Giving Credit Unions Household-Level Account Intelligence
By Roy Urrico
OptimaFI’s Household Insights, a new tool giving credit unions and community banks household-level account intelligence, was one of 72 live demos on stage at FinovateFall 2026 in New York City September 9-11, 2026. (Finopotamus was a media partner for the event).
Finopotamus sat down post-conference with Tim Keith, CEO of OptimaFI, a Memphis, Tenn.-based fintech that partners with more than 2,500 banks and credit unions to boost profits, strengthen customer relationships, and identify growth opportunities through data-driven insights. Keith focused on how Household Insights, which is benchmarked against 14 billion private peer data points, provides credit unions with awareness of their deposit and account trends.
Introducing Household Insights
Household Insights lets FIs understand their complete household relationship picture, Keith explained. The Web-based tool for community institutions supports more strategic decisions on funding, pricing, and growth.
“Because it's a SaaS product, it doesn't involve full-scale software implementation. It is not a six-figure type of price point where you have to devote half your IT team and spend a year implementing it into your system,” said Keith. “Household Insights resides on our system and we can send you a login tomorrow and you can be on the system. It just takes a data feed, which is easy to set up.”
Key features include:
Visibility into household-level deposit and loan relationships.
Peer benchmarks that show where trends align or deviate.
Board-ready reporting in minutes.
Live within one week.
No core system integration; runs off a CSV file upload.
Purpose-built for financial institutions.
Benchmarks each institution's households against OptimaFI's Peer Performance Index (PPI).
Flags which customer segments and products are above or below peer norms, with a recommended next-action for each.
Providing CUs with an Inside View
Part of the problem for credit unions is they still don't have a household view of their data, suggested Keith. “They're looking at account-level reports or member-level reports, but they don't have that household-level view. So, another fundamental value proposition of Household Insights is we take your raw core account data. We are core agnostic; we work with every core out there, every different type of database.”
OptimaFI takes all of those account records and membership records into a relational view. “In many cases, the credit union would have no other way of getting that view of their data. You can do things like distinguish between single-service and multiple-service relationships,” said Keith. “One of the most fundamental things every credit union wants to know is ‘how many new households did I attract in the last year?’ and ‘how does that growth rate compare to my peers?’ We're able to give you that by just being able to do the householding.”
There is significant value in a household view, Keith noted. “A household-level view might tell me 40% of my mortgage households have a checking account with me. It's important to know that, but then is that high? Is that low? How do I contextualize that? And that is where the benchmarks come in.”
Household Insights appear on a credit union’s dashboard. “It would give them a total household summary view, how many households do you have, what's your average number of accounts per household relationship, your average deposit, balances per household… and then they would be able to drill in from the homepage into different subsets of the data,” Keith explained. The subsets could focus on what percentage of households control what percentage of deposits, retention metrics. and member relationships in various categories.
Data Sets Drive Insights for CUs
“We're super excited about this product,” said Keith. He further explained there are two data sets driving Household Insights. “One dataset is 20 years of core account records we have collected from credit unions. We think it is somewhere over 30, 40 billion account records. And then the campaign tracking component of it is a billion tracked marketing contacts where we tracked from the contact all the way through to purchase. There's just really deep intelligence feeding into this. Those databases are continually updated with machine learning every day with new data. No one else has these data sets to feed this analytics and marketing type of engine.”
Keith noted that in Household Insights, credit unions not only can see the data, they can see the benchmark, and can click on it and ask, What are the implications of this? “And it'll talk to you about retention implications and it'll also give you a cross-sell projection. And you can even download a cross-sell campaign file that you could then deploy, (and) an email marketing campaign towards that audience. In contrast a lot of analytics platforms are full-scale software implementation, expensive, takes a long time to get up and running, you got to devote a lot of IT resource.”
Household Insights’ use depends on the size of the credit union and how they're organized, he added. “For larger credit unions, (it’s) probably more a marketing function because marketing tends to own relational database views; and because the system allows you to develop and download campaign files. For smaller credit unions, it might (involve) the chief experience officer, (or) even CFO, because it is a very strategic view of data, and there are different ways you can act on it.”
A New AI Role and What’s Coming
Keith saw a good number of credit unions, and fintechs, at FinovateFall, but he relayed a different kind of AI story. “A $3 billion asset credit union came up to our booth and said, ‘Hey, I just wanted you to know, I took everything about the conference, everyone who's demoing, everyone who's exhibiting, everyone who's here, I dumped it all into ChatGPT and I said, who should I talk to first?’ OptimaFI came up number one, and so that is why I am standing at your booth. AI told me I need to talk to you about what you have to offer.’ So that was really cool to see that.”
Meanwhile, OptimaFi currently has several credit union clients in Household Insights trial. Keith noted, “They're using the system, we're getting feedback, we're continuing to make enhancements, and then we're out there promoting.”
Keith added, “Our second module of the product that we will be launching in the near future is a full marketing automation where clients will be able to go in and actually execute omnichannel campaigns out of the system and download campaign tracking reports on their results. And our tracking reports are the most comprehensive in the industry, and all of that will be automated and downloadable.”
