How my marketplace drove $1B in new payments flow for U.S Bank

The Problem

One of U.S. Bank’s objective was to increase its API adoption across its payments such as RTP, Zelle, Wire, Check, ACH and more. While U.S Bank had already a large library of API's available, the traffic of the API's was quite low and so was its payables volume, which means less revenue. This meant that from a competitive standpoint we were positioned certainly behind our competitors and something needed to be done.

The Solution

I was brought on to help develop a new program aimed at increasing our competitive advantage in the market and thus the Partnership Network was born. Now, sure it was not easy to sell the solution internally but with many, many, meetings (mind you this is a bank), eventually the execs were on board and a green light was lit. I expressed that our competitors are having marketplaces of their own and by partnering with SaaS and Fintech providers they are offering more value to their customers, increasing API adoption and giving more ways than ever for their customers to want to use their bank and this was the way to do it.

The Design

To develop such a website, we had a partner that would work with me on a weekly basis where I would provide the design direction, language, layout and branding that we were looking to achieve.

The ecommerce site had to have:

• Easy to use

• Video upload & hosting capabilities

• Admin portal and ability to maintain the content at any time

• Lead notifications

• Filtering and search capabilities

• Login capability for the partners themselves so that they could also update the profile themselves.

Market Research & Strategy

A lot of time went into researching specific partners who specialized in an industry, had a compelling use case or already served our existing client base. Once partners were identified, we held meetings with those partners, discussing the benefits of the program and signing the partners on. Also, a lot of back-end initiatives had to be built with legal, risk & marketing. I had to meet across all of those departments and coordinate the program launch so that everyone was aligned. As the bank is heavily regulated, certain partners were not approved such as those working with the cannabis industry. Working across multiple partners was the only way this program was going to succeed and it was key to keep the message consistent and as clear as possible to demonstrate internally the benefits that this would bring.

Go To Market

We had set an initial date to launch the platform public and go to market but there were some technical hiccups compliance issues and our partner got hacked in the process. This delayed the Go Live launch until all of those issues were resolved, and risk assessment was performed. Finally, after all of that we published the marketplace online and it went up in September 2023.

To promote it, I worked alongside our marketing colleagues and drove the messaging, promotional materials, and what would be said in a public press release. All the public facing communications had to be cleared past our PR department to ensure we were staying on brand. During the program, I had to ensure that our internal teams were aware of the developments and new partnerships opportunities as well as collateral that was created for each partner so that they could use it in the field.

The Win

The program became a huge success for the bank and it won a Datos Insights Award. With our partnerships, we opened new up payment flows over $1 billion and created a new revenue channel. The time I spent developing this program, designing the marketplace and working along multiple teams was one of my most memorable and fun projects I've worked on at U.S Bank.