Most community financial institutions are sitting on a goldmine of data and doing very little with it. The information already exists within your core systems and ancillary platforms, but without the right infrastructure, it lives in static reports, scattered spreadsheets, and inboxes that never get fully opened. The gap between having data and using it to drive decisions is where community banks are quietly losing ground to better-equipped competitors.
On this episode of Banking on Growth, host Mike Graham, CEO of Midwestern Securities, sits down with Kim Snyder, CEO and Founder of KlariVis, to discuss how community banks can transform raw data into a strategic advantage. With a background as a CPA, former community bank CFO, and founder of a consulting firm that worked with over 35 financial institutions, Kim brings a ground-level perspective on why the status quo is costing banks more than they realize and what a better path forward looks like.
In This Episode
- Why the status quo costs more than most community banks realize.
- How KlariVis replaces static email reports with instant, organization-wide visibility.
- What the SVB crisis revealed about the value of real-time deposit monitoring.
- How transactional intelligence surfaces customers investing outside the bank.
- Why imperfect data is no reason to wait, and where to start.
The Hidden Cost of Community Banking's Status Quo
As CFO of a publicly traded community bank in Roanoke, Virginia, Kim Snyder received more than 20 emails every day. Each email included a different static report covering loans, deposits, past-due amounts, and general ledger activity. She was expected to open all of them, find the critical data point, and act. Most days, she didn't get through all of them.
Her experience became the foundation for KlariVis. When Kim later ran a boutique consulting firm serving 35 financial institutions for over 4 years, the same obstacle appeared.
Every engagement required data extraction, and extracting it was always a friction point. The issue persisted regardless of whether it involved strategic planning, M&A support, finance, or process improvement. Confirmed across institutions ranging from small community banks to those with $10 to $20 billion in assets, data accessibility was an industry-wide problem, not a small-bank limitation.
Most banks have never calculated what maintaining a broken reporting system actually costs. Kim's recommendation is straightforward: add up the salaries of every employee involved in building reports and Excel files. Then, estimate their monthly hours and run the math. Her firm has done it with clients, and the average billion-dollar community bank spends around $45,000 per month on the status quo. Most have no idea.
Knowing the number does not obligate a bank to change anything, but it does make the decision an informed one. Too many institutions resist new tools because of the non-interest expense line without accounting for what they are already spending on a system.
From 20 Emails to One Dashboard: How KlariVis Works
KlariVis ingests data from a bank's core system and ancillary platforms. It standardizes it inside a proprietary common data model and surfaces it through a single visualization layer. Instead of 20 emails each morning, a CFO works from 10 dashboards. Every dashboard is available simultaneously to the CEO, the chief lending officer, and the production team.
Shared visibility eliminates a problem that plays out in bank meetings everywhere. When the chief lending officer and the CFO walk in with different loan balance figures, the conversation turns into a debate over whose number is right. A unified platform removes that conflict. Data is trusted, consistent, and available without anyone needing to run a report and wait.
Kim calls it "Coffee with KlariVis": a morning routine where bankers start the day with a complete picture of what happened the day before. A CEO who used to call the IT manager to pull a report can now answer the question themselves.
Across 150-plus implementations, every executive walkthrough turns up at least one loan officer on a dashboard. When data becomes visible at that level of granularity, cleanup priorities surface fast.
Real-Time Community Banking Data Stopped a Deposit Crisis in Its Tracks
The 2023 SVB collapse put every community bank in an uncomfortable spotlight. News coverage told consumers their money was at risk, and deposit outflows began. For banks without real-time visibility, identifying which customers were moving money required pulling manual reports. Then, employees comb through data and hope the list is complete before too much damage is done. For KlariVis clients, the picture looked entirely different.
KlariVis includes a dashboard that tracks changes in deposit balances at the customer level. When a longtime customer with $2 million in their account moved $1.9 million out, the CEO and the relationship manager both saw it immediately, without anyone running a report. They could pick up the phone that day and have a direct conversation about the bank's stability. They can share financials and make the case for the customer to bring the funds back before the window closes. Furthermore, they can do it before the new debit card is activated and the bill pay is rerouted.
That kind of speed is not a luxury in a crisis. It is the difference between saving a relationship and losing it permanently. Banks operating on delayed or fragmented reporting simply could not move that fast. The SVB episode made the stakes of data latency concrete in a way that monthly reports never could.
Margin Leakage, Loan Pricing, and the Power of Daily Visibility
One KlariVis client, a billion-and-a-half-dollar bank, picked up 40 net basis points on net interest margin in the first six months. Before KlariVis, the CFO didn't see loans booked under individual loan authority until a week after the month-end. Now she sees every loan daily. If a lender prices something outside her comfort zone, she addresses it that day.
