There’s no secret how challenging it is to make money off of low-balance, “free-checking” customers. (Just ask M&T.) But Social Money‘s president, Scott McCormack, thinks he has a pretty good solution under his roof, and soon he’ll have the clients to prove it.
One client is slated to sign onto the brand’s new savings product, CoreSaver, in 4Q 2014, and two more are lined up for 1Q2015, McCormack, a 10-year veteran of FNBO, told Bank Innovation this week.
Social Money is best known for SmartyPig, a goals-based savings account that leverages social connections. CoreSaver, which was announced at the end of September, is a similar product for the enterprise market.
CoreSaver is a backend, whitelabeled system built on Social Money’s CorePro core banking solution that can allow banks to offer a SmartyPig-like experience. And why not? With interest rates bouncing along at rock bottom, it has been a stiff challenge to offer any sort of differentiated experience in the savings space. SmartyPig was forced to be creative and offer other bells and whistles, like inviting friends to contribute to goals — hence the name Social Money.
There is no doubt social media will play a larger role in financial services in coming years, helping to score borrowers, for example. And millennials have shown a willingness to share some financial information publicly, as the success of Venmo illustrates.
But the promise of CoreSaver is not just about offering a sexy social solution to attract millennials, though is part of the attraction for Social Money’s target client base of smaller FIs. The solution, because it runs on CorePro, can be installed quickly, in under 120 days, McCormack said, and run for just 15% of the cost of a traditional savings product. Social Money’s millennial chops are strong. It works with several prepaid solutions, for example, and is worlds away, in marketing, technology and partnerships, from the same-old, same-old in financial services.
CorePro itself, incidentally, can be employed to replace a legacy core system. The banks that hope to survive longterm will need to bite the bullet and look for solutions like this eventually, or related ones such as Mambu or cloud-based nCino.
CoreSaver, McCormack said, is a “solution to the profitability challenge of low-balance accounts that legacy systems don’t offer.” More than that, it’s a cure for the common savings account, because, unfortunately, the common saving account sucks.
When interest rates begin to rise, as they are expected to in 2015, the savings landscape will change radically, but McCormack feels CoreSaver has enough that sets it apart, not to mention a strong first-mover advantage, so that this will not hurt its value proposition.
“If a savings account is only based on interest, there is no differentiation,” McCormack said. This reflects a knowledge of the coming world where commoditized banking functions need much more than is offered at present to attract tomorrow’s banking customer.