Horicon Bank

Horicon Bank, a Wisconsin community lender, needed to modernize its sales and marketing efforts to better understand and engage customers. The bank had valuable customer data required for account management and regulatory compliance but lacked the tools to extract actionable insights from it. Retiring loan officers also represented a knowledge-loss risk, as their expertise in identifying opportunities was not being systematically captured.

AVP Chrissy Oelke led a team that implemented AI-powered customer intelligence across the bank's lending, retail, and commercial banking segments. Machine learning tools were deployed to analyze customer habits and finances to identify the most relevant products and services for each customer. The bank also built a consistent, automated onboarding process and used AI to record and systematize the institutional knowledge of retiring loan officers so less-experienced staff could act on opportunities.

Horicon substantially increased its share of wallet among existing customers by identifying the best cross-sell opportunities. The initial lending deployment drove a measurable lift in loan application volumes and funded loans. Expanding the technology across retail and commercial banking resulted in what Horicon now calls a 360-degree view of customer behaviors and activities across all business units.

• Community banks can unlock significant value from regulatory-required customer data by layering ML-driven analytics on top of it, without needing to collect new data.
• Starting AI deployment in a single business unit (lending) allows for proof-of-concept before scaling across the entire institution.
• AI can serve as a knowledge-transfer mechanism, capturing the expertise of retiring staff and making it actionable for newer employees.