What we’re seeing

Earlier this month, Alkami Research published an analysis of consumer spending trends, revealing our investment personas and the median amount invested per account throughout 2023 by each of the personas. This week, we look at median transaction investing patterns for each persona.

Aspirational Newbies are the most frequent investors, with a median of 28.55 transactions throughout the year. This equates to a transfer every 12.8 days. This persona is often using automatic investing applications (apps), so these apps are likely pulling small amounts on a frequent basis. 

Emerging & Tech Savvy investors have the lowest median number of transactions at 3.1. This equates to an investment transfer every four months. This may indicate that as investors are emerging and are planning/executing their own investing, they make transfers less frequently and perhaps on more of an ad hoc basis than the automatic investing apps used by Aspirational Newbies. 

Finally, Well-Established investors have a median investment frequency of 5.34. With larger investment portfolios than the other personas, this may be reflective of more sophisticated cash balance management and slightly more active investment management than we see in the Emerging & Tech Savvy Persona.

Takeaway and Call to Action

Financial Institutions can craft focused messages to different personas. For Emerging & Tech Savvy investors, banks and credit unions can benefit from relationship building by offering financial wellness advice around setting up smaller but more regular monthly transfers to investment accounts as a best practice.

For the Well-Established investors who are moving larger sums more frequently, financial institutions should be more proactive about offering ways for this persona to keep funds in their deposit accounts, such as higher interest certificate of deposits, or more attractive money market rates.