Seacoast turns to big data
Old-school bank invests in new strategy as part of statewide expansion.
For decades, Seacoast Bank relied on small-town service to drive its dominant market share in Martin County.
Now that the bank is expanding statewide, old-school Seacoast is using a much different strategy: It’s focusing on big data.
The 90-year-old bank has added two data scientists to its staff, and, in an effort to tailor its offerings and to smooth loan approvals, Seacoast has begun to analyze customers’ banking behavior.
Dennis S. Hudson III, the longtime chief executive of Stuart-based Seacoast, points to mobile deposits of checks by phone or iPad. If a customer regularly comes into a branch to deposit checks, Seacoast sends messages to let the depositor know that the transaction can be completed without leaving home.
“We’re helping them get time back in their lives,” Hudson said. “Without the analytics, we would just be handing fliers to everybody. This very personalized message is really effective.”
Of course, mobile deposits aren’t just more convenient for customers. They’re also cheaper for banks. If everyone who visits a branch for routine deposits switched to mobile transactions, banks would need fewer branches and fewer tellers.
More importantly, Hudson said, data mining is an important part of customer satisfaction. Big banks such as Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Chase have trained customers to expect cutting-edge technology, Hudson said.
“More and more, our customers want us to know what they need,” Hudson said. “They don’t want to have to come talk to us about it.”
Smaller banks that want to keep their customers happy have little choice but to invest in technology. The good news, Hudson said, is that software for data analysis has plummeted in price.
“It’s really shockingly inexpensive,” Hudson said. “The challenge is getting the right people into the organization.”
Seacoast (Nasdaq: SBCF) survived both the Great Depression and the Great Recession. After weathering a real estate crash that decimated the Treasure Coast market that’s the core of Sea-