A second client added 50 basis points in commercial loan yields in year one without adding volume. When a lender proposed a below-market rate for their "best customer," the chief lending officer pulled up the borrower's profile and asked a direct question: " Is he actually your best customer if his operating account, deposits, and treasury management are all somewhere else? If the answer is no, the rate conversation changes. Offering your best price to a customer, giving you one product out of five, is margin leakage with a friendly name.
Real-time data with complete context is what separates banks that manage their margin from banks that discover the problem six weeks later.
Transactional Intelligence and the Wealth Management Leakage Report
Transactional intelligence analyzes and enriches transaction descriptions at the individual account level to identify which customers are making recurring transfers to external investment providers such as Fidelity, Schwab, or Robinhood. For banks with a wealth management program, that becomes a ready-made lead list with a specific, data-backed reason to reach out.
It also reveals whether a customer is using your bank as their primary financial institution or what Kim calls a "hotel account," money coming in, a credit card payment going out, an investment transfer going out, and nothing else. Knowing the difference changes how you prioritize outreach and what you say when you make the call.
The same logic applies to insurance. Banks with insurance programs can identify customers who send recurring premium payments to outside carriers and give both the marketing team and the relationship manager a coordinated reason to engage, using the same underlying data.
KlariVis analyzed transactions across its client base. They found that nine out of ten community banks already have customers actively sending money to platforms like Coinbase. For every $2.77 that leaves the bank, only $1 comes back. The deposit risk is real and already sitting in your data.
Competition Is Not “Just Down the Street” Anymore
Mike made a point that community bankers need to hear clearly: the competition is not just the other bank or credit union in your county. Edward Jones received FDIC approval for a bank charter in February of this year. Robinhood holds a banking license.
Most of the major wealth and brokerage platforms that community banks partner with or compete against already own banks or operate as banks. When a community bank brings in a broker-dealer that is bank-owned, they are in effect bringing a bank inside their bank, one with its own interest in capturing the full financial relationship of your customer.
The customers who have been with your bank since their grandmother walked them in as a child are not automatically loyal for life. That era is over.
Today, loyalty comes from relevance, and relevance requires knowing what your customers are doing, what they need, and reaching them before a competitor does. Platforms like Amazon already know what you are going to buy before you do. The question Mike posed is whether community banks are willing to apply the same intentionality to their own customer data.
Banks sell wealth management, insurance, and treasury management, rather than clients buying them. They require proactive outreach, a nurturing process, and multiple touchpoints before a customer takes action. That means understanding your data, building targeted marketing campaigns based on it, putting a sales system in place, and holding people accountable for execution. The banks that are winning right now are doing all four.
Two Action Items Every Community Bank Leader Should Take Now
Kim closed the episode with two concrete recommendations for bank leaders who want to move forward. The first is to calculate what the status quo is actually costing you. Pull together the employees involved in building reports and Excel files, estimate the hours they spend on this each month, and multiply that by their salaries.
The average billion-dollar bank lands around $45,000 per month. You may still decide to stay the course after running those numbers, but at least the decision is informed rather than assumed.
The second is to get started, even if your data is not clean. Nobody's data is clean. Waiting for perfect data before investing in better visibility means waiting forever. What a platform like KlariVis does is make the imperfections visible in a way that helps you prioritize your cleanup efforts.
You will see which data elements actually drive your strategy and focus your energy there, rather than trying to boil the ocean all at once. Let your business strategy drive your data strategy, not the other way around. The clients already on the platform are seeing a 10-times return on efficiency alone.
The cost of doing nothing is a real number. The cost of inaction is a real number. Both are just harder to see when the reports arrive a week late, and the meeting conversation is still about whose numbers are right.
Start Using Your Data Before Your Competition Uses It Against You
Community banking has always been built on relationships, but relationships alone are no longer enough to protect a full wallet. The competitors moving in on your customers have better data pipelines, faster visibility, and more intentional outreach strategies.
If your bank is still relying on end-of-month reports and email attachments to understand what your customers are doing, you are already behind, and the gap is growing. The good news is that the data you need to close that gap is already inside your systems. KlariVis was built to unlock it.
To learn more about Kim Snyder and KlariVis, visit KlariVis.com or connect with Kim directly on LinkedIn. For community banks looking to strengthen wealth management, improve margin management, or build a more intentional relationship banking strategy, contact Midwestern Securities, and let's start the conversation.
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