New tool streamlines personalized loan offers for financial institutions

SavvyMoney today announced Get My Rate, the first personalized offer automation tool designed exclusively for financial institutions (FIs). 

The new, customized offer tool is set to transform the way FIs interact with members and non-members, providing unmatched convenience, tailored experiences and enhanced market reach. Get My Rate also seamlessly integrates consumers into the FI's marketing efforts, ensuring that as their credit profile improves over time or as rates improve, they are presented with pre-qualified loan options featuring the latest rates in line with their credit qualifications.

Unlike other conventional, single-stop pre-qualification solutions in the market, Get My Rate allows users to get pre-qualified for multiple offers simultaneously and receive ongoing alerts when rates change in their favor. Additionally, users benefit from continuous credit monitoring and a comprehensive set of financial wellness tools, which guide them toward improving their financial profile over time. These improvements can unlock better loan opportunities and significant cost savings for consumers.

"SavvyMoney is thrilled to introduce Get My Rate — the first tool of its kind — marking a new era of convenience, empowerment, and expansion," stated JB Orecchia, President & CEO of SavvyMoney. "Given credit criteria and rates change all this time. This solution provides a personalized solution that alerts consumers when the product or rate meets their needs.  In an industry that's rapidly evolving with digital transformation and increasing consumer expectations, it truly exemplifies our commitment to reshaping the lending landscape, putting the power of personalization in the hands of consumers while driving continued growth for financial institutions."
Other key features and benefits of Get My Rate include:

• Streamlined consumer pre-qualification for loans, eliminating uncertainty and stress

• Alerting consumers of progress regarding credit improvement goals to pre-qualify 

• FIs enabled to effortlessly identify and market personalized offers to consumers

• Expanded market share by simplifying borrowing on consumers' terms

• Multi-offer pre-qualification and ongoing rate change alerts

• Continuous credit monitoring and financial wellness tools

• Long-term relationship building between FIs and consumers

"In today's fast-paced financial landscape, consumers expect personalized, convenient experiences. Our new offer automation tool meets this demand head-on, revolutionizing how financial institutions connect with both members and potential customers,” said David Dowhan, Chief Product Officer at SavvyMoney. “By providing tailored loan options based on real-time credit profiles, we're not just streamlining the lending process - we're creating a more transparent, empowering financial journey for consumers while driving growth for our partners.”

Get My Rate marks a significant milestone in the convergence of finance and technology, providing FIs with the power and agility of a fintech while serving as a powerful customer acquisition tool. By offering free access to pre-qualification and tools that help consumers improve their financial wellness over time, FIs can establish long-term relationships with consumers that go beyond the typically transactional nature of loan origination. This innovative approach underscores SavvyMoney's commitment to redefining the financial landscape with customer-centric solutions that push the boundaries of traditional banking.

To learn more about SavvyMoney and its solutions for banks and credit unions, please visit www.savvymoney.com. 

Read the full transcript below

Disclosure: Transcript is automatically generated.

Sarah Cooke 28:54

So right now, delinquencies and collections are up among credit unions, and lending is slow, there's liquidity crunch. Of course, people do want to make deposits, and credit unions desperately need the deposits. But, so where do you see lending, savings, the rates going by, say, year end, or maybe a year from now?

JB Orecchia 29:19

Yeah, yeah. So over the last year, we saw an increased focus on deposits. For sure, there were deposits leaving institutions. As you know, we had a little bit of a banking crisis. I think folks were a little bit concerned, but credit unions were offering, you know, great rates on deposits, and so we were able to lean in on that and actually market deposits in our product and drive a fair amount of deposit volume. The interest rate situation changing, I think, is going to be good for all consumers. Number one, as interest rates come down, that's going to be less of a burden on the consumer. Those payments will be less, right? The way our tool works is that we'll identify as interest rates are dropping, the ability for you to save money through your institution. So whether that be consolidating credit card debt or refiing a car, all those opportunities are going to present themselves. What we're seeing also is that lenders are starting to really lean in on the lending side. Whereas, you know, 12 months ago or even eight months ago, they kind of retracted a little bit and they said, Hey, we got to shore up our balance sheets. We need to do more on the deposit side. But going forward, we really want to now focus on lending, and as interest rates start to drop, we want to be out ahead of that and be able to highlight those opportunities for consumers. So I think given credit unions are competitive on the interest rate side with loans, they're really in a great position to consolidate debt or offer refinance opportunities those consumers, and then, from a financial wellness standpoint, if we're able to help those consumers work their credit up and actually see the impact to the rates they're being offered as they reach new credit bands, that's going to be super powerful, because now there's a means to an end. Now there's an opportunity to really save money. And I'm motivated now to get my score up, because I know that's going to help me save on interest and save on the money that's going out the door. Right?

