Use data to help members better manage everyday spend

The widespread economic challenges resulting from the pandemic have proven that most people aren’t planning for their financial futures in terms of years but rather in weeks or even days. In fact, the overwhelming majority live paycheck to paycheck. Despite this, most personal financial management tools available today are designed to help save for vacations or retirement, which are luxuries, not reality, for many. Members desperately need help managing everyday spend before they can successfully start planning their financial futures beyond the next pay period. It’s time for credit unions to step up to help to solve the problem by providing better tools and capabilities to manage spend and promote financial wellness.

Most institutions today fail to proactively offer advice about how members can make their money go further but they can and, what’s more, they should. Credit unions should be helping members save money by tracking their transactions, including monitoring for price drops and credit card discrepancies; automatically ordering needed products; providing expense analytics; managing subscriptions; and more. Helping optimize everyday spend means extra money in members’ pockets, yielding strengthened loyalty toward their institution.

More Granular Data

To make this vision a reality, credit unions must be able to leverage deeper, contextual data to better know their members and more narrowly understand their spending habits and behaviors. Traditionally, institutions have solely relied on transaction-level data, such as the merchant, total purchase amount and date. Such surface-level information makes it nearly impossible to gain a complete understanding of who these members are and the extent of their financial needs. The addition of alternate, SKU-level data (stock-keeping unit or barcode) points paints a much more telling picture, revealing items and SKUs, taxes and tips, off-card spend, warranty and return information, and brand loyalty and affinities. This increased visibility enables financial institutions to proactively and more accurately offer the tips and tools necessary to better manage finances.

 

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