Every day, consumers are paying their bills for a variety of goods, services and utilities. In the last year, U.S. consumers paid 16.8 billion bills, amounting to roughly $5.6 trillion. Just as there are many types of bills, there are also many different ways for consumers to pay them, including in-person, using paper checks, over the phone, directly through biller websites, through online banking platforms, through automatic checking deductions and more. Data and marketing for financial institutions can help you uncover opportunities to drive bill pay adoption and overall digital banking utilization.

Consumer behaviors have shifted towards digital payments. Among the 16.8 billion bills that  U.S. consumers paid in the last year, approximately 10.6 billion, or 63%, were made online via a biller, bank, or third-party website. Financial institutions looking to increase loyalty, stickiness and adoption within digital banking should look to this area of opportunity. 

While capturing bill pay volume within digital banking can help achieve that, its interchange fees can also be a lucrative way to provide convenience to your account holders for bill pay functionality that they are already using elsewhere.

Activating Revenue Opportunities with Data & Marketing

Analyzing core transaction data takes a two-step approach – combining intelligent data analysis with personalized marketing tactics. Alkami’s Data & Marketing Solutions allow banks and credit unions to do just that. Alkami’s Customer Insights process aggregates a financial institution’s data sources and transforms account holder data into simple, intuitive insights. Because we create behavioral tags from account holders’ everyday spend data, you get a clear picture of your account holders’ financial life cycle and what’s important to them.

Did you know 40% of consumers have set up automated recurring payments? By analyzing transaction data, Alkami’s Data & Marketing Solutions can identify which direct biller websites your account holders use for recurring payments and how often they are made. Some of these common recurring bills and utilities include:

• Cell phone services
• Streaming entertainment subscriptions
• Meal delivery services
• Subscription box services
• Physical fitness facilities and classes

After identifying account holders’ bill pay data, you can leverage Alkami’s marketing automation solution to easily deploy personalized marketing campaigns designed to entice your account holders to ditch disparate billing websites, in favor of a bill pay experience within digital banking. 

This is just one of the many use cases for cleansed, tagged and categorized transaction data.  There are countless ways to deliver personalized messaging to the right users at the right time in order to grow revenue. With integrations to popular campaign delivery tools, you can execute more high-performing campaigns faster than ever before. 

And tracking your results? Automated full cycle attribution reporting easily identifies account holders who were influenced to achieve the campaign goal as a direct result of your marketing efforts.

Improving Bill Pay Convenience and Control

Centralizing the bill payments experience for your account holders improves their convenience factor tremendously. No longer will they have to navigate to, and keep, their banking information stored across multiple direct biller websites.

Additionally, providing bill pay within digital banking gives account holders greater visibility and control into their financial commitments, as they can see all of their bills and upcoming deadlines in one place. The added bonus? Financial institutions can gain insight into competitively held relationships and retarget their account holders with attractive win-back offers to grow share of wallet.

Achieving Profits and PFI Status

By driving bill pay adoption within digital banking, financial institutions can capture additional interchange income by allowing account holders to pay their bills with credit cards, turning bill pay into a profit center.

In addition to bill pay, other activities that take place on a recurring basis, like direct deposit or person-to-person (P2P) payments also help keep your active digital banking users primed for product adoption and loyalty, increasing your likelihood of capturing primary financial institution (PFI) status.