Executive Focus on Economic Data: Part 1 - Translating Risk into Revenue with Marketing

Executive Summary

Banks and credit unions face a complex challenge: growing quality assets while managing margin compression, interest rate and economic uncertainty, and consumer credit risk. ALCO discussions are focused on balance sheet resilience, but strategic growth still matters. The question is: how do you execute?

This article explores how financial leaders can translate ALCO strategy into actionable, measurable loan growth, specifically through high-performing consumer assets like Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOCs). With the average HELOC balance now exceeding $45,000 and utilization still below potential, institutions have a clear opportunity to drive net interest income without expanding risk.

What’s often overlooked is the role marketing and data intelligence can play in this process. Tools like Marquis’ Marketing Data Platform, KEYs.ai, and Digital Communication Platform are no longer “marketing resources”, they are strategic enablers that help executive teams activate their balance sheet.

In this series, you'll learn how to:

• Identify and model high-yield HELOC opportunities
• Align marketing execution with ALCO planning
• Track campaign performance and forecast ROI
• Understand the Marquis tools available help you responsibly grow your balance sheet

Translating Risk into Revenue with Marketing

CEOs, Presidents, CFOs, and senior leaders deeply discuss opportunities and risks on their balance sheet. Often, ALCO meetings are deep dives into strategic initiatives that can influence future success and growth. But a missing element is often how to translate ideas into action, opportunities into growth, and risks into real solutions. Marquis helps translate ALCO driven asset strategies into borrower-level execution, improving yield, deepening engagement, and improving loan portfolio performance without inflating expenses or your cost of funds.

Today’s economic climate is uncertain. GDP is faltering, -0.3% in Q1 2025[i], and consumer credit health is deteriorating. And there’s real concern this performance will be revised even lower. ALCO conversations are laser focused on margin preservation, interest rate volatility, and credit quality, but what often gets lost in translation is how marketing and analytics can serve as strategic levers to drive smarter, safer loan growth.

This is especially true when it comes to consumer lending, where leaders are asking hard questions:

• Where do we find high-yielding assets without unnecessary credit risk?
• How do we activate opportunities already sitting inside our existing portfolio?
• What tools can help us identify, reach, and convert borrowers faster?
• How can I know if my ROI validates our effort?

This article is designed for senior executives who want more than broad tactics, they want to know how their Marquis relationship can strengthen their balance sheet and power revenue growth. You want strategic execution that leads to real results.

We’ll begin where the balance sheet starts, on the asset side, and show how to uncover high-value consumer loan opportunities, like HELOCs, align them with yield and quality goals, and deploy precision tools that drive results without inflating your cost of funds.

Strategy & Asset Focus: Building High Quality Assets with HELOCs

From an ALM and balance sheet perspective, the conversation around consumer loans in 2025 isn’t about volume, it’s about quality, yield, and sustainability. With the FDIC reporting yield on earning assets declining (and fortunately cost of funds as well) ALCO members are searching for lending opportunities that strike the right balance: earning yield without taking on disproportionate risk.[ii]

That’s where HELOCs, specifically, high-quality HELOCs originated from within your existing portfolio, provide an often overlooked and underappreciated advantage.

Why HELOCs Make Strategic Sense Right Now

Home equity is the strongest its been in a generation, providing a buffer should our economy experience significant headwinds. With home equity exceeding 70%[iii] nationwide you can have a lot of confidence in uncovering well positioned borrows with significant collateral. Plus, the current first mortgage rate environment is not encouraging new home purchases or refinancing when many borrows are sitting on rates lower than 3%.

There are many attractive reasons for a bank or credit union to focus more marketing resources on HELOC acquisition.

• Low Acquisition Cost: You’re not chasing unknown borrowers. With the right data, you already know who has significant untapped equity.
• Better Risk Profile: Homeowners with strong equity and proven payment histories represent lower delinquency risk, even in softening economies.
• Flexible Structure: Variable-rate features can better align with anticipated rate cuts as the Fed signals 2+ rate reductions in 2025[iv].
• Attractive Pricing: Compared to fixed-rate loans or investment alternatives, HELOCs can deliver consistent and competitive margins without deep discounting.

The real opportunity lies in precisely identifying equity-rich households, predicting their likelihood to borrow, and reaching them with timely, personalized offers. This is where marketing strategy must be an extension of ALCO planning, and where Marquis excels.

Marquis’ Strategic Advantage

With tools like the Marquis Marketing Data Platform, your institution can:

• Isolate households with the potential for strong home equity and no HELOC
• Uncover likely buyers based on demographic, psychographic, and intent indicators
• Score and segment customers or members based on credit quality and borrowing propensity
• Align loan growth initiatives with internal funding capabilities and rate sensitivity

The result? A loan strategy that’s not only boardroom-sound, but field-tested and campaign-ready.

Next, we’ll look at how to execute this strategy using tactical tools that translate ALCO insights into real growth.

Tactical Execution: Tools That Turn Strategy into Loans

Once your ALCO and executive team aligns around targeting high-quality HELOC growth, the question becomes: What tactics can we use to grow our portfolio—fast, precisely, and without stretching internal resources?

This is where Marquis’ tools convert balance sheet strategy into efficient growth, enabling institutions to activate high potential borrowers without expanding credit exposure or marketing overhead.

Predictive Modeling: Know Who’s Likely to Borrow

Using your data with Marquis, you can uncover HELOC opportunities—not just based on equity, but on real engagement signals: product mix, household income, credit events, and even online behavior.

Use case 1: Identify top 10% of deposit households with untapped equity or no HELOC.

Strategic value: Improves pull-through rate while reducing reliance on rate promotions or credit-wide campaigns with an unsure financial standing.

Use case 2: Detect HELOC churn risk among current borrowers by tracking inactivity or utilization ratios.