Sarah Cooke 31:36

The people who are just coming of age now are really learning what interest is when I you know, at that age it was, it was much lower than it is today. And so, you know, the some of the key issues, of course, right now are the economy and inflation and rates. But a big piece of that is the credit education part. It's not just financial wellness people, you know, it's not just savings and budgeting, it is wise use of, use of credit also. So how do we use credit unions and other community institutions improve that? What? What's effective? Have you found? Yeah.

JB Orecchia 31:36

So, Sarah, we do a few different things in the tool. One, we do a financial checkup, which allows you to enter your income, all of your debts, and actually, it pulls in your credit information, and we get some sentiment from the consumer on how they feel about different things, and then give them very actionable content to help solve those problems, right? And benchmarking that if you're making this and you've got this going out in discretionary spending or this going out in your housing payment or your auto loan, you're over indexing from where your income is. So we need to tell consumers, hey, maybe you shouldn't have $1,000 auto loan. You should probably have something more on the line of like $600 payment on your auto loan. I'm just using that as an example. We show that benchmarking data based on where their income is, and then as it relates to their credit score, we have two things in place. We've got action plans and goal setting. So if I want to reach let's say my credit score is 680 and I go, Well, I want to go, I want to be 825. Say, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, I want to be 825. Too. But let's get from 680, to 710, first. And so we create increments that are reasonable set reasonable goals. And then these are the things you need to work on. And then you get confetti when you when you hit that goal. And then what happens is you set a new goal, and then you have a new set of things that you need to work on in order to get to the next level. And so there's power in that incremental progress that feels rewarding to the consumer for kind of making, making up ground in terms of their situation. And then they're also going to see, as they do that, they're going to see the interest rates change in the tool, and with there's a double benefit there, one of my scores going up, and interest rates are on the way down that I'll see the benefits of improving my credit. The other benefit to the institution for improving credit is risk, right? So if I can improve my credit, I'm less likely to go delinquent. So if I can get my consumers actually focused on improving their credit, then I'm also going to have less delinquencies in my file. Yeah, and and so much is available to credit unions in the data that they already have right in about their members.

Sarah Cooke

And so what can we see in that data as how you talked a little bit about it already, but what can we see in that data as how to better assist them?

JB Orecchia

Yeah, great, great question. First of all, I want to see where are my members borrowing, right? So I want to understand that. But I want to see where my members are borrowing as it relates to what institutions by what credit band. I also want to see how they're improving their credit so we actually track by credit band, where did you start and where are you now? Did you move up one credit band? Did you move up two credit bands and and I have a lot of backup data that I can send you on institutions where they've been able to really move the needle on consumers that are sub 600 and over 600 in fact, Greater Nevada Credit Union saw their users that were the average score was under 600 improve 184 points. That's that's pretty that's pretty incredible. And the ones that were credit savvy, which we call in the in the highest credit band, actually increased 106 points. And so you're really able to provide very specific guidance based on your circumstances. Is what are the things that you need to do in order to improve your credit score? And if you take that to heart and you leverage the tools that SavvyMoney provides in order to help that user along, you're going to see great increases in their score,

Sarah Cooke 36:41
yeah, it's that. It's that personalization that Gen Z and others are wanting out of their banking as well. So that's a great one two punch there. And

JB Orecchia 36:51

then in the data as well, we show competitive interest rates on average. So let's say your loans aren't getting a high click rate. And you look at the interest, average interest rate for that particular loan in that credit ban, what you might see is, boy, my a paper, consumers are clicking. Those rates are good, but as I go down in my in my credit policy, I'm charging a lot more from an interest rate standpoint, and I'm seeing that those loans are going elsewhere. So let the data inform you as to what products you have that are good. You can also see on on certain products. Hey, my balance transfer isn't that good of a rate. It's not getting that good of a click rate, right? But if you look at another institution and how they're performing, or maybe they're on one of our best practices webinars talking about what they've offered. Oh, Wow, no wonder they're successful. They've offered a more attractive rate, and they're seeing the benefits of that. So leveraging the data really to inform you as to what are you doing right and what are you doing wrong?

