Solve the Suck: Banking & Sisense

[JonB]

Solve the Suck: Banking & Sisense

Looking at things in the world that are changing (good or bad) has helped me here at Sisense. Using these changes to help drive conversations to see how or if Sisense can help potential customers. With this series, I am hoping to show that Sisense can help businesses in a multitude of ways. 

Banks: we all use them in some form or fashion. 

I previously spent around 15 years working at a tech distributor and during that time I did what any young professional does: I invested in my 401K and retirement funds. Also like a young professional, I didn’t spend a ton of time checking into those investments. I got the statements once a quarter, reviewed them, and then threw away the statement. I did that continuously over the years. 

Flash forward 14 years later and I was leaving that distributor; with me leaving, my bank that I had my investments in did exactly what they were supposed to do– they saw that I was no longer contributing to my investments and called and said “Hey, we noticed you stopped contributing, is something wrong?” They let me know I had enough in my 401K that I didn’t need to move it and they wouldn’t charge me fees; we all left that call happy and walked away. 

I continue to get my quarterly statement and log into my account to check my investments. What had changed though? My behavior online. This is something that they could have easily seen if they had the right tools in place to do so. So what was I doing? I was not only looking at my investments once a quarter, but I started to look at another service, I looked at how to transfer money from my 401k. I went from being online once a quarter, to once a month, to once a week, to almost daily. Eventually, I got the paperwork I needed to withdraw my investments, filled it out, and took it to my local bank branch. 

When I arrived I gave them the paperwork and told them I wanted to withdraw my investments and move them over to another bank. They replied with the typical response: “Is there anything we can do to keep your business?”, to which my response was a laughable no, not now. Had they reached out a few weeks earlier, I could have explained my thought process and asked if they had a better offer than what I was looking to do. Could they have made a better deal? Who knows, but I do know they could have caught me leaving sooner had they been looking closer at my activity online.

How can we relate this to the current world? A hundred thousand people have left their jobs between COVID-19, The Great Resignation, and Tech Layoffs. That means all of those retirement accounts have become "portable money".… Portable money is scary for banks because that means the money can go anywhere. My money had to stay at the original bank as long as I was at that employer, as soon as I was no longer with that company, I was able to move my money wherever I wanted. With billions of dollars that are currently considered portable due to the tech layoffs (or even layoffs that can date back to COVID), banks are worried about accounts moving and closing. 

So... how can Sisense help banks prevent the loss of customers/accounts?

Banks have a record of a user's history of logins/access to accounts. The first indicator for banks that there was going to be a change in my actions should have been the change in the frequency of my logins. Banks could use this login info as a signal to call me and say “Hey Jon, we see your online activity with our bank has changed and we want to be sure we are serving you correctly. So, what is driving the need to find information and how can I help you simplify that?”. This would have led to me letting them know that I was thinking of moving my assets, which would have allowed them to have the chance to not lose my business. While the increase in my online activity may not have been the first indicator for a rep to speak to me, the moment I started looking into ways to move my 401K should have been. 

Had the bank been using Sisense they could have pulled up a report and seen my online activity mixed with what I was looking into. Sisense can create reports that can show a customer service rep those accounts that should be prioritized based on set metrics, which then can create their call list for the day. They could have reached out and asked how they could best assist me, show me what I may have been missing with my account with them, and may have even kept my business. But since they house so many 401K accounts that they are serving, they were not able to identify me, a needle in the haystack. 

With over 20 years in sales and business development, Jon Barrett is the VP of Sales for North America at Sisense. Known for leadership roles at ASLAN Training and ScanSource, Jon is a seasoned executive with a global perspective. Career highlights include leading successful sales teams, initiating European operations, and contributing to Sisense's mission of simplifying access to critical business insights.