Understanding Customers’ Finances Strengthens Relationships

As the current economy shifts and evolves in response to inflationary pressures, and consumer debt increases, banks may encounter an influx of customers who are accruing late charges, overdue accounts and delinquencies for the first time in nearly a decade.

Banks have not been accustomed to seeing this level of volume in their collections and recovery departments since the Great Recession and have not worked with so many customers in financial stress. To weather these economic conditions, banks should consider automated systems that help manage their collections and recovery departments, as well as guide and advise customers on how to improve their financial health and wellbeing. Technology powered with data insights and automation positions banks to successfully identify potential weakness early and efficiently reduce loan losses, increase revenue, minimize costs and have the data insights needed to help guide customers on their financial journey.

Consumer debt increased $52.4 billion in March, up from the increase of nearly $40 billion the previous month. Financial stress and money concerns are top of mind for many households nationwide. According to a recent survey, 77% of American adults describe themselves as anxious about their financial situation. The cause of the anxiety vary and stem from a wide range of sources, including savings and retirement to affording a house or child’s education, everyday bills and expenses, paying off debt, healthcare costs and more.

While banks traditionally haven’t always played a role in the financial wellness of their customers, they are able to see patterns based on customer data and transactional history. This viewpoint enables them to serve as advisors and help their customers before they encounter a problem or accounts go into delinquency. Banks that help their customers reduce financial stress wind up strengthening the relationship, which can entice those customers into using additional banking services.

Using Data to Understand Customer’s Financial Health
By utilizing data insights, banks can easily identify transaction and deposit patterns, as well as overall expenses. This allows banks to assess their customer risk more efficiently or act on collections based on an individual’s level of risk and ability to pay; it also shows them the true financial health of the customer.

For example, banks can identify consumers in financial distress by analyzing deposit account balance trends, identifying automated deposits that have been reduced or stopped and identify deposit accounts that are closed. Banks can better understand a consumer’s financial health by collecting, analyzing and understanding patterns hidden in the data.

When banks identify potentially stressed customers in advance, it can proactively take steps to assist customers before loans go delinquent and accounts accrue late fees. Some strategies to accommodate customers facing delinquency include offering free credit counseling, short-term or long-term loan term modifications, and restructuring or providing loan payment skip offers. This type of assistance not only benefits the financial institution — it shows customers they are valued, even during tough economic times.

Data enables banks to identify these trends. But they can better understand and utilize the data when they integrate it into the workflow and apply automation, ultimately reducing costs associated with the management of delinquencies, loss mitigation and recoveries and customer relationship management. A number of banks may find that their outdated, manual systems lack the scalability and effectiveness they’ll need to remain competitive or provide the advice and counsel to strengthen customer relationships.

Banks are uniquely positioned to help consumers on their journey to improve their financial situation: They have consumer information, transaction data and trust. Banks should aim to provide encouragement and guidance through financial hardships, regardless of their customers’ situation. Augmenting data analysis with predictive technology and automated workflows better positions banks to not only save money but ensure their customers’ satisfaction.

Why Embedded Finance Is the Next Area of Digital Revolution

The four decades after the internet made information readily accessible has led to inventions and innovations like smart devices, mobile apps and the ability to be constantly connected. Today, companies are focusing on harnessing technology to build smoother, richer and deeper customer experiences.

As the information age evolves to the experience age, the next digital revolution will be embedded finance. Embedded finance enables any brand, business or merchant to rapidly, and at a low cost, integrate innovative financial services into new propositions and customer experiences. Embedded finance is driven by consumers’ desire for more convenient and frictionless financial services. Several use cases that underline the demand for embedded financial experiences include:

  • Billing payments as part of the experience. Businesses are already using payment options, like buy now, pay later, to differentiate their offering, increase sales and empower buyers at checkout.
  • Growing popularity of Point-of-Sale financing. The volume of installment-based, flexible payment and instant credit options has increased significantly in the past five years, indicating a desire for instant access to short-term borrowing.
  • Mainstreaming of digital wallets. As more people use their mobile phones to purchase products and services, it makes sense that consumers want to access other financial services seamlessly within apps.

There is potential for embedded finance in almost every sector; in the U.S. alone, embedded finance is expected to see a tenfold revenue increase over the next five years. Financial institutions are in a position to provide branded or white-label products that non-banks can use to “embed” financial services for their customers. Banks must evolve rapidly to take advantage of this new market opportunity.

The front-runners will be institutions that can offer digital real-time payments or instant credit with minimal friction and optimum convenience to customers. But providing this requires new core technologies, cloud capabilities and flexible application programming interfaces, or APIs and other infrastructure to support new business models. Banks will also have to become much more collaborative, working closely with fintechs that may own or intermediate the customer relationship.

Embedded finance allows nonbank businesses to offer their customers additional financial services at the point of decision. Customers can seamlessly pay, redeem, finance or insure their purchase. This can look like buying, financing, and insuring a TV from a store’s shopping app, securing a mortgage through the estate agent’s website as part of a house purchase or obtaining health insurance from a fitness app. This does not mean that every retailer or e-commerce business will become a bank, but it does mean that many more will be equipped with the potential to offer more financial capabilities to customers as a way to compete, differentiate and engage more effectively.

In May 2021, Mambu surveyed 3,000 consumers and found the following:

  • 81% would be interested in purchasing health insurance via an app, and almost half of these would pay a small premium.
  • 60% would prefer to take out an education loan directly from their academic institution rather than a bank.
  • 86% would be interested in purchasing groceries from a cashier-less store.

How these capabilities are delivered and consumed is changing constantly. Consumers want to use intuitive and fast financial services via online and mobile banking channels. Digitalization and cloud services are reinventing back-office functions, automating and streamlining processes and decision-making. At the same time, legislation, open banking and APIs are driving new ecosystems. These changing markets and increased competition make it more difficult for banks to meet evolving customer demands, prevent churn and sustain growth.

We are living in the world of the continuous next. Customers expect financial service providers to anticipate and meet their requirements — sometimes even before they know what they want — and package those services in a highly contextual and personalized way. At the same time, new digital players are setting up camp in the bank space. Tech giants are inching ever closer to the banking market, putting bank relationships and revenue pools are at risk. On an absolute basis, this could cost the industry $3.7 trillion, according to our research.

Incumbent banks need to adopt a foundation oriented toward continuous innovation to keep pace with changing customer preferences. Embracing innovations such as embedded finance is one way that banks can unlock new opportunities and raise new revenue streams.

Transforming, Optimizing Bank Finance Functions


Banks can optimize their finance functions to go beyond compliance and drive performance and results. Creating a layer of functionality on top of the general ledger allows executives to apply behavior and risk data with an eye toward improving profitability and forecasting without replacing their core. Will Newcomer, vice president of business development and strategy at Wolters Kluwer, and Bill Collette, managing director of financial services solutions at Wolters Kluwer, share what kind of applications and analytics executives could use to drive measurement, accuracy and accountability. Topics include:

  • Trends in Transformation
  • Uses of Finance Analytics
  • Best Practices for Transformation

Banks can improve measurement, accuracy and accountability by leveraging their existing core and finance functions.