Urban Partnership Bank: Fintech Case Study

Urban Partnership Bank, a full-service Community Development Bank
Consumer
upbnk.com
Creative
Strategy
Paid media
Data and analytics
SEO

THE SETUP

The customer base was aging out

Urban Partnership Bank became a Community Development Financial Institution and refocused its mission on underserved communities in Chicago.

The mission was right. The audience was wrong. Account holders were getting older and the bank was not reaching younger people, which is the slow version of a problem that eventually becomes an existential one for a retail bank.

Their digital presence was thin, and the audience they needed banks almost entirely online.

Competing for that audience in a city full of Fortune 500 banks meant the pitch could not be about rates or branches. UPB had something the big banks did not, which was more than 80% of its lending directed to low and moderate income communities in Chicago. Nobody knew it.

Traffic from young professionals rose nearly 800%.

THE SOLUTION

Our Interest Goes Here

The campaign line put the bank’s mission in four words. Interest is what a bank pays and interest is what a bank cares about, and UPB’s answer to both was the neighborhoods it lent in.

The 18-to-34 audience would have rejected anything that felt like a national bank talking about community. So we hired a local photographer and shot the city the way people who live there recognize it.

Campaign highlights include:

The Our Interest Goes Here platform, built around UPB’s community lending record
An agile awareness campaign focused on the specific neighborhoods UPB helped develop
Original photography from a local Chicago photographer
Paid social and display targeting young professionals near branch locations
A two-phase structure moving from brand awareness into products and benefits
Extensions into out-of-home, internal communications, and print

THE STRATEGY

Do what a national bank cannot

The big banks in Chicago can outspend a community bank on every channel. What they cannot do is be local, so we made the campaign personal in a way a national brand has no standing to attempt.

Targeting was geographic and generational. Young professionals living in and around UPB branches, people already inclined to care about where their money goes but who had never heard the bank’s story.

Sequencing mattered because the audience needed the mission before the products. Phase one taught people what UPB does with deposits. Phase two explained how banking there works and what it returns to the neighborhood.

UPB then extended the platform beyond digital into out-of-home, brochures, and internal communications, so employees and passersby saw the same idea.

THE RESULTS

A younger customer base and more accounts opened

The campaign outperformed banking industry benchmarks and UPB’s own previous campaign results, with growth concentrated in personal banking.

800%

Increase in web traffic from young professionals

300%

Increase in online account openings

Why it matters:

Online account openings were the metric that mattered most, because the target audience does not walk into branches
The traffic gain came from the specific demographic UPB was failing to reach, not from general volume
UPB exceeded deposit goals across every campaign, so awareness converted into balances