OBJECTIVE: Find new opportunities to build stronger relationships. Converting a customer to a direct deposit relationship not only lowers costs, but more importantly, increases customer retention.

With activity-based data, firms can easily identify their checking account users who do not have direct deposit set up. To find these accounts, all checking accounts are examined to see what their level of ACH activity is.  Additionally, to ensure the checking accounts returned by the query are being actively used, the average number of checks written is set to three or more per month. The data points used are:

• The monthly average of ACH transactions

• The monthly average number of checks written

To set up the query shown below, make sure you are at the Account level, then double-click on the ACH_EFT_MonthlyAvg data point from the Delivery Channel Data folder and set it to less than 1.  Next, select the Checks_MonthlyAvg data point and set to 3 or more.  You may wish to add additional criteria after Checks_MonthlyAvg in order to further qualify the activity level of the checking account -- that is up to you.  This is an example query and you need not to follow it exactly:

This query should be executed at the Account Level when the Apply button is pushed.   In this example, 4,947 checking accounts that meet the criteria above were found.
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IDEAS: Consider some of the following ways you can capitalize on this tactic:

• Offer an incentive to sign up for direct deposit.  These incentives may be cash (there may be regulatory restrictions on how big an incentive you can offer), free spiffs such as checks for one year, or special loan rate discounts.

• Provide a link in the pitch to a web page that explains how easy it is to set up a payroll deposit (if your institution has a web site).

• Try to sign up all new accounts for direct deposit.

• Keep pitching, don't stop after a single mailing.  People may need to see this offer several times before they'll react.

CAVEATS:  The assumption is made that ACH activity indicates direct deposit activity.  However, there may be a small number of households who use some form of ACH bill pay -- utility bills for example -- that do not have direct deposit set up, and are being excluded because their ACH activity is one transaction per month or more.  Typically, this is a very small number.  By adding a Direct Deposit flag to the activity data being collected, this small inconsistency can be resolved.

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