As community-based institutions, credit unions are well positioned to truly understand the unique needs of their members. 

With digital platforms and evolving technologies transforming the landscape, credit union leaders have an opportunity to capitalize on the digital wave to grow and better meet the needs of their members - any time and any place. 

Yet, navigating this new terrain can be complicated.

In this episode, Jake Darabos, Chief Financial and Administration Officer, and Chuck Eads, Chief Lending Officer, both with Abound Credit Union, join the show to discuss the digital transformation and how to deepen member relationships.

Digital Transformation

Due to its historical affiliation with Kentucky's military community and its status as Kentucky's largest credit union, Abound feels a responsibility to serve their community and honor the respected and long standing history of the bank.

With a focus on easing the user experience and eliminating the perceptual barriers around credit union membership, Abound is advancing the digitization game in five key ways.

1 — Rebrand

In order to stay modern while maintaining their core military membership base, the institution has gone through multiple rebranding initiatives throughout time to better target and speak to their consumers.

Aside from renaming the bank to update but never stray too far from its historical roots, Abound developed a rebranding campaign centered around user personas—a marketing tool designed to define the kinds of members an organization wants to attract.

Defining a number of demographic qualities such as age, household income, education levels, and outlining a detailed story of how a particular user persona operates in the world—i.e. where they shop, who they hang out with, what they do in their free time, where they like to eat—determines how they’ll create and deploy brand messaging.

It’s all about how the brand presents itself.

2 — Data

Data analytics has been invaluable to Abound’s digitization process.

While it’s a widely held belief that it requires a large investment to extract useful data, Abound is showing the industry how simple and inexpensive it can actually be.

Using a very small analytics team and internal data that they already have, they’re able to supplement loan growth and perform far more targeted outreach than they ever could before.

Initiatives include looking at debit and credit card transactions and checking ACH data to see where members are sending money in order to anticipate needs and offer more customized services.

For example, if a member is using their credit card at Camping World, Abound could deduce that they might be the correct fit for an RV or boat loan and send them offerings.

ACH data indicates loan payment which is useful for credit unions to leverage in order to reach out to a customer regarding potential loan deals that might better suit them or help them refinance at lower rates.

There’s already so much data readily available to any financial institution—the next step for Abound is to strengthen their position by investing in the right technology and talent to aggregate that data into a cross-channel bank that aggregates the data from all of their systems to pull even stronger analyses out.

3 — Removing Friction

Simplicity is key.

It’s far too easy for a financial institution’s success rate to plummet if the digital experience requires a higher level of interaction than the in-branch experience.

For example, if the process of refinancing a loan is inconvenient, painful, or requires a lot of documentation, it doesn’t matter how much money a credit union helps their customer save.

If there is a lot of information to scroll through or too much to fill out, then members are going to drop off.

Tapping into platforms, like Google Analytics, helps institutions understand at every stage where potential pain points exist, and where exactly members are dropping out of the application workflow.

At Abound, lending and marketing teams get together to identify those pain points and talk through how to streamline the process to keep it as simple and uninvolved as possible.

4 — Consultative conversations/Financial Conversations

Another important aspect of digitization that’s difficult to get right is integrating the human touch into a primarily digital consultation process.

Follow up calls are integral to Abound’s consultation cycle.

However, as the biggest credit union in Kentucky, it’s impossible to reach all the thousands of potential customer targets at once.

Prioritizing where those resources go is key.

When members open the preliminary email and click on the provided link to start the application process, the greenlight is given to deploy the necessary human touch that furthers the sales process.

What Abound found is that the members who engage and open their messaging still hesitate to take next steps.

Lack of financial education seemed to be the culprit, which proved to be a valuable insight for the credit union as it enabled them to follow up with a human interaction that educated the consumer and introduced a wide variety of solutions for their needs.

5 — Partnership

The last fundamental of Abound’s successful digital transformation is partnership.

As the credit union continues to create new, innovative, technology-driven products, they need support to implement and maintain them.

Many community-based institutions just don’t have the funds necessary to expand into the technological space, so partnerships are essential to that advancement.

Finding the right partner is the hard part.

For Abound, the right partner is one that is committed to providing resources, like project management teams; founded on similar goals; and determined to work in parallel to get the job done.

So far, Abound has seen ​​an increase in digital banking engagement, online use of remote deposits, and person-to-person/account-to-account money transfers.

These are just a few of the many ways Abound Credit Union is leading the way in the digital transformation age.