From a manual rate sweep to 60+ competitor banks tracked with full provenance

Client

Date

$6B+ US community bank and its digital deposit brand

08/2026

The challenge

A $6B+ US community bank and its digital-only deposit brand both compete on price, and price moves with the Fed. Rates, minimums and terms across more than sixty competitor banks were checked by hand, with no analyst team behind it and no syndicated feed to fall back on.

The solution

FifthRow deployed a deposit pricing and competitive intelligence layer. A competitor set goes in; source-traced rate tables, scheduled competitive digests and peer benchmarking come out, with the provenance of every figure carried through to the row it sits in.

50,198

analyst-hours equivalent, 22 FTEs

60+

competitor banks tracked with provenance

Competitor rate tracking60+ banks' rates and terms, source-traced

Competitive market reportingWeekly digest on 4,600 to 10,300 verified sources

Peer deposit analysisFiled composition per peer, reconciled to source

Analyst-hours equivalent50,198 hours saved; equivalent to 22 FTEs

01 — COMPETITOR RATE TRACKING

What every competitor is paying across its published deposit products is the bank's anchor question. It was always answerable, but only by hand: someone had to go and check more than sixty banks, one at a time, every time a rate moved. FifthRow turned it into a single run.

Core Activities

Captured the advertised rate on every relevant product across the competitor set, with its conditions: opening minimum, qualifying balance, tiering
Compiled one ranked table across the full set, not a folder of screenshots
Rebuilt for production scale after the first months, with a provenance column per row and persistent identifiers so no bank drops out silently
Validated it the slow way: ran the full set repeatedly, checked bank by bank that the right yield was picked up, and documented the sites that could not be read reliably
Ran it against live rate decisions, like-for-like against the prior baseline within a day

The Results

A ranked, source-traced view of the competitive rate landscape that refreshes on demand in under twenty minutes, with the conditions attached to each rate and a visible trail back to the page each figure came from.

60+ banks

repriced in one 20-minute run

02 — SCHEDULED COMPETITIVE DIGESTS

Pricing is only half of a competitor's move. The rest of it – launches, feature changes, promotions – arrives weekly on a schedule rather than on request.

Core Activities

Tracks what the market launches, prices and promotes across the full set, unattended
Ran the digest as two tracks, a lens per brand: one national against its own set, the other by customer type
Ran one track twice, nationally and locally, since launches are national but pricing varies by region
Carved out a new area of interest, watched without diluting the main digest
Layered a broad-market radar under the watchlist so new entrants still surface
Put it on a schedule, delivered weekly to inbox, unasked

The Results

A weekly synthesised read on what competitors have launched, repriced and promoted, with a company roll-up per competitor and a trend layer pulling themes across the set, delivered without anyone starting it.

13,423

analyst-hours equivalent saved since start, weekly digest

03 — PEER DEPOSIT BENCHMARKING

Deposit growth reaches the market as one total, and that total mixes relationship money with municipal balances, brokered funding and acquisitions. Whether a bank is holding its position against its peers cannot be read from it.

Core Activities

Built the benchmark on the quarterly regulatory filings every US bank makes, so every institution is measured the same way, on the same date, under the same definitions
Read deposit composition from the filed schedule rather than inferring it: core-customer money against municipal and interbank, transaction against savings and time accounts, balances and account counts either side of the insurance limit
Reported brokered funding separately from reciprocal balances, which are economically relationship money and materially stickier
Screened out any peer quarter growing more than 10%, so acquisition step-changes do not sit inside the peer median
Reconciled every figure against the source before release, and excluded any that could not be reproduced rather than reporting it with a caveat
Ran a second view across eight quarters of total deposits, to separate a persistent position from one weak quarter
Kept the reporting inside what the filings support: core-customer money separates from municipal and wholesale, but consumer does not separate from small business without the bank's own account data

The Results

A quarterly view of where the bank ranks against its peer set, what each peer's deposit base is actually made of, and which peers' growth is flagged as a step-change rather than organic gathering. Every figure traces to a filed line item with its reporting code and date, and re-runs as each new quarter of filings posts.

peer banks measured on one filed standard

04 — ON-DEMAND DESK RESEARCH

Alongside the standing systems, the platform absorbed the one-off strategic questions that used to go unanswered or get outsourced.

Core Activities

Ran the entry-point research behind two growth decisions
Compared vendors in a buying category, with a fit-by-segment recommendation for the team choosing one
Reviewed the digital brand's technology stack against 1,223 sources
Answered a live policy question on 185 sources while the call was still running
Ran team-driven customer-journey analysis, surfacing a finding taken straight to its digital partners

The Results

A standing capability to turn a strategic question into an evidenced answer inside the working week, which removed the choice between waiting for capacity and commissioning an agency.

growth decisions researched in-house

What it proved

A four-person footprint has produced 658 agent runs across 1,043 analysis steps and 82,565 verified sources. The rate board that was a manual sweep of sixty-plus banks now runs in under twenty minutes, provenance on every row. A competitive digest lands weekly, saving 13,423 analyst-hours. The peer deposit question now runs on filed regulatory data, with every figure reconciled against its source before release.

The bank holds a market intelligence function it never had headcount for, built for a risk-averse institution to actually use. Every rate carries its source, every peer figure traces to a filed line item, and the peer analysis runs on public data alone, so nothing internal leaves the bank. Across those 658 runs the platform records 50,198 analyst-hours saved, the equivalent of 22 full-time analysts, against a team of four.

Results

Metric	Benchmark	Result	Improvement
Competitor rate refresh	Manual sweep of 60+ banks	One run under twenty minutes	Capacity-limited to on demand
Competitive market reporting	Syndicated reports twice a year	Scheduled weekly digest	26× more frequent
Peer deposit benchmarking	Assembled by hand, only when someone had time	Encoded methodology, re-runs as filings post	Manual effort replaced by a standing method
Analyst-hours saved	Four people doing all the work manually	50,198 hours across 658 runs	Equivalent of adding 22 full-time analysts over the period

SOURCE-TRACED PRICING

Every rate in the ranking carries a visible trail back to the page it came from, so an unsourced figure never reaches a pricing decision.

PUBLIC-DATA BENCHMARKING

Peer deposit analysis runs on public filings alone, so competitive answers arrive without any internal bank information leaving the institution.

FILED, NOT INFERRED

Deposit composition is read from the filed regulatory schedule rather than estimated from disclosures, so a peer figure can be cited rather than defended.

TWO-TRACK COVERAGE

Each brand is watched against its own competitor set and its own geographic lens, so neither business reads a digest built for the other.

OPEN WATCHLIST

A named competitor list runs with a broader market radar underneath it, so entrants nobody thought to list still surface.

REPEATABLE BENCHMARK

The peer view is wired to the public filing calendar, so each new quarter of filings updates the picture rather than restarting the analysis.