By John San Filippo
When three distinct financial technology providers—Infusion Marketing Group, QwickRate, and IntelliCredit—merged to form OptimaFI, the goal was not just to expand market share. The ambition was to solve a fundamental problem facing community financial institutions: fragmented data.
“Data is fragmented internally, and there’s also some cultural silos,” said Tim Keith, CEO of OptimaFI. “If we can bring the data together and then serve it up, instead of ‘how do I think about credit risk,’ and ‘how do I think about liquidity’ [for example], you can be thinking about these things together.”
The journey to launching OptimaFI began with Infusion Marketing Group, a performance-based marketing and analytics company founded in 2007. After completing a private equity buyout with Chicago-based Concentric Equity Partners in late November 2023, Keith received an unexpected call just two months later regarding an opportunity to acquire QwickRate.
By May 2024, that transaction was closed. The move doubled Infusion’s employee count and added QwickRate’s extensive institutional client base, along with its loan review arm, IntelliCredit.
The resulting entity brought together three distinct operational areas:
According to Keith, combining macro-level regulatory filings with core account-level data allows credit unions to uncover actionable operational insights that standalone point solutions cannot reveal.
“If you’re using us to do marketing, then we’re getting a monthly extract of all of your core account records,” said Keith. “We also have access, through our call report insights, to your macro financial data. We’re able to bring those together in a way that no one else does.”
Keith also noted that this integration helps explain performance metrics directly. “We can say, ‘Your cost of funds is currently 10 basis points higher than your peer group for billion-dollar credit unions.’ When we look at your household level core data, we can also tell you your average checking account balance is 15% below peer. These data explain each other.”
As artificial intelligence continues to reshape financial operations, OptimaFI relies on normalized data repositories as the foundation for modern AI connectors. Rather than requiring institutions to overhaul their internal infrastructure, the platform uses basic monthly core extracts to power its analytics engines.
“Our view is that AI is no different than any other computer program in the sense that the better data you put into it, the better output you get out of it,” said Keith. “We take in data, normalize it into standardized categories, and then create peer group benchmarking.”
To simplify adopting these capabilities, OptimaFI delivers its solutions through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to eliminate lengthy implementation cycles.
“Rather than spending six figures in a year of tech implementation, with SaaS, we’ve created the platform already,” said Keith. “We just set you up with a login, and you go in and start working in the platform tomorrow.”
Looking ahead, said Keith, OptimaFI plans to continue expanding its platform with unified tools for strategic budgeting, M&A risk analysis, and automated marketing workflows tailored to community financial institutions.
This article was originally published on Finopotamus.
All community bankers need to answer four fundamental strategic questions when it comes to relationship banking: What type of customer do I want to serve? How do I engage those customers, bring them onboard and capture their wallet? How do I manage the evolving risk associated with that relationship? How do I understand and manage the profitability of those relationships across various accounts in dynamic economic cycles?
Key insight: The hype has become auditable fact. This realization creates a different kind of conversation for community banks and credit unions.
The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) today announced the expansion of its Preferred Service Provider (PSP) relationship with OptimaFI.
