Organic Relationship Growth is Easier Than Prospecting and Available Daily

Your cheapest growth engine is the customer whose transaction history you're already holding.

Every month, your customers' accounts send money out to banks, brokerages, mortgage companies, auto lenders and installment lenders. At the customer level, that's a flow of funds analysis: where money enters, where it leaves, and which parts of the relationship are being served somewhere else. It won't tell you everything a customer owns or owes, but it will show you where money is going, how often it moves, and which outside relationships are active.

Deposits and investments held elsewhere leave a trail as outbound transfers, and no credit bureau reports them, so your bank or credit union may be the only one positioned to see them. Loans held elsewhere show up as recurring debits. Every one of those is a form of credit somebody else underwrote for a customer you had already acquired and already paid for.

Acquisition costs are rarely fully loaded, and roughly a third of new accounts leave within the first year. That's what makes this an organic growth argument rather than a reporting exercise, and it's growth you can begin sizing before you spend, because the volume, the frequency and the timing are already visible.

Jim Marous shares his own money movement across two top 5 institutions, neither of which has ever offered him an alternative to what they can see him doing elsewhere. Some institutions have never assembled this view. Others have assembled it and attached no action to it. Different starting points, and the same result for the customer.

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