Customers want to trust their banks. In fact, they need to trust their financial institutions more than they trust almost any other company or entity. When crafting your marketing plan, make sure you’re talking about your fraud protection and security tactics. That can be a great way to draw new customers. Consider focusing on the following elements.
Number of Breaches
If you’ve never had a security or data breach, you may want to emphasize that fact in your marketing materials, and you may want to compare your record with other banks in the area. Similarly, if you’ve had a security breach, you may want to highlight how you dealt with the breach or the steps you took to minimize consequences to your customers.
Room for Change
In other cases, you may want to explain how you’ve changed since the breach or other issue happened. For instance, after a series of scandals, Wells Fargo launched a marketing campaign that resonates with this idea. The bank’s ads feature the logo “It’s a New Day at Wells Fargo”. They talk about trust and explain that the bank has committed itself to customer trust and satisfaction.
Protecting Your Customers
You may even want to discuss the steps you take to protect your customers. For instance, if you use tools that deter check fraud, like automatically looking over check images to detect altered or counterfeit checks, you may want to share that in your marketing materials or when talking with prospective new clients.
Keep in mind when sharing these types of details that you want to share enough to entice new customers, but not so much that you reveal important secrets to potential fraud artists. If you’re talking about scanning checks, for example, you don’t necessarily want to say that you only look at checks over a certain amount.
Identity Protection Tools
Offering identity protection tools can also be a useful way to entice new customers. Many banks only offer identity protection tools in the wake of a data breach, but at that point, the tools aren’t that effective. Identity protection tools alert consumers when a potential issue has been detected. They don’t protect the identity per se.
For instance, they let consumers know if a credit card application has been submitted in their name. Then, if the individual hasn’t submitted that application, they can take steps to shut it down before the situation gets out of control. To attract customers who have security concerns, you may want to offer something like Equifax Credit Watch™ Silver or Identity Force free with premium checking accounts.
Fraud Prevention on Your Website
To market your fraud protection strategies even more, devote a page of your website to explaining your fraud protection strategy. This site page can be a great place to point customers or potential customers if they have questions about your security measures. On the US Bank fraud protection page, the bank explains its surveillance and physical security tactics for bank branches, but it also goes into security elements related to its app and how it protects banking data.
Beyond that, you may want to follow US Bank’s lead and use this page as an educational tool as well. The bank explains what to do if you have lost your wallet or if you believe you’re the victim of identity theft. It also provides tips and tricks on how to protect your computer and how to avoid losing papers with important identifying details.
A fraud webpage isn’t just something that big banks can do. Even relatively modest community banks such as Illini State Bank have web pages devoted to explaining how their customers can protect themselves from fraud, and you can too.
Regardless of which information you decide to share on your website, make sure that you prominently display the numbers people should call if they are a victim of any type of fraud. Beyond just sharing information, this page of your website can also help people to find you. If someone searches online for a bank that offers great fraud protection tools, they are more likely to find you if a page of your site is devoted to this niche.
You need the right fraud protection tools. They help to protect your current customers and the reputation of your bank, but they can also help you to grow and attract new customers. To learn more about fraud protection tools, contact us today. At SQN Banking Systems, we offer hosted solutions for fraud protection, and we can customize our offerings to meet the needs of your financial institution.