Post-Pandemic Growth Series [PART 2]: 3 Considerations as Things Return to ‘Normal’
View Part 1 here: Tips to Protect and and Grow Your Loan Portfolio Beyond the Pandemic
View Part 3 here: 3 Risk Mitigation Strategies for Financial Institutions
Traditional financial institutions have been fighting to overcome evolving market challenges long before COVID-19. In many ways, the pandemic amplified many of these obstacles and accelerated the need for more competitive loan, account and member growth strategies. As we return to some sense of normalcy, consider these three strategies to help meet the post-pandemic needs of your financial institution and accountholders.
- Remote Banking Solutions
Strengthening loan-to-share, liquidity, and revenue can be a challenging task; especially now. To more effectively support a strong, balanced growth strategy, consider offering your consumers solutions that will simplify their banking needs, while at the same time offering your institution new revenue opportunities. Examples include:- Online and mobile banking capabilities, including remote deposit capture and digital account transfer services
- Fee-based checking programs that offer certain retail benefits or discounts to accountholders
- Flexible, long-term deposit options offering high returns, such as CDs and money market accounts
- ‘Social-distancing friendly’ payment tools, like contactless, digital and top-of-wallet solutions
- Updated share draft and deposit account pricing models to reinvigorate growth and revenue
- Digital Service Strategy
There is a growing expectation among consumers that all interactions be tailored to their personal sales and service preferences. With the pandemic forcing branch closures, this personalized sales and service experience needed to take place in an entirely remote environment. Services which were traditionally performed in person - like mortgage closings, form signing and loan onboarding - now needed remote channels to operate. Not only that, these new digital services needed to meet consumers’ high standards for these digital service channels.
Related Resource: How and Where to Communicate and Engage Members
Providing a positive digital experience requires the following core elements: simplicity, convenience, and relevance. Consider adopting the following strategies to meets these three objectives, so you can continue to protect and enhance relationships with your accountholders:- Leverage digital channels like email, text, and video to communicate with your accountholders in easy, inexpensive, and effective ways.
- Send out proactive communications to accountholders with timely updates, educational information, or helpful resources to help them through this time.
- Leverage any data you have to send out more targeted, relevant offers to accountholders.
- Use ads and social media to market solutions that provide financial support and relief to members of your community.
- Ensure all communications are tailored to demonstrate the care and concern you have for your accountholders and your community, to build trust and support lifelong relationships when it matters most.
- Offer online education programs to help support accountholder and community needs, such as financial wellness workshops and one-on-one appointments with advisors.
These strategies will help you support trust and longevity with current accountholders, while at the same time helping drive new business and build your brand within the community.
- Alternative Investment Opportunities
A significant increase in loan loss exposures is on the horizon as temporary COVID-19 loan relief programs start to expire. As you build your risk management strategies, also consider the following investment channels to protect your financial institution’s bottom-line and offset loan losses in a sustainable way:- BOLI /COLI insurance services, which offset employee benefit costs and help capture guaranteed yield
- Secondary capital and non-member funding solutions for low-income credit unions
- Loan participation opportunities to manage liquidity and generate returns while loan demand is down
Adopting any number of these competitive strategies can help your financial institution to mitigate losses and build revenue. Contact Allied to hear more about how we are supporting our clients’ strategic priorities, throughout and beyond the pandemic: alliedsolutions.net/contact-us
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