The Challenge

  • A central goal for the U.S. financial system is to ensure that consumers and small businesses have access to fast, reliable, and secure payment systems, as well as affordable and manageable credit that reflects their ability to repay.
  • In keeping with this goal, policymakers must establish appropriate rules and safeguards while also encouraging innovation and supporting free market principles.
  • To help find this balance, it is critical that financial sector institutions — including banks and credit unions, payment networks, and credit reporting agencies — come to the table equipped with credible, compelling, and data-driven evidence to support their policy positions.
  • In addition, they must stay abreast of macroeconomic trends that affect consumer and small business credit demand and financial health.

Our Solution

Keybridge provides a suite of advisory services to help our financial sector clients anticipate and respond to emerging economic and market trends and advocate for sound public policies using persuasive, data-driven arguments. These services include:

  • Data dashboards: We develop and produce customized data dashboards for financial sector clients covering a range of topics, including consumer financial health, small business lending activity, and credit and debit card market trends.
  • Economic insights: We provide easy-to-digest narrative summaries that offer context for the latest data movements, and frequently present economic insights to our clients during internal meetings, webinars, and client events.
  • Literature reviews and research summaries: We stay abreast of the latest academic and industry research on financial sector topics of interest to our clients and regularly provide summaries, analyses, and methodological critiques of relevant studies.
  • Comment letters. We help clients respond to official government requests (e.g., RFIs, NPRMs, and proposed guidance documents) with professionally written, data-driven arguments that reflect our clients’ policy priorities.
  • Original research: We conduct data-driven, fact-based original research on behalf of our clients using sound quantitative methods and produce research memos, white papers and narrative infographics to better inform policymakers and the public.

End Results

  • For more than a decade, Keybridge’s efforts have improved our financial sector clients’ understanding of economic trends that are likely to affect consumers and small businesses, including spending, borrowing, and investment trends; near-term changes in credit quality and availability; and emerging signs of financial stress.
  • Our work helps to position our clients as thought leaders among federal policymakers and the public and ensures the evidence supporting their policy positions is current, compelling, methodologically sound, and professionally presented.
  • In short, we have become an invaluable strategic partner and “policy handyman” for our financial sector clients, and we serve as a true extension of their organizations.

“Keybridge helps us communicate with our stakeholders more persuasively by strengthening our policy arguments with compelling data analysis and economic expertise. They have been a trusted and reliable partner for many years.”

— Executive Vice-President, Major Financial Sector Trade Association