia (21:30):

So, generally, if we wanted to move really fast, we can go as fast as the financial institution can go. But realistically, if they're going to do their testing and what they're going to do, it's going to be three weeks to a month to get the full end-to-end product up and running.

JB Orecchia (21:46):

If we wanted to go fast and we wanted to be heads down, we could do it in a week because all of our integrations are built and getting credit score up is easy. That part, flip a switch. But once you want to build in all your loan products, all your rules, all your creative, create your hierarchies from what's going to be in the platform on what offer to what individual, under what situations, that takes a little bit of a thought where the partner manager works with the financial institution to really work on that.

JB Orecchia (22:18):

And then it's got to go through compliance. We know compliance isn't always fast, and so that kind of takes long. So, it's not the technology that takes long, that's pretty quick. It's more the double checking of what's in there that takes a little bit of time.

Jim Marous (22:34):

I'm sorry, but you talked about how long you've been banking. I've been banking a good decade extended beyond yours. The reality is the fact that we're no longer looking at implementing things in a year or in multi-years is kind of crazy. I mean, you think about it.

Jim Marous (22:51):

I was thinking that you'd say three months, roughly speaking — you're talking three weeks. Let's say because of the financial institution having more than just one priority in their shelf, three months is still a very quick process to get something up and running, and for you to understand the benefits of it.

Jim Marous (23:08):

But I think what's important is your company does … I'm not going to oversimplify, it’s plug and play, but the reality is it's not like 80% of the process has to change between institution to institution. You have maybe 20% customizing within it.

Jim Marous (23:27):

And as you said, it usually depends on the financial institution and the bandwidth they have to answer all the questions. But I think what's important is it's not a hard thing to get up and running. Your platform is really based on engagement, which is really so high on the priority list between personification and personalization, and then also the ability to build engagement over time and get more interaction.

Jim Marous (23:56):

You have all those capabilities, and especially at a time like this where I don't know if there's any consumer out there that's not worried a little bit about their financial status and how to protect themselves. You give them the capability.

JB Orecchia (24:08):

Yeah, Jim, one of the interesting things is TransUnion just did a study. They looked at a hundred million consumers that monitor their credit, and the average score increase over a year was 15 points. That takes into account both up and down.

JB Orecchia (24:24):

And when you looked at SavvyMoney, the average was 31 points. And I think part of that reason is we try and drive features in the tool, whether it be setting goals, action plans, SavvyMoney checkup, robust content that's tailored to their specific situation. We're trying to give them reasons to come back in and get a little bit better.

JB Orecchia (24:51):

And so, that’s constantly a focus of our team how do we do that better in order to enable that consumer deliver better life. Because at the end of the day, it's about helping the consumers. While we're enabling the financial institutions to help their situation, they want their consumers to get better. They want more loyalty from their consumers.

Jim Marous (25:12):

I mean, it builds trust. The whole concept of what you're offering here is to make the consumer more comfortable in the scary world of finances, and to do that, and at a time when … a lot of what the financial institutions have done in the past, the ones I've worked with and worked for, is that we kind of broke that trust barrier because we were really looking out for ourselves and consumers didn't have choices.

Jim Marous (25:40):

They now have choices to put products out there that really do benefit the consumer really helps. If there was one key reason why a financial institution works with SavvyMoney, what would it be from your perspective?

JB Orecchia (25:56):

I think there's really two reasons. One, we really help the consumer, and two, we really help them, because they're busy, and how do we help them hit their goals and enable their business to be better and more efficient.

JB Orecchia (26:14):

So, we do that really, really well. And then the data shows that we do it really, really well with the consumer. So, if you're improving that consumer financial situation, you're also de-risking your institution. So, you're helping your institution at the same time. If less people are going to link one, if less people are managing their credit better-

Jim Marous (26:31):

Everybody, the tide rises.

JB Orecchia (26:32):

Then that's a win-win also. But if we can make their jobs easier in order to do deposits or drive loans, or drive more loyalty and engagement, then we've done our jobs and if they're happy about it, even better.

[Music Playing]

Jim Marous (26:53):

So, it all sounds like mom and apple pie, but there's very few institutions that have a hundred percent close rate. When you're meeting with financial institutions, your team's out there selling your services, what is the reason why organizations don't sign on?

JB Orecchia (27:12):

There's a couple. 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 is going to be hard to implement. And on the surface, you think, “Oh, well this is just a score.”

JB Orecchia (27:36):

Well, no, we do so much more than that. That's just kind of what brings people into the ecosystem. And then from there, everything builds on it. And then 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.

JB Orecchia (28:00):

And I think what's happened over the years, which is why we've got so much adoption — I mean, we're launching 50 to 60 financial institutions a quarter, which is not a small task. And we have 98% retention of clients. And part of the reason maybe we-

Jim Marous (28:20):

Sorry, but then again, if I have that product, it'd be hard for me to turn it off only because if consumers are using it, how do I explain that? I mean, it's an engagement tool. So, it’s really hard that it's no small feat to have that kind of retention, but it also shows the value of the products you're providing to the customers because organizations go, “You know what …”

JB Orecchia (28:43):

It’s got super strong ROI. I hear what you're saying, Jim, in terms of, yeah, I wouldn't want to take that away, but financial institutions that are focused on the bottom line don't have a problem with like, “Hey, we got to make cuts here or whatever.” I think they look at the bottom line and go, “Whoa!”

