How to Go Digital, Stay Personal
Five-Steps to Simplify Your Digital Transformation, and to Preserve Your Heart
1. Go digital and engage with younger generations
Millennials and Generation Z are not so different: they both share the need for a financial partner that can help them organize money, while pacing with an ever-changing economic scenario.
Some of the Generation Z are focused, among others, on having the chance to get a personal loan, even if struggling in achieving a solid professional career. Some of the Millennials are keen on sharing ownership, not only bank accounts, as this element resulted in a truly differentiating point after the 2008 financial crisis.
Both do like to interact with financial partners that not only care, but that offer high-level, yet affordable and easy, digital banking experiences.
The ability to deliver this kind of service level is key when competing with fintechs and banks.
2. Be member-centric by understanding your members deepest needs
What do members expect from digital banking? And from where do they prefer to interact with their Credit Union?
It seems that today, Credit Unions not only need to answer these questions, but they also need to evolve dynamically, transforming as they go on their transition to digital banking. Imagining the members’ entire set of financial needs, being accessed from their laptop at their kitchen table or from their mobile phone while sitting at the lake, is a mindset that these organizations should embrace to adapt with their members’ behaviors.
Creating digital experiences that are built around the evolution of members’ preferences and behaviors is now possible through the integration of innovative technologies: how people respond to things and phrases, how colors affect our responses, how terminology matters and how the workflow creates action. All of these can be today a leverage through which align digital experiences to true life behaviors.
3. Be recognizable by easily branding your digital platform
Can you imagine having a digital banking app from a bank that doesn’t have a strong branding effort embedded in the overall experience of the application itself?
No, you cannot.
Nevertheless, banks often have resources that Credit Unions simply don’t.
A focus on Marketing and Communications activities are pertinent, but what if this could be as easy and affordable as printing the old-fashioned collateral?
Designing your own digital branch, easily and with drag and drop capabilities, empowers Credit Unions to make up for the lack of resources – or of the entire Marketing and Communications department, directly from within their digital banking platform.
Having more control over the brand and the image of the Credit Union is key to gain consistency of the overall member and staff experience.
4. Be a certified partner, by offering the highest level of security
Your members data is crucial and deserves the highest security levels. Also, it needs to be clear what security methods you can use, accordingly to your exact need in terms of digital banking. So, members really expect to have total transparency on security methods, as this gives them a true control over their data usage and management. Combining different popular methods of security can be a good way to be a certified partner, that builds security levels upon standards in the market, and guarantees to members the ability to understand the value of this approach. Choosing the right mix of security and convenience, a good way to be a trusted partner.
5. Become a fintech, but with a heart
Today the Credit Union movement needs to compete with aggressive players, such as the fintechs. These organizations have invested money and resources in designing front-end interfaces to be delivered quickly to younger generations. But what happens when going beyond the front-end? Fragmented data and processes, not connected with your overall organizations’ systems, generating a “Frankenstein” effect that creates inefficiencies, while increasing costs and generating security issues.
The back-end, when it’s built by someone who know the Credit Unions’ movement from within, is a resource to exploit and to leverage. This is how we envision our digital banking approach: a way to manage your financial supply chain all along the journey, with a deep understanding of the Credit Unions’ main business processes and future challenges, and the mission to provide affordable and high-level financial services to each of your members.
