With loan demands down, how can credit unions, especially smaller ones, innovate to drive demand?
Unison Credit recognizes that breaking the mold is the only way forward.
While it sounds unintuitive, getting more personal and more local is the most efficient way to expand.
On this week’s episode of Leaders in Lending, Chad Van Handel, Chief Lending Officer at Unison Credit Union joins us to discuss how his team is employing personalized marketing and small business lending to more precisely target the customers who need their services most.
Marketing Personalization
Credit unions are designed to diligently serve their immediate community and what better way to do so than by getting the right product to the right customer at the right moment?
A small organization like Unison Credit is taking matters into their own hands by implementing their unique in-house marketing system to optimize time and more efficiently address their customers’ needs.
In-house marketing
“You can build that muscle internally these days,” Van Handel encourages.
After his own experience at a different institution using a CRM platform with a built-in marketing automation feature, Van Handel realized how something so simple and in-house could make selling far easier.
Unison Credit invested in building a robust in-house marketing team, hiring experts and employing smart automation and analytics technologies to make themselves as available as possible to their membership.
Tracking analytics and what’s occurring on the website can provide invaluable insights, revealing what customers are clicking on, how they navigate the site and what kinds of information they’re seeking at what times.
Identifying emerging behavioral or purchasing patterns is key to designing a more personalized marketing plan—one that speaks to the individual at just the right moment.
Newsletters
As a community-based organization, interacting and communicating with members at all times is integral to not only educating them, but extracting more valuable information.
Newsletters, as Unison Credit has found out, are a powerful way to engage their customer base.
No matter the interval, newsletters are a consistent messenger of service-based information and news that keeps the brand at the forefront of the customer’s mind.
Business Lending
Unison Credit realized that there was a gap in the market when it came to small business loans.
“Small businesses are hard to support, but so valuable for your community when you can do it right,” says Van Handel
By focusing lending efforts on small, local businesses, they could drive up their loan demand in a way that other financial institutions wouldn’t, and thereby, diversify their revenue stream.
Instead of going the safer, more traditional route—relying on consumer and retail loans—Unison decided to venture into the business lending space with an emphasis on rental property investing.
Enabling small businesses to invest in property via personal lines of credit and HELOCs not only drives loan demand, it can simultaneously help the business grow and fuel the local economy.
Near-term opportunities
With their eyes always set to the future, Unison is creating space now for more loan origination strategies.
Automating processes such as underwriting, processing loans, and reviewing documents and applications will reduce administrative burdens for both customers and employees.
CUSOs (Credit Union Service Organizations) are also helping their members like Unison leverage new technologies to push automated initiatives forward. With the mission to share expenses and resources, credit unions are coming together to take advantage of the opportunities.
