LATHRUP VILLAGE, Mich.-Members are spending more time online at Michigan First CU ever since the credit union began offering new Internet banking with built-in personal financial management (PFM) tools.
Online bankers log-in to the site an average of six times per month, up from four times per month one year ago when the CU first offered homebanking with PFM, according to Michael Poulos, president and CEO at the $552-million Michigan First here. The CU sees about 120,000 total online banking sessions every month, up from 85,000 one year ago.
People Like Having Self-Service Option
"People just like the ability to do things for themselves," said Poulos. "They like the ability to track their own finances in ways they could not do before. That's especially important in this economy, where people are paying attention to the pennies."
With PFM, members can track, flag and categorize transactions and create budgets and alerts for Michigan First and external accounts.
"The value to Michigan First is that the member is not going someplace else to manage finances," he added. "If they turn around and do more business with us because of these tools, that's where we'll make our money."
About 20% of Michigan First CU's online bankers actively use the year-old PFM. In comparison, about 20% of the online membership actively uses electronic bill pay, which the CU has offered for eight years. Nearly one-third of Michigan First's 75,000 members actively banks online.
Michigan First's suite of PFM tools is just one of the functions that are part of a larger Internet banking platform, MoneyTracker Better Online Banking (BOB). The credit union developed MoneyTracker BOB in partnership with Austin, Texas-based Jwaala, an online banking software CUSO owned by Amplify CU, also of Austin. And that's just how it "feels" to a member-it keeps everything all in one place, positioning the CU as members' go-to financial resource online.
"The look and feel between the PFM and other online banking features is consistent," Poulos suggested. "When you use PFM, it doesn't feel like you're entering a separate site. There's no data transfer from another system; the transaction data are already there."
Whereas data stemming from Michigan First accounts appear throughout MoneyTracker BOB, members must manually enter account and transaction data for outside banking and investment accounts. That is, MoneyTracker does not use "screen-scraping" technology to automatically grab the data from external systems. Members who use Intuit Quicken or QuickBooks can automatically import data from that software, however.
No More Worries About Compromises
Without screen-scraping, "we don't have to worry about account compromises," Poulos said. Members can feel confident entering third-party account and transaction data behind Michigan First's "trusted" online security, he said. "The drawback is convenience, but the bigger plus is that the member who takes the time to enter the external data is going to be a good user."
One of every five users has created custom transaction categories to supplement the default categories in the platform, Poulos continued. And one of every five users is creating custom transaction and budget alerts delivered via email or even Twitter.
PFM holds great promise for sales and marketing, Poulos suggesteds. The system makes it easy for Michigan First to pull debit card spending data, for example-it's harder to pull that data from the core, he observed.
"We'll be able to see where members are spending and transferring their money, and where they're keeping their money," he said. "We could correlate that with our psychographic data to help us determine targeted marketing."
Perhaps for the first time, Michigan First will have insight into the personalities of a large group of members, said Poulos. "MoneyTracker will tell us how conscientious members are and how they manage their money. I just can't get that from the host system."