JB Orecchia (29:01):

When I look at a lot of our institutions have compared the profitability of their clients and SavvyMoney clients are 3x to 4x more profitable than non-SavvyMoney. You could call it correlation or causation or both.

JB Orecchia (29:17):

So, there's probably both of those things playing in, but if they're your best consumers and they're engaging with this, they're not going someplace else. And so, I think you want to lift the consumers up that aren't engaged, and you want to protect the ones that are. And so, both of those things are super important.

Jim Marous (29:35):

It's also interesting JB that the ecosystem that you've built with all of your clients, it continues to rise to tide. People share, “Oh by the way, I just had this great success with this or that.” The entire ecosystem is towards building the ROI.

Jim Marous (29:53):

A lot of times, and you can't say it as the supplier, but the reality is sometimes you have to say to yourself, is it me that's causing the problem as a financial institution where I'm just not getting the ROI everybody else is getting.

Jim Marous (30:08):

It’s a matter of letting go of the way you've done things in the past and taking advantage of the opportunities out there. And I think as you said, this is not a charity. Yes, you're helping the consumer with their financial wellness, you're given a rate, all this, but at the end of the day, it builds, as you said, loyalty. It builds better business models.

Jim Marous (30:27):

Also, it builds engagement, which again, will help every product rise, which is hard to measure the ROI on products outside of the credit products, but reality is it benefits all. So, it's important that way.

Jim Marous (30:41):

So, JB, we had you on, as I said, about a year ago, about what you're doing in the marketplace. And if you were to look forward a year from now (and I no longer talk three to five years because it's impossible to predict what's going to happen), what do you see that's exciting about not just SavvyMoney, but overall, in the credit and in the financial services industry? What excites you?

JB Orecchia (31:05):

Yeah, I mean obviously, the buzzword, Jim, is AI, and we've been experimenting with AI around answering 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. And then gaining insights from the consumers about how do they feel about certain things about their finances or about their credit or budgeting.

JB Orecchia (31:33):

So, we collect a lot of information and where I believe AI is going to be super powerful is stitching all of that together and being able to provide very actionable advice in the short-term and in the long-term. And then capturing that data along the way and course correcting, because no one ever sticks on plan. It's kind of like going to the gym, you start the new year, then you start going to the gym right from day one, and then after two weeks, you kind of fall off a little bit.

JB Orecchia (32:03):

And so, you want to keep pulling in that data and look at those cues and provide very actionable content. So, we've got a ton of content on the site that we need to probably curate better, and then capture data from individuals that is saying, “This was super helpful and that helped me. And we watch that move the needle.” And so, how do we take both content and the actionable advice and really build a roadmap for consumers on how to get better? So, that's one area that's super exciting is AI.

JB Orecchia (32:38):

Leveraging the to do automated marketing is our next phase. We have a lot of the dependent variables of the closed loan data and what's happening with that consumer. FIs can go in and 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 kind of learn and do that personalization on its own.”

JB Orecchia (33:04):

So, we do a fair amount of it in the tool, but actually, taking that to the next step is super exciting for us.

Jim Marous (33:12):

Yeah, it really is. You’re gathering so much information from so many consumers across the board. Every institution, to flow with all that data and being able to say, “How do we make this even better?” And then deploy it across the platform.

Jim Marous (33:27):

And again, you mentioned it very early in the podcast, the whole fact that the financial institutions you're working with do not have time. The reality is they just don't have enough time. So, the more that you can solve for this circle of engagements and circle of tools on their behalf gives them back time that they're losing. So, that's all strong.

[Music Playing]

Jim Marous (33:51):

JB, thank you so much for being on the show today. I really appreciate you being back on the show, and it's always good to see what your firm is doing. And as I said before we got on the line, you are at every event I've been at this year, your people are out there. It's obviously creating a lot of buzz.

Jim Marous (34:08):

You talked about the number of organizations you're putting online in a monthly period, and I think the benefit overall is that it really does benefit the end consumer more than anybody. And people are looking for those solutions that can also make them money on the side. So, that's good as well. So, thanks a lot. I appreciate your time.

JB Orecchia (34:28):

Jim, will see you out on the road.

Jim Marous (34:30):

Yep. Thanks a lot.

JB Orecchia (34:32):

Alright.

Jim Marous (34:33):

Thanks for listening to Banking Transformed, the top podcast in retail banking and the winner of three international awards for podcast excellence. We appreciate the support we've received to make this endeavor a success.

Jim Marous (34:45):

If you enjoy what we're doing, please take some time to show some love in the form of a review. Finally, be sure to catch my recent articles on The Financial Brand and the research we're doing for the Digital Banking Report.

Jim Marous (34:57):

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

Jim Marous (35:08):

If you've not already done so, remember to subscribe to Banking Transformed on both your favorite podcast app and the YouTube channel for more thought-provoking discussions on the interaction of finance, technology, and leadership.

Jim Marous (35:21):

Thanks for joining us. And until next time, keep innovating and transforming.