The Growth Opportunity in Your Data

Jim Marous (0:01)

You're chasing the wrong customers. Marquis looked at thousands of campaigns across more than 100 banks and credit unions and found that life cycle programs, the work you do with the people you already have within your customer base, run two to six times more efficiently than acquisition and prospecting. And yet, our 2026 State of Financial Marketing Report says acquisition is still by far the number one marketing priority. Satin Mirchandani is Chairman and CEO of Marquis, and he believes that most financial institutions are missing opportunities with their own bases. In this conversation, he tells us which signals indicate that an account holder is about to act, and he gets very specific about auto loans, silent attrition, lifestyle changes, and especially onboarding. He also explains why messy data is not a reason to wait, how his clients are generated 10 times ROI without taking credit for products they didn't directly offer, and why the side hustle inside your member's household may be the relationship growth engine you're missing.

Welcome to the show, Satin. It's interesting, I've known Marquis for many, many years, and you're a great company to work with, and a lot of our clients use you for marketing services and all. It seems to me there's so much happening in the marketing world.

What is very interesting is you just created a report, as I mentioned, around the hot takes, around marketing. And there's so many nuances that go into between the data and the analytics and the program opportunities and the speed at which these can happen right now. You came to Marquis from enterprise software, cyber security and healthcare analytics. What surprised you most about how banks and credit unions market compared to other areas you were at?

Satin Mirchandani (1:59)

Jim, thanks for having me on the show. Thanks for having Marquis. Really excited to kind of tell the story and share some of our most recent research.

Great question, right? What's different about this industry than others? And I'll make my comments more specifically about community financial institutions, community banks and credit unions, which are very different than the fintechs and the megabanks. I have been pleasantly surprised by the spirit of community and the desire to be deeply interwoven into their local groups and their local communities across the board, right? Almost regardless of asset size, almost regardless of where they are in the country candidly, and I know this is a bit of a third rail, whether they are credit unions or community banks, they tend to have a similar approach to people, helping people within the community, being deeply attached to making sure that there is a level of inclusion, that there is a level of personal interaction. Branches obviously are very important. So that's been a pleasant surprise because it puts a human face on all of this.

Some of the essentials of marketing are similar across industries, but this focus on people and the community and the human face has been just really amazing.

Jim Marous (3:16)

You know, it's interesting. I just spent early part of this week with a number of banks, credit unions of all sizes. And I think what's interesting is yes, I agree with the fact that trying to serve the community, trying to serve the markets is universal among smaller community banks and credit unions as well as the bigger banks now. What's interesting now is that if you take the logo off the financial institution, how they differentiate themselves. And marketing is one way to do that.

One thing we found in a research report that we're just coming out with around marketing services ourselves is that we have a lot of money being spent towards acquisition. And your hot take, your first hot take actually was that acquisition is still where the money goes. And yet the hot take was that marketing budgets are allocated backwards, which is interesting.

What does that really mean? And why does acquisition still get so much attention from your perspective?

Satin Mirchandani (4:21)

Great question. And if you don't mind, let me share a few seconds on the way Marquis approaches the problem, because I think it'll explain, it'll add a context to the question. So what Marquis does really is try to be a community financial institutions growth partner. And what that means is, the definition of growth very much depends on where you are in your journey, where you are with your community, etc.

As a result, growth could be acquisition, it could be retention management, it could be product cross-sells and upsells, or it could simply be engaging with the next generation of folks in your community that you want to bring on board. In order to customize programs for the FI, it turns out we look very hard at the data, at their underlying data. And the answers are all in the data. So when I first got here and we started running these, we started tracking these campaigns on an annualized basis, what surprised us was how much growth remains latent within your existing customer base or member base. And so now finally, coming around to your question, Jim, which is why is it that acquisition and prospecting gets so much interest? I think as human beings we're focused on growth and we're focused on numbers that go up. And so you have institutions that are really focused on customer or member growth. They're focused on branch growth, all of which are appropriate, by the way, right? I mean, most healthy FIs need to grow both in terms of acquisition and in terms of what we call life cycle programs, which is mining your existing member and customer base so that you can add more value, capture more share of wallet, etc.