Met today with the folks at Inuit Financial Services (formally Digital Insight) – a online banking platform vendor. The purpose of the call was to discuss an upcoming document around cross-selling financial products on the Web that I am in the process of writing. During the discussion, they highlighted an exciting new cross-sell targeting engine that will be available this Summer to their FinanceWorks' clients.

 

FinanceWorks is IFS's online personal financial management suite of services. One features of that service is the ability to aggregate accounts from different providers into a single account view. Why this is an interesting cross-sell opportunity is that this Summer IFS will offer a ad targeting engine that will allow its clients to target cross-sell messages based on EXTERNAL owned accounts. Let me give you an example.

 

Let's say a customer of a ABC bank aggregates their American Express credit card within FinanceWorks. ABC bank can set up a rule such that if a customer doesn't have a credit card with them, has a credit card with an another provider (e. g. AMEX) and that competitor card has an APR of more than 12%; they can target a message to the customer highlighting ABC bank's credit card and rate (a rate they KNOW will be less than what they have on their AMEX card). Offers can also be targeted based on the balances of external accounts.

 

What is particularly exciting is that most of this type of analysis in the past would have had to happen offline, but with IFS's new targeting engine, those decisions are both intelligent and dynamic.

 

This is another great example that the future of cross-selling financial services products is getting a lot more sophisticated and relevant.

 

Brad