FNBO had a need in 2018 to expand into mobile marketing and customer interaction, and knew that they needed to bring on SMS as a means of communicating with their customers. After looking into alternatives and surveying the major solutions for SMS and mobile marketing, they selected Vibes as their platform of choice – and have been with Vibes ever since.
In 1953, FNBO (First National Bank of Omaha) was one of the first five banks in America to offer a credit card. Over the last seven decades, they’ve used their credit card expertise to develop a robust co-brand partnership business that issues consumer, business, and commercial credit cards for more than 40 national and international brands, as well as numerous other financial institutions.
FNBO established an efficient and effective email program for customer communication over the years. In 2018, they needed to expand into SMS for mobile marketing and customer messaging. After looking into alternatives and surveying the major solutions, they selected Vibes as their platform of choice.
Mark Spotanski, FNBO’s Vice President of Partnership Operations, says, "In the banking world, we're often still operating on a transactional basis, or sending service messages via SMS. FNBO as a company is trying to take steps forward to become more progressive in terms of how do we actually ensure we consistently leverage the right channel for the right customers with the right message, and that means looking at the entire ecosystem from a customer standpoint and really understanding how they want to be communicated with.”
This was central to the solution FNBO and Vibes built together. One of the major initiatives FNBO launched SMS to help with was validating that each credit card applicant was who they said they were. Every credit card application requires applicants to provide a code back either via text or via email to verify their identity; what FNBO found was this occurs over 90% of the time via SMS.
This is almost every user’s initial interaction with FNBO, and therefore needs to be fast and friction-free. As Spotanski says, “It's setting the precedent, setting the tone, so having a successful delivery to the customer and allowing them to respond instantaneously is critical. It has been a definite positive in terms of starting us off on the right foot with our customers”.
FNBO also uses Vibes for text alerts and service announcements that their customers have signed up for, and have seen exceptionally strong throughput and success.
"We approach our partnerships withcompanies such as Vibes as simply that: partnerships. When we find partnerships that have the right product, the right service, and a great team working together, that keeps that long-term relationship going - which is exactly what we’ve seen with Vibes.” Mark Spotanski further emphasizes that this relationship and collaboration is what has kept the two companies working together all this time.
FNBO now wants to put more emphasis on SMS as a channel, and grow it further, along with MMS and RCS. During their time with Vibes, FNBO has added multiple messages and multiple customer touchpoints, and found the experience of launching them to be very seamless and easy. “With Vibes, it's been an easy relationship to expand upon, which is what leads us to wanting to do more, because we know there's more that can be done, and the lift shouldn't be that challenging”.
"We approach our partnerships withcompanies such as Vibes as simply that: partnerships. When we find partnerships that have the right product, the right service, and a great team working together, that keeps that long-term relationship going - which is exactly what we’ve seen with Vibes.” Mark Spotanski further emphasizes that this relationship and collaboration is what has kept the two companies working together all this time.
FNBO now wants to put more emphasis on SMS as a channel, and grow it further, along with MMS and RCS. During their time with Vibes, FNBO has added multiple messages and multiple customer touchpoints, and found the experience of launching them to be very seamless and easy. “With Vibes, it's been an easy relationship to expand upon, which is what leads us to wanting to do more, because we know there's more that can be done, and the lift shouldn't be that challenging”.
“We approach our partnerships with companies such as Vibes as simply that: partnerships. When we find partnerships that have the right product, the right service, and a great team working together, that keeps that long-term relationship going -which is exactly what we’ve seen with Vibes.”
Vice President, Partnership Operations, FNBO