Sarah Cooke 37:59 Yeah, absolutely. And

JB Orecchia 38:00
you guys could do better, I should say, not necessarily wrong, right?

Sarah Cooke 38:04

Yep. Gotta watch your words carefully, of course. So you guys work with more than 1300 banks and credit unions, and you just recently created this get my rate service, allowing users to get pre qualified for multiple offers at the same time and receive ongoing alerts as rates change in their favor, which we kind of talked a little bit about. So, so obvious, there are obvious benefits to the members in that getting a better pricing in their credit. But what? What else are you finding?

JB Orecchia 38:40

Yeah, I think get my rate is the real power of get my rate. So a couple different things. One, if you're A paper and the rate that you're offering that consumer isn't what they want, they're able to set the rate they want and be notified as rates come down or as you change your credit policy to be alerted. So what that does is it's not a no, it's a not now, but we're going to work towards getting you the rate that you want, so it keeps that consumer in the fold. If you're a low credit band, what that's going to do is a much better experience for the user. What a number of credit unions have seen is that when they turn somebody down, they don't come back. And so if it can be a not now and not a no, and actually say, Hey, you're only 20 points away, or 25 points away, or work on these things, we'll continue to alert you when you get there, it changes the narrative in terms of the conversation with the consumer, when they come in, they're actually going to see their score. They're going to see the rates they qualify for. Now we're also going to have them enter their income information, because one of the things that we've seen is that they meet the criteria from a credit standpoint, but they don't meet the criteria from a debt to income standpoint. So getting your debt to income in line before you apply for that loan is also critical, in addition, in addition to managing your credit. And if you think about how pre qual works today, it's a little bit flawed in that you do a one time pre qual, if it's not what you want, you'd have to keep going in every day. Well, that's not efficient. Why don't you set the tool to continue to monitor my credit every single week and give me updates as to where I stand. And it may be that the interest rate gets to within a close margin of what you want, and we update you that, hey, you wanted 6% and we've got six and a quarter, is that good enough? And you may end up pulling the trigger on that rate. So I think it's important that it's really looking out for you, telling you what you need to be doing better, as well as alerting you when something comes online that meets meets your needs.

Sarah Cooke 40:58

Yeah, and on the other end, the credit unions are probably getting more loans from better borrowers, better educated borrowers. And you know, there's a lot of other data that is included in the platform.

JB Orecchia 04:35

we're launching 50 institutions a quarter, to give you an idea of just the volume of new financial institutions. And so kind of bringing up to speed, our core product is integrated into digital banking. And so one of the benefits of that is that it were where the user is right when they're logging into their their bank account to look at their checking account or their loans. We're a widget built right into the digital experience, both in mobile and in desktop. I did that intentionally to to be where the consumer was, and our research suggests that 75% of users would prefer to get their financial wellness and their credit score and all that through their primary institution. So being in there is kind of, kind of table stakes. I was in lending for 10 years with Household, both on the branch side and on the credit card
side. I left in '98 to be part of the founding team at FreeCreditScore.com so pioneered the the original direct to consumer credit score business. You probably remember those crazy commercials. You don't have to quote that in the article. But my reason for kind of building this is there's, there's a number of websites out in the market that monetize through advertising, right? So if you think about Credit Karma, their whole, their whole thing is to get people to kind of look at their score, right? And then what do they do? They monetize through financial offers. And at a number of credit union conferences, when I'm when I'm there, I say, how many you guys know about Credit Karma? And they all raise their hand. I said, How many of you advertised on Credit Karma? And they all bring their hands down, right? And so, the idea I built a B to B business. We are not a direct to consumer business. We only, we only integrate with the digital banking as well as we're outside of digital banking, maybe on their website. But the idea is to keep those consumers you don't want your your credit union members, going to a financial website and then being lured away with other financial products. And so inside our product, we only market the institution's loans and deposit products. It's, it's very sticky. We get, you know, upwards of 40 to, in some cases, 65% adoption of our service. So those users that are logging in, it's completely free to the user and, and some of the relevance there is that they're able to update their score and their credit information every day. And part of the value of that is, if you're going to apply for a loan, you want to see the most recent data that's that's on your credit file, that's going to be on the back end goal when you apply for, when you apply for a loan. So super critical to have visibility to that. And then we personalize it. You know, personalization is very big today. It's like, well, yeah, I'm managing my credit. But like, why is that important to me? Well, you'll see in the tool when I show you, we actually look for opportunities to save you money. If you were to do a balance transfer, specifically, what would I save on interest, or if I refined my car, or if I did personal loan consolidation or home equity or whatever it might be, you know, we, we bring that to the consumer so they see the relevance, and then we give them motivation to improve their credit score so they can increase it to a point that they qualify for even better rates.

