Providing Financial Wellness to Users Who Suddenly Need It

Early digital financial wellness tools didn’t move the needle for most Americans in realizing their financial goals. At the Megabank and fintech level, new data-driven technologies have reinvigorated the pursuit of meaningful digital financial wellness solutions.

Yet, in reality, regional and community banks and credit unions are better positioned to utilize financial wellness tools to build and grow user relationships. The only requirement is finding a digital banking platform that provides diversified and integrated financial wellness solutions.

Financial wellness user needs to address

Digital banking users hold their banking apps to the same standards as most other digital experiences they’re accustomed to. Instagram, Netflix, Facebook, all of these are seamless and personalized experiences. Users expect that type of ease of use and personalization from their digital banking and financial wellness experience. Such a streamlined experience is more important than ever as a growing number of users need to quickly and regularly track their finances during the pandemic.

Users are seeking a holistic view of their financial lives to begin setting spending, saving, and credit management goals. And, they want it all delivered via modernized financial tools in an accessible mobile-first experience. Add an element of financial coaching, and you have a detailed picture of what financial wellness users find most necessary and useful.

To deliver what these users demand, the digital banking experience will need deeply integrated digital solutions that blend seamlessly into the core banking experience to cover a comprehensive spectrum of overall financial health factors.

Financial wellness integrations

A digital banking platform financial wellness framework can provide deeply integrated solutions that assess a user’s financial health within their everyday online banking experience. This results in a personalized digital strategy for each user to build credit, deposits, and promote overall financial wellbeing.

For instance, transaction descriptions and aggregation, two platform integrations central to a complete financial wellness experience, provide a rich transaction data layer across all internal and external accounts. Together, these can generate a normalized dataset for billions of transactions to grant customers a clear view of their finances within their digital banking experience. Users can track spending by categorization and view trends over time while key recurring expenses are automatically detected and reported to the user so they understand their core monthly expenses now and into the future.

FIs using a digital banking platform with built-in data management benefit further. All that user data for spending, saving and credit score that accumulates can give financial institutions a better idea of how to help their users reach their financial goals with offers delivered through targeted marketing. If an FI’s data capabilities need to mature, they can offer users micro-savings solutions that promote auto-saving behaviors and drive deposits in the meantime. Deep integrations that promote the role of the FI to coach and administrate financial well-being without disrupting the user’s online banking experience builds user trust and loyalty beyond times of financial emergency.

In addition to providing data enrichment through transaction descriptions, banks and credit unions can provide both FICO and Vantage-based credit solutions so users are able to engage regularly with their credit score and understand how their monthly finances impact their credit rating.

Turnkey financial wellness solutions generally don’t align with the Financial Health Network’s (FHN) scoring framework, so seek out a digital banking platform who does — your users will thank you for it. Aligning to the FHN provides established guidance for scoring financial health across spending, saving, borrowing, and planning. Wellness scoring steers actionable financial health insights for users and their FIs.

Digital wellness solutions are not the only answer to helping users improve their financial lives, but they are vital to facilitating an optimized and scalable wellness solution where banks and credit unions can take an active role in providing financial support.