More profitable customers at account opening
What does it take to boost the profitability of your newly acquired customers? Effective onboarding that includes making it easier for them to break ties with their previous FIs when they join yours.

At the core of breaking those ties is moving recurring payments and deposits from another financial institution. 59% of people decide not to do this when they open a new account, saying it’s ‘too much of a hassle” to switch¹.

We’re happy to tell you that we’ve found a way to help you overcome this at account opening. We’ve partnered with ClickSWITCH to offer you an integrated solution, making us the first on the Canadian market to combine account opening with a fully automated switch capability. Integrating ClickSWITCH with cumulus means that your newest customers can: 

• open an account in less than 5 minutes
• make the switch from another FI without the hassle 

cumulus + ClickSWITCH = success
In a typical account opening, people looking to switch to the new FI face a tedious manual process. First, they must contact each recurring payment third party, then wait for the automatic fund transfers to be reauthorized. Once that’s done, they close their old account and move any balance to their new FI. It’s no wonder that someone with five automatic bill payments is 95% less likely to switch than someone with no automatic payments set up.²

With the cumulus/ClickSWITCH integration, the scenario above changes dramatically because all of this hassle is removed. Information gathered during account opening with cumulus is instantly pushed to the ClickSWITCH workflow. It’s such a fast and seamless transition from account opening into account switching that applicants are able to do it almost intuitively. Immediately after the new account has been opened via cumulus, your newest customer can:

• notify auto-debit payees of the new account information
• update their billing information (i.e. utilities, insurance, cell phone payments, etc.)
• transfer direct deposits (i.e. paycheques) to their new account
• close accounts at other FIs

A perfect relationship
‘The partnership with ClickSWITCH is an ideal fit for our platform,’ according to Jeff Coomber, our Director of Product Management. Jeff oversees our product road map, as well as the direction and design of all of our software products. He views the integration of ClickSWITCH technology into our platform as a big win for our FI clients, because it ‘provides them with a deeper wallet share from moment one.’

ClickSWITCH agrees. ’We are excited to announce our relationship with thirdstream, expanding the accessibility of ClickSWITCH within the Canadian market,’ says Cale Johnston, CEO of ClickSWITCH. ‘ClickSWITCH is a natural extension of thirdstream’s cumulus onboarding platform. This synergy will make it easy for financial institutions to attract and retain new customers by providing a seamless account opening and account switch solution.’

^{consumersunion.org, Trapped at the Bank, Removing Obstacles to Consumer Choice in Banking, May 30, 2012
Harland Clarke, Converting New Accounts to More Profitable Ones, July 2015}