Increasing Customer Engagement with Cross-Selling, Up-Selling, and New Financial Products

Bank branches aren’t just about deposits and withdrawals anymore. They’re evolving into community hubs where customers seek guidance, learn about money, and discover financial tools tailored to their lives. While digital banking grows, branches remain critical for building trust and deepening relationships.

The secret? Pairing modern tech with a human touch to cross-sell, up-sell, and introduce products that truly resonate.

Importantly, these strategies are also getting a much-needed update thanks to advancements in data analysis and artificial intelligence.

Explore how financial institutions can leverage cross-selling, up-selling, and new product offerings to enhance branch profitability and customer engagement. Drawing insights from industry experts and recent examples from Future Branches Austin 2024, we examine practical approaches for retail banking leaders to revitalize their branch networks and drive revenue growth in 2025 and beyond.

Improving Sales with Top-Notch Data, Financial Products and Strategy

Cross-selling, up-selling, and introducing new financial products are not new strategies. However, they can be paired with innovative concepts to improve the branch experience and drive more value.

Here are a few ways banks and credit unions can use these strategies in today’s banking world.

Pairing Products with Person-to-Person Services

Cross-selling involves offering complementary products like bundled accounts or insurance alongside existing services, such as consulting services.

This strategy is becoming an important one as branches evolve into advisory hubs, offering personalized financial guidance to customers and members. By training staff as financial advisors, banks can identify customer needs and recommend complementary products—a win-win for everyone.

Take M&T Bank’s Financial Education Center as an example. This resource provides customers with relevant insights to help them on their financial journeys. It also includes multiple financial tools, including calculators for savings, lending, mortgage, and retirement.

M&T even created 100 new “Multicultural Banking Centers” at its branch locations. These programs offer services to customers in their preferred languages. They employ bankers directly from the communities they serve, which means each branch is designed to meet the unique needs of their neighbors.

The centers are also opportunities to expose communities to other types of financial products and services:

“M&T is continuously learning and developing new ways to serve local families, individuals and businesses — from organizing financial empowerment sessions to developing new products like its secured credit card,” M&T said in a press release.

Predictive Analytics for Product Innovation and Adoption

Up-selling encourages customers to upgrade to premium versions of their current products. Introducing innovative offerings such as green financing, Buy Now Pay Later services, and digital wallets can attract new customers and retain existing ones in an increasingly competitive landscape.

At Future Branches Austin, COO Richard Sellwood shared how USF Federal Credit Union uses aggregate member data and behavior analysis to identify emerging product needs and building these insights into new product development. "We could look at what the entire membership is doing. How are they behaving? That's how we stood up Buy Now Pay Later. Because we realized that our members were out there using that service considerably more than we had anticipated. So we said, okay: this is the next best thing to offer to our members."

This use of predictive analytics increases sales by:

• Anticipating member needs before competitors and offering timely, relevant products.
• Expanding the product portfolio based on actual member behavior, ensuring better market fit.
• Driving product adoption by meeting members where their financial habits are evolving.

This proactive product development approach not only increases sales of new offerings but also strengthens member loyalty by demonstrating that the credit union understands and responds to their financial lifestyles. These examples demonstrate how combining data analytics, AI, and structured engagement strategies enables financial institutions to increase sales by delivering personalized, timely, and relevant product recommendations that resonate with customers and members. The enhanced customer experience and improved sales effectiveness create a virtuous cycle of deeper relationships and revenue growth.

Pulling Data Across Systems to Power AI Recommendations

If you attended Future Branches Austin 2024, you may remember hearing about some of the ways practitioners are driving revenue at the branch level through cross-selling, up-selling, and product recommendations. One of the most notable examples was the “customer recommendation engine” discussed by James Anthos, Director of Distribution Strategy Retail Analytics at Fifth Third Bank.

This system represents a significant investment in leveraging customer data to create personalized product recommendations. What’s notable about it is the fact that it successfully draws data from a variety of systems and sources (even their conversations with bankers) to help the bank understand customers’ needs.

Anthos explained the bank’s process like this: "Once a customer is onboarded, we start to look at all of the data from their usage patterns... to really come up with what we call our customer recommendation engine."

The bank collects approximately six months of usage data before initiating targeted product conversations with customers. This process allows Fifth Third to make highly personalized recommendations.

"Based on everything that we see and understand about that data, both from just their usage from online to the conversations that they have with the relationship banker, here's what we believe is the next best product."

The sophistication of Fifth Third's recommendation system is groundbreaking. "We actually have around 75 different machine learning models that do all these calculations for us,” said Anthos. “We found that when we implement those, we have about a 40 percent increase in success on that recommendation."

Finally, to support its cross-selling initiatives, Fifth Third has restructured its branch staffing model. “It's all about the conversation and less about the transaction. It’s much more engaging for customers and less about trying to get something processed," said Anthos. Since branch staff can have more meaningful conversations with customers thanks to the insights they have about each customer, their opportunities to cross-sell, up-sell, and recommend new products are more likely to succeed.

Personalized Outbound Engagement to Boost Sales

Seacoast Bank leverages data to trigger timely and relevant outbound calls to customers. At Future Branches Austin, Chief Banking Officer Julie Kleffel mentioned the data-first approach Seacoast Bank has taken to their outreach strategy: "We're data first...I'm blessed in that we have a group of data scientists and a data analytics team that works alongside our marketing and strategy teams. In addition to that, I have a data management office that's under my umbrella."

Because of this, Seacoast Bank utilizes a system that analyzes customer behaviors and recent activities to identify tailored product or service opportunities. When a customer receives a call from their local banker referencing their recent transactions or needs, the interaction feels personalized and relevant, which increases trust and receptiveness.

Kleffel explained how they use this data to help decide not only on how to create personalized customer experiences, but even the frequency and rhythm of interactions: "We use data analytics to help inform how often we speak to that customer and what do we speak to them about, and we track that and register that for the branches and so they know the next call is not going to be an invasive call, a frustrating call for the customer. It's driving a good customer experience."

Kleffel noted that customers respond positively when they feel their banker "knows what I need," which drives higher engagement and sales conversion than generic marketing outreach.

Using Branches as Innovation Showrooms

Branches serve as ideal platforms for introducing and demonstrating innovative financial products. By creating interactive branch experiences, banks can engage customers and drive the adoption of new offers.

PNC’s New Banking Platform Complements Its Branch Strategy

PNC unveiled a new cloud-native, micro-service-based banking platform that provides customers with more self-service options. The idea was to enable the bank to “more quickly make changes and introduce products,” to meet customer needs, a report said.

This is after PNC said it planned to open 200 new branch locations in 12 cities and renovate 1,400 existing branches over the next five years.

“Importantly, the investment that we are making is not at all catch-up to something we should have done,” said PNC Chairman and CEO William S. Demchak.

“This is new branches, it is new technology, it is larger data centers that are more resilient — it is everything positioning us to accelerate our organic growth. So, these are all dollars spent to make money.”

These strategies adopt old concepts like cross-selling and up-selling but turn them into something new. Using a mix of data-driven insights, employee training, and technology integration, banks can drive revenue and fulfill the needs of tomorrow’s customers.

Ready to Improve Your Branches’ Sales Opportunities?

Improving sales through cross-selling, up-selling, and new financial products requires a strategic blend of data-driven decision-making, employee empowerment, and innovative product development. By adopting these practices, retail banks can enhance profitability while strengthening customer relationships.

To learn more about improving branch revenue, don’t miss Future Branches Boston. Download the agenda and get tickets today.