The Account Opened But Not Funded Problem

Picture this: it’s the end of the quarter, time for your bank to check in on whether deposits are tracking to your goals. While there may have been an exciting influx of newly opened accounts in the last few months, there still appears to be a noticeable funded-account gap. It doesn’t make sense. You made sure top-of-funnel was stellar and high quality, had a great campaign launched, and even pulled together a last-minute KPI dashboard to keep track of everything. But did any of that change who’s responsible for closing the “account opened but not funded” gap?

Everyone’s Hitting Their Numbers

A new account opening at any bank follows a typical path through multiple organizations. It may kick-off at either an existing relationship with the bank, or the thoughtful marketing campaign of the month. For marketing, they closely track and are measured on how many applications were started, what was the cost per lead (or customer acquisition cost, AKA CAC), and how many converted to actual submitted applications. If a campaign generates a thousand applications, it’s considered a win. Marketing may or may not have visibility into how many of those applications were funded, and probably isn’t measured on that number, either.

Once it’s moved onto the onboarding stage, the application is then being tracked for processing time and the approval rate. If it gets the green light and checks all the boxes, it’ll move on to the next stage, and onboarding’s job is considered done. Whether or not any money is deposited into the account isn’t a number tracked here either.

Then it’ll go into a fraud review, if that hadn’t already happened before or alongside onboarding. The role of fraud and compliance is measured by catch rate and false positives rate. Again, not on their downstream conversion. If an account is flagged, it waits to be reviewed by the fraud team, a common area for the customer to give up and abandon funding. Fraud’s KPI will reflect how effectively and accurately they caught the risk, not whether the account was funded.

Finally, the account may reach the stage of actual funding ability! However, any friction that may have accumulated as they went through the prior stages has a likelihood of showing up as a dead account. None of those steps or departments were lying about their numbers, everyone is optimizing their own stage. But those KPIs don’t directly translate to deposits funded. A bank can hit every other department’s KPI goals, and still have low funded rates, due to the gaps between departments.

To Close The Gap, You Must See The Gap

The answer lies in visibility. When there is clear, trackable visibility of the full customer path from acquisition through funding, the bank can see where it breaks and do something about it.

That’s what happened with our partners at Vault.Bank, backed by Bank of Brodhead. When they finally had full, 100% funnel visibility, real-time customer intelligence, starting with the campaign all the way to the conversion, they saw outstanding results. Through their partnership with Linker Finance, Vault.Bank achieved 10x deposit growth in under a year, experienced a 40% CAC reduction through smarter attributions, and saw their accounts grow to an average of $44K in funding, 2.5x the industry average of $20K. They even scaled operations 8x without a need to add headcount, further proof that more people watching the gap wasn’t the same as truly seeing the gap. Bank of Brodhead saw an overall 16% year-over-year growth and expanded to 3 states as a result of that newfound visibility.

The banks finding it easiest to close the gap between account opening and account funding are the ones where someone finally owns the middle, sees the entire journey, and can make data-driven decisions because of it.

Hear the full story on how Vault.Bank and Linker Finance came together to launch a digital-only brand, elevating parent bank, Bank of Brodhead, to growth at five times the prior rate.