Establish your data strategy with Transaction Data Cleansing

The essentials to enhance user experience, data science & modeling, and marketing automation

If you handle data for a bank or credit union, you probably already know deciphering merchant names in your account holders’ transactions can be a time-consuming task. The cryptic merchant names on transactions seem deliberately vague, don’t they? Would you guess that “DOCTORSASSOCINC” is actually Subway Restaurants? With that kind of “clarity” on merchant names, it’s easy to see that accurately identifying and matching millions or even billions of transactions and descriptions to the right merchants requires a lot of time and resources most financial institutions (FIs) do not have.

Yet, understanding that data is vital. It allows you to better analyze account holder behavior and spending patterns, which in turn allows you to develop deeper relationships. Without the intelligence behind your customers or members’ full financial journey, you can’t reach out to them with relevant and timely offers and information, and grow your business in the process.

The key to unlocking the value of that data and how to better leverage it to drive marketing technology and sales initiatives is Transaction Data Cleansing. Alkami is the industry leader in accurately identifying, tagging, and categorizing financial transactions including credit card, debit card, ACH, bill pay, and much more. Our library science methodology blends human and machine learning capabilities to provide the fastest and most accurate data enhancement available.

Why transaction data cleansing should be foundational 

Enhance User Experience and Optimize Resources

Cleansing and categorizing transaction data is necessary to make it usable and actionable. Our data cleansing services lead the industry in efficiency, accuracy, and reliability. Once your credit card, debit card, ACH, and bill pay transactions have been cleansed, your FI is able to give account holders a 5-star online banking experience. Optimize your internal resources by avoiding transaction disputes, providing better online banking statements, and reduce IT hours, lag time, and quality issues associated with cleansing your data in-house.

Deploy Data Science and Modeling

To deploy predictive modeling and respond to changing customer or member needs, you need clean and categorized data. With artificial intelligence (AI) modeling, FIs can predict users’ behavior. Past transactions can predict future financial decisions, and armed with that knowledge, FIs can do things like identify opportunities for cross-selling products at just the right time. AI modeling can also pinpoint account holders who might be thinking about leaving the FI, providing you with precious time to reach out to those customers or members and mend relationships before they exit – allowing you to minimize attrition rates.

Target and Automate Marketing

With the intelligence pulled from cleansed transaction data, an FI can better identify customers or members, based on trends in their behaviors. Armed with that knowledge, you can build audiences and reach out to only those who are interested in particular products your FI offers. Best of all, cleansed data can be used to power marketing automation campaigns by keeping your audiences accurate – making relevant messaging to account holders an easier lift on your existing in-house team.

Uncover Hidden Opportunities Among Account Holders

One hidden opportunity Alkami helps clients to identify is the amount of account holders who are running micro or small businesses out of their consumer accounts. How big of an “opportunity” is it? It may surprise you to know that 60 million Americans did freelance work last year, according to gig economy platform, Upwork. And found within Alkami’s data, presented at the 2022 FinXTech Conference, 26% of consumer deposit accounts showed ongoing business transactions and payments. Examining data from FIs in five asset classes, Alkami found that there were between two and three times the number of “hidden” business accounts than there were actual business accounts. That’s a huge opportunity for FIs to cross-sell business banking to those account holders and generate revenue from their transactions.

Bottom line: Data insights used to inform growth strategies and product development for the financial industry are here to stay. Recently, SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in an interview with Bloomberg reporter Lydia Beyoud, “Technology is so rapidly advancing. We’re in a significant transformational time around predictive data analytics and the use of data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.”

FIs of all sizes are hungry for intelligence, to help deepen and strengthen relationships with account holders and grow the business. We’re here to help.

Alkami’s industry-leading Transaction Data Cleansing solution allows FIs to trust their transaction data, giving rise to better decision making and strategizing.