JB Orecchia 12:41

So as an example, this is wrapped inside of digital banking. This is your, your, your credit score. This is actually my, my credit score. So I'm showing you my actual credit information. So we actually track the users credit over time. You'll see here the impact of different things on your credit. So here is my utilization rate spiking up. So I'm what's called a transactor, and as I charge on my debt, I pay it off every month, but I try and maximize, maximize the benefit that I get on cash back or whatever it is, but I take a hit to my credit. So one of the benefits of SavvyMoney money is actually having the ability to pull your credit and see when those balances are still showing up. But you'll notice here, once I pay those balances off, I don't carry any balances, my credit spikes up all the way to 816, but kind of hitting rewind here a little bit. When I log into the tool, I can update my credit score every day. Here I'm showing I had a little bit of a decline because I just charged my season tickets for the 49ers and the Warriors on on my, on my, on my card. So I'll pay that off this month, and my score will jump back up to over 800 and we break the score down into its parts. And then, credit usage, I'm getting a grade A, but it shows here that my Citibank, I have a high balance. That's one that I get nice, nice cash rebates on but if I clicked on it, I'm going to go into the full credit report, so I'm going to be able to see all of my payment history, everything in the report related to my full my full credit file. And then I've got the ability to simulate my score. So back to my situation of paying down balances. If I were to pay down my balances by 40,000, my score is going to jump up 37 points, right? I've got credit monitoring alerts in here as well, the ability to see anything that's happening on my credit for identity theft. But the real important feature inside of SavvyMoney, you'll see up here in the carousel that there's multiple loan products being offered. This is all based on the lending criteria from the lender, I'm able to overlay it on top and actually customize this tab with all the loan products or deposit products that I have as an institution. And so if I were to go in here to credit cards, I see that there's a balance transfer opportunity here. It's a little bit better than the rate that I'm paying on my on my card. So I've downloaded all my cards off my credit file. Now, if I were carrying my balances, I pay mine off, but if I were carrying my balances, I could see that if I were to do a balance transfer to pay off this Citibank card, and I got the the balance transfer rate, I'd say $10,000 in interest, right? And then the other powerful thing that we talked about is giving financial institutions visibility to the data. So in here, this is going to be the FI's view into the, into the data, and we're going to be able to see everything that's happening with their customer base. This is super insightful in that for those that have their primary account by a financial institution, I want to see, are they improving their credit number one, where are they borrowing? What are the loan opportunities that they have with other institutions that I could market to them and potentially get loans for my institution that could better their financial situation? So it isn't just being able to offer them loan products, but offer them personalized loan products that could really help them benefit their financial situation. So the first thing I'm going to look at is wallet share, because I kind of want to know, as an institution, how am I doing versus, versus, where my consumers that have their account with me are borrowing? So in here, we do this in a couple different ways. One, we show how many loans in aggregate are with your institution and how many are with other lenders. This gives you an idea of the addressable lending base that's available through through other institutions. And if I were to break that down, I could actually go in by credit score band and see what my penetration is.

Sarah Cooke 40:58

So I always offer my guests final thoughts as we wrap up these videos. So JB, tell me, what are your final thoughts about all of that we've talked about? Yeah,

JB Orecchia 41:30

I think, Sarah, you touched on it, right? So my final thoughts are leveraging the power of the data, right? So the power of the data is going to be critical, and how do you use that to answer consumer questions? Why did my score go down? Why did my score go up? What are the top three things I can work on? So as you think about AI and applying all that data to AI and give consumers today, we give great recommendations, I think what will happen is it'll take in more data and be more specific as to the direction that you that you give consumers.

Sarah Cooke 42:07
Yes, well, thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Yeah,

JB Orecchia 42:12

Thanks, Sarah.