Strategic value: Protects existing loan yield by identifying at-risk accounts early, allowing for proactive retention strategies that reduce runoff or responsible use while maintaining ALCO-targeted asset stability.

Use case 2: Launch HELOC offers to mortgage-only households with strong credit and rising equity based on updated home value indexing or loan history.

Strategic value: Increases wallet share among low-risk, high-potential households, driving organic asset growth that aligns with ALM goals without needing broad rate concessions.

Uncover Your HELOC Opportunity in a Few Clicks

HELOCs are a strategic growth opportunity in your current economic environment. But knowing where and how to act takes more than intuition. It takes clarity. KEYs.ai gives you and your leadership team that clarity.

KEYs.ai is a research and discovery engine built specifically for financial institutions. Designed with the C-suite in mind, it surfaces real-time insights from your own data to help you make smarter, faster decisions, with just a few clicks. You can quickly filter your data to aid in your ALCO discussions, build your strategic plan, and better understand your customer or member base.

In the examples below, you can examine your account balances by product cross sell, or see expected household income groups. With additional filters for tenure, generation, product, branch, and more, you can improve your ALCO discussions with greater data and nuance. You’ll quickly have greater insights, making your data a strategic asset.

Built for Action, Not Just Awareness

The KEYs.ai makes dashboard actionable, with an easy-to-use interface, allowing you to better understand your customer or member opportunities. Direct your teams to act where it counts and justify every move with data-backed rationale. With KEYs.ai, we give your executive team, and everyone in your institution, the power to recognize, prioritize, and seize the right HELOC opportunities before the competition does.

HELOC Balance Trends: A Path to Profitable Growth

With the average HELOC balance exceeding $45,000 in 2024, a 7.2% increase from 2023[v], consumers continue to demonstrate the value of this product. Financial institutions are in a strong position to capitalize on a product that delivers both attractive yield and responsible asset growth.

Your marketing team can help you improve your balance sheet with HELOC marketing. You can model this opportunity by reviewing your current HELOC average balances, the yield on this product, and project an ROI. KEYs.ai will give you a current HELOC balance, that’s also filterable by branch, age, tenure, and other variables.

Marquis analyzes client campaign results. In 2023 response rates with HELOC campaigns resulted in strong response rates. The following response rates, combined with your average account balance, can easily help you project performance benchmarks. These benchmarks help you understand your ROI potential with direct mail, email, and other channel activations.

Response Analysis – HELOC Campaigns 2023

The Untapped Opportunity: Unused Credit Lines

The challenge isn’t just originating new HELOCs. It’s activating the balances already sitting unused on your books. Many institutions carry sizable portions of their HELOC portfolio with sub-30% utilization. That’s a drag on yield, yet provides sizable opportunities.

This is where targeted communication can play a decisive role. Marquis’ Digital Communication Platform enables your institution to:

• Focus on distinct campaigns, such as HELOC holders with low utilization and mortgage only customers or members
• Segment by product, household profile, demographic, tenure, and other filterable options to ensure your marketing his highly relevant
• Deploy behavior-triggered email campaigns to prompt usage
• Promote activity with specific sales points, such as remodeling, larger purchases, or debt consolidation

These emails are data driven messages sent with precision and relevance. Marquis tracks opens, clicks, and engagement to measure lift in both response and account activity, helping you understand your performance metrics.

Leading with Confidence: Build Smarter, Perform Better in 2025

As the economic environment continues to shift, marked by unclear growth projections, cautious consumers, and the potential for multiple Fed rate cuts, success in 2025 will belong to institutions that can move with precision, not just speed.

That’s why aligning your ALCO-driven lending strategy with marketing execution is essential. Your marketing team has the tools and resources to help you make your ALCO discussions actionable. Marquis helps transform economic insight into executable strategy—and marketing into measurable results.

Let’s make 2025 the year you turn economic pressure into strategic advantage.

If you’d like to learn more, schedule a session with our team and see how Marquis can help your institution grow smarter.

“This article series is focused on bank and credit union CEOs, Presidents, CFOs, board members, and other executives looking to help their financial institution navigate an uncertain economic environment. Written by Marquis’ SVP of Product Marketing & Innovation, Ben Udell, his focus is on blending real world needs with Marquis products and solutions you already use, helping you maximize your impact in 2025. His experience includes 25+ years of financial experience, UMass MBA, Graduate School of Banking at Wisconsin (GSB) degree. He’s on faculty at GSB, American Bankers Association’s Stonier Graduate School of Banking, and teach at America’s Credit Unions Digital Banking School. His expertise will help you strengthen the connection between your financial statements and marketing.”

[i] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. “Gross Domestic Product, First Quarter 2025 (Advance Estimate).” BEA.gov, 25 Apr. 2025, https://www.bea.gov/news/2025/gross-domestic-product-1st-quarter-2025-advance-estimate.

[ii] Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. “Quarterly Banking Profile: First Quarter 2025.” FDIC.gov, 30 May 2025, https://www.fdic.gov/news/speeches/2025/fdic-quarterly-banking-profile-first-quarter-2025.

[iii] Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US). “Households and Nonprofit Organizations; Real Estate at Market Value, Level (HOEREPHRE).” FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOEREPHRE. Accessed 25 June 2025.

[iv] Kihara, Leika, and Howard Schneider. “Fed Set to Hold Rates Steady as Middle East Crisis, Tariffs Cloud Outlook.” Reuters, 18 June 2025, https://www.reuters.com/business/fed-set-hold-rates-steady-middle-east-crisis-tariffs-cloud-outlook-2025-06-18/.

[v] Experian Staff. “Home Equity Line of Credit Study.” Experian Blog, 25 Mar. 2024, https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/research/home-equity-line-of-credit-study/.