Florida Banking October/November 2025

BANCSERV ENDORSED PARTNER: VERICAST

HOW BANKS CAN GROW BIG BY THINKING LOCAL BY LISA NICHOLAS, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT AND STRATEGY, VERICAST

F or years, smaller and mid-sized financial institutions have been given the same message: Raise your digital game, get bigger and try to compete nationally. That’s long been the mantra for banks that want to compete both with digital-first fintechs and deep-pocketed nationwide banks. But what if the better advice is to go in the opposite direction? Here’s the state of play: Community-based banks are squeezed from both sides – the scale and spend of the megabanks on one, the speed and UX acumen of fintechs on the other. Even some large institutions are scrambling to keep up, launching their own “in-house development mega-centers to fend off maturing fintechs,” McKinsey & Co. reports. As for smaller institutions, EY suggests they should aim to double their market share by “embracing the digital marketplace infrastructure model” and leaning into their trusted customer relationships. But the team at Vericast wondered if there was a different way. We started by analyzing search engine behavior, aiming to understand how financial institutions could improve their digital marketing. What emerged from the data was something bigger: a pattern of regional nuance that challenges the idea of “the American consumer” as a uniform group. Just as consumers in Ireland shop differently than those in Greece, people in New Jersey search for financial products very differently than people in Texas. And the phenomenon proved even more granular than that: The search terms used in, for example, an urban zip code could vary greatly with a next-door suburb. What we discovered reframes how banks should think about growth. Instead of chasing scale for its own sake, many institutions could grow more effectively by thinking hyper-locally — and marketing accordingly.

Our search-data analysis led to the creation of a new Consumer Demand Index – a resource to capture and activate local-market interest data and insights. The project also gave rise to a practical framework for rethinking digital financial services marketing, starting with why hyper-local matters, and advancing to what the data reveals and how to act on it. The Why At first glance, it seems logical for financial institutions to take a national approach to marketing. After all, Google controls more than 87% of search and, when combined with Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, the top four search engines account for 99.5% of all search. But we found that by zooming in, more opportunities revealed themselves. By analyzing search behavior, we developed a scoring model that could estimate opportunity size by product, zip code, and even specific product features — such as whether consumers are more drawn to low interest rates or rewards. What if you could have thousands of campaigns instead of just a few? Search data can reveal which cities or states are generating search activity for which specific products, where your products are winning and where you are losing market share — invaluable insights for deciding where and how to allocate your marketing budget. The What Silver Spring and Baltimore are only 32 miles apart, but when it comes to how residents search for financial products these Maryland towns are worlds apart. Building the Consumer Demand Index, Vericast found dramatic differences in behavior, even between neighboring communities. By reverse-engineering search patterns across products like checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages and financial planning, we uncovered how deeply local these behaviors are.

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