$150 Million in New Deposits from a Dormant Charter
Strategy
Media
Websites
Analytics
Digital
About Brilliant Bank
Brilliant Bank is a division of Equity Bank (based in Wichita, Kansas) and an online-only bank built to gather deposits outside the community bank’s physical footprint. By 2022, the charter existed but the brand didn’t. Equity’s marketing team engaged HIFI to turn a dormant digital bank into a real deposit engine.
Building a national brand quickly is hard. Building one that acquires deposits at a defensible cost is harder. The mandate was both.
Competing nationally without a national budget
A digital-only bank can’t rely on branch presence, local awareness, or the reputation Equity had spent decades building in Kansas. Brilliant had to earn attention from savers anywhere in the country; and against national players with far larger budgets.
The answer was concentration rather than reach: high-intent audiences, disciplined media mix, and a conversion path engineered to turn interest into funded accounts rather than traffic.
Mixing Media, Building Brand, and Strengthening Conversion
HIFI ran a fully integrated media program: market research and media planning, creative campaign development, programmatic and search advertising, lookalike and retargeting audiences, streaming and niche media buying, website development, and performance analytics.
Two pieces of that list matter more than they look. We built advertising fraud prevention into the media buy, because national programmatic at this spend level attracts it. And we structured media coverage to stay CRA-compliant; a constraint most agencies don’t know exists, and one that determines where a bank is allowed to spend.
The Results
- 2,000 new relationships out of the community’s bank footprint
- $100,000 average balance
- .46 % media spend per dollar acquired
- 10% higher CTR in PPC than industry average
- 15% higher conversion rate from programmatic advertising compared to industry average
Client review
HIFI Agency helped us turn a dormant digital bank idea into a transformative driver of deposit dollars for our bank. Their creative, media, and data prowess is unmatched in the banking industry.
