A beta version of financial wellness platform Personified was supposed to roll out to 300 employees of First United Bank in Durant, Oklahoma, this past summer.
Instead, the service accidentally became available to the entire First United customer base.
"Our chief technology officer woke up one day and we were getting six thousand times the pings to our platform we were expecting to see," said Parker Graham, founder and CEO of Finotta, a provider of embedded fintech for digital banking that co-created the product with First United.
Personified is a package of digital features that help bank customers track and improve their financial health. One refers users without
"When we shared with the team" at First United, "everyone was like, 'That's not good, but that's also awesome,' " said Graham. "It was a nice little peek."
Now that Personified is officially launched to all First United customers as of Nov. 8, early results suggest that this offering is driving more customers to open savings accounts than they typically do at branches.
Susan Foulds, managing partner at the competitive intelligence firm Keynova Group, says personal finance management apps should have two components to meet different customer needs: high-level summaries of the user's finances, such as spending and cash flow, and a more engaging and analytical component that may involve exporting data from external accounts.
"But if it requires too much work, chances are that users will fall off," she said. "That was the problem with the first generation of personal finance management tools."
First United and Finotta joined forces in October 2021 to co-develop Personified. They united over a similar philosophy toward financial health. First United's brick-and-mortar locations feature displays centering on its Spend Life Wisely mantra and its four "pillars" of financial well-being, religious faith, personal growth and health. A financial well-being "journey" is mapped across one wall with steps customers can take to improve their financial health. There are frequent free events that correlate to the Spend Life Wisely pillars, including retirement planning sessions, yoga classes and Bible studies.
"We do a great job in the physical locations," said Dan White, director of customer and employee experience program office. But at $14.5 billion of assets, "we are not at the size where we can build custom software for ourselves." The bank also wants to appeal to younger, digitally savvy customers, who may be less intimidated seeking advice from an app than from a person.
First United Bank in Oklahoma bought a minority stake in Exencial Wealth Advisors instead of acquiring it outright to give the owners an incentive to stick around and help build the business — and to make it easier for the bank to bail if things don't work out.
Personified is white labeled and embedded into mobile and online channels through First United's digital banking provider, Q2. The features include graphs and trackers detailing the user's cash flow, expenses, debt-to-income ratio and more; "points" they have accrued for achieving certain financially healthy behaviors, such as paying off debt; and recommendations.
The recommendations engine is where Graham feels Personified distinguishes itself from
"Advice is one thing, guidance is another," he said. "Advice tells you that you need $400 in an emergency fund. Our system coaches you each month on how much to put into that bucket in an automated way."
The recommendations engine currently centers on emergency funds and debt. The feature will either direct customers to open an emergency fund — that is, a savings account at First United — or analyze their First United and external accounts to advise how much more they should save. For customers with debt, the application will analyze their interest rates and other variables to suggest an order to operations in which they should repay it.
Finotta uses Plaid so customers can link external accounts, including loans. According to Keynova Group's fourth-quarter online banking scorecard, seven of the 20 large banks it surveyed let customers import transactions from external accounts into personal finance management tools or spending reports.
So far, Personified seems to be effective at nudging customers to deepen their relationships with First United.
In the first 24 hours of Personified's official launch to First United customers, 120 users went through the entire flow and clicked through to First United's account-opening page, suggesting they intended to open a savings account. (The data for how many followed through is very limited because at this point, Finotta is simply referring them to the First United website rather than letting them open accounts through the Personified tool; it is working on this capability.) That number rose to 400 after 30 days.
In contrast, a typical First United branch normally sees 20 savings account openings per month.
Ninety-one percent of all new accounts at First United are still opened in a branch. "Getting 120 in the online channel is a monster improvement in the numbers," said White.
First United is Finotta's launch partner with Personified and the sole investor in Finotta, at $3 million. But Finotta will sell its software to other financial institutions. For those that use Q2, the software can be easily embedded. "We're basically a light switch away from working with them," said Graham. The company is working on pipelines into other digital banking providers. It will charge financial institutions a platform fee per month that is adjusted based on the size of the institution.
