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Successful Digital Money Management Launch: Leveraging Employees

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who they are

First Citizens BancShares Inc. is the financial holding company for First Citizens Bank. First Citizens Bank provides a broad range of financial services to individuals, businesses, professionals and the medical community through more than 560 branch offices in 19 states, digital banking, ATMs and telephone banking.

  • Assets

    $39B+

  • Branches

    560

  • Headquarters

    Raleigh, NC

  • Employees

    5000+

Challenge

One of First Citizens primary objectives is to help its customers achieve their financial goals. And an important part of that is being financially strong. The bank evaluated many tools to help achieve that goal and ultimately launched an all-new set of personal financial management tools (powered by MX) that would help its customers live better financial lives and improve their business.

Solution

After getting buy-in from the First Citizens Bank management team and their commitment to help promote the product, the banks marketing team executed a multi-faceted, coordinated marketing campaign to launch Manage My Money

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Improving Customer Experience

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Successful Product launches

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Improving Member Engagement and Adoption

We knew that simply telling our employees and customers, ‘Its important to manage your money – use these tools would not have had the impact we wanted. Our employees are busy, and their time is valuable. We wanted to create something that would catch their eye and deliver a fun and engaging way to learn how these tools can help them and their customers manage and improve their financial health.

Key's to First Citizen's Success

Prior to customer availability, the bank decided to roll out an internal launch to its 5,000+ employees to create excitement, awareness and, ultimately, help improve customer adoption and engagement. This way employees would have the opportunity to use it themselves, create their own value stories for how it helps them manage their money, and then use that highly personal experience to become advocates for their customers.

We decided that the way to get them excited about our new tools for managing money was to make the launch fun – which is what we did.
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Teaser story on the internal website from a First Citizens executive sponsor to generate excitement before the launch

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Launch story on the internal website from another First Citizens executive to kick o the campaign

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Scavenger hunt: A fun game involving green, yellow and red inflatable beach balls representing bubble budgets that were hidden across headquarters and main buildings; employees were encouraged to takeselfies when they found the beach balls (the most creative photos received prizes)

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Headquarters / main location signage: Banners and digital displays throughout high foot traffic areas, including breakrooms, elevators and hallways, displaying budget bubbles, spending categorization, net worth, and external accounts

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Games: A Mad Lib-style, fill-in-the-blank word game that allowed employees to get creative around the available tools and the value they saw in them (the best entries were featured in an internal website story)

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Employee survey: A survey was sent to all bank employees, inviting them to share their personal stories about the tools, or identify any challenges or issues prior to the customer launch

Conclusion

First Citizens Bank recently launched MXs digital money management (DMM) tools to its employees. Called Manage My Money, the banks internal launch included Single Sign-On (SSO), Insight & Target (I&T) and mobile app integration. Within the first four days of the launch, 919 employees had registered and 252 added at least one external account.

The bank launched Manage My Money to external customers a few months later, and 125,000 customers (representing 27% of First Citizens Banks total customer base) signed up within the first three months.

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