Brilliant Bank: $150 Million in New Deposits
A digital-only division of Equity Bank, taken from dormant to deposit engine. Part of HIFI’s ongoing work with Equity Bank since 2020.
Brilliant Bank is a division of Equity Bank (Wichita, Kansas), built to gather deposits from savers outside the community bank’s physical footprint. By 2022, the brand existed on paper and nowhere else. Equity’s marketing team engaged HIFI to make it real.
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.
Campaign creative from 2022; rates shown are historical.
Fraud-filtered, CRA-aware, and Built to Convert
HIFI ran the program end to end: market research and media planning, creative development, programmatic and paid search, lookalike and retargeting audiences, streaming and niche media, website development, and performance analytics.
We built ad fraud prevention into the media buy from day one. National programmatic at this spend level attracts invalid traffic, and a deposit program can’t afford to pay for it.
And we structured media coverage with Equity’s Community Reinvestment Act obligations in mind. CRA shapes where a bank’s marketing needs to show up, not just where it wants to. Most agencies don’t know the constraint exists. In a deposit program, it determines the map.
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
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.
