U.S. Bank wants to make it as easy as possible for small businesses to bank with them, especially those that are just getting started.
That's the thinking behind the Minneapolis-based bank's Business Essentials, a bundled suite of banking and payment services it launched in April following more than a year of development by a cross-functional team from the bank's business banking, branch and small business banking, payments, sales and technology teams.
Business Essentials offers a checking account with payment acceptance capabilities, including features an entrepreneur would need to stand up a business, said Shutri Patel, executive vice president, GM and chief product officer of the bank's business banking segment.
Also included in Business Essentials are a physical card reader, unlimited digital transactions, same day access to funds, fraud management tools and a cashflow management dashboard.
"Once the small business applies for the bundle, we essentially are approving them and onboarding them across multiple capabilities all in one flow." Patel said. "Otherwise… [customers] will have to go through multiple steps in the journey to become customers across all of those capabilities."
Business Essentials' development was a departure from the way the financial institution usually thinks about creating products, Patel said.
"Historically, most banks, including us, always go to market in singular product capabilities," she said. Instead, the $686.4 billion-asset bank focused on identifying which set of jobs were most critical for entrepreneurs to be successful before bringing those products together in a single bundle.
But creating a bundle wasn't as easy as grabbing products off a shelf; it required a significant technology investment and cross-department communication to exact.
"We are a bank with very diversified assets and infrastructure, so we had to bring a number of technology platforms and capabilities together and build very modern data integrations and digital layers on top," Patel said. "That was the most critical [question]: How do we merge our tech roadmaps, so that we, in unison, are working towards the same product delivery schedule across banking, payments and our software unit."
The work paid off, Patel said.
"Very segregated, singular products or fragmented software which they are interacting with right now in the marketplace tends to create a lot of confusion, and sometimes [have] a high cost of operations that overwhelms small businesses," she said.
Going forward, the bank is "very focused" on its future bundling strategy, Patel said.
"We want to make sure that we are designing it for the entire segment," she said. "We're going to continue to build on the sophistication of those bundles and also make them very vertical specific. The healthcare vertical specialty is a huge practice for us."
The Team
Business Banking Product
- Shruti Patel, Chief Product Officer
- Mary Miklethun, Product Lead, Business Deposits & Lending
- Leslie Kim, Product Lead
- Queanne Smith, Group Business Strategy Manager
- Rachel Castro, Group Business Strategy Manager
- Deepa Chatterjee, Group Business Strategy Manager
Payments
- Courtney Kelso, Head of Payments for Consumer and Small Business, Senior EVP, Managing Committee member
- Kristy Carstensen, Head of Treasury and Payment Solutions
- Jordan Owen, Head of Merchant Business Banking Revenue
Partners
- Gayatri K, Head of Business Banking Technology
Branch and Small Business Banking
- Heather Kesner, Branch and Small Business Regional Executive, East Region
- Devon Bray, Small Business Regional Leader, California
- Sarah Lester, Small Business Regional Leader, West
- Sable Manske, Small Business Regional Leader, East
Business Banking Sales
- Nanette Reid, Business Banking Regional Executive, West
- Missy Lackey, Strategic Initiatives Manager
