SEATTLE – Thousands of consumers lined up waiting for a credit union to open Saturday morning, prompting hundreds of credit unions to stage special weekend hours as the most fertile month of member recruitment culminated in Bank Transfer Day.
“Just about every other person in line is a new member coming in or saying they’re there to ditch their bank, so that’s pretty aggressive,” said Kyle Markland, president of Affinity Plus FCU, who attributed the high branch traffic to increased marketing of its “Ditch Your Bank” campaign, as well as exposure on the local news.
On Friday, people were sitting on the floor of the downtown Seattle BECU branch waiting to open accounts. The credit union was staffed up on Saturday, and 659 people opened new accounts in their 45 branches – a record for a Saturday.
California’s Bay FCU reported adding 100 new checking accounts Saturday – a third of the monthly average – with dozens more applications waiting for processing. Schools Financial CU said it recorded its biggest membership day of the year, following its best October ever – 1,064 new members for the month.
Seattle City Councilman Mike O’Brien held a press conference Saturday to announce not only was he moving his deposits to Verity CU – but his loans too. “I got sick of all the fees and hassle of the big banks, making life difficult for customers while reaping record profits,” he said.
Many of the new membership gains of the past five weeks had already occurred or were being accumulated online, even before Saturday’s event. “New membership via online sign-ups jumped 10-12% in the weeks leading up to Bank Transfer Day,” Robin Marohn, vice president of marketing at Wisconsin’s Heartland CU, told Credit Union Journal Saturday. “That’s why we’ve been really urging people to get the process started online and we’ll get the rest of it taken care of as quickly as possible.”
Credit unions around the country were enticing new members with a variety of offers.
Pennsylvania’s Trumark CU was offering bank customers a $50 gift certificate to open a credit union account Saturday. Stanford FCU paid a $100 bonus to the first 100 people to open checking accounts on Bank Transfer Day. Utah’s Mountain America CU was paying $125 for new members.
Even small banks were getting into the act, campaigning for big bank customers to switch to community lenders. First Tennessee Bank, for example, was offering a $300 bonus for account transfers.
“We’ve actually seen a significant amount of traffic,” said Leslie Spence, director of member services at Colorado’s Partner CU. “To be quite honest, we didn’t really know what kind of numbers we were going to get. We did expect this day to be an educational piece, because we reached out to the current member base to tell them we’d be open on this day for their friends and family to come in and get to know us.”
According to CUNA, the five-week push towards Bank Transfer Day, started Sept. 29, when Bank of America announced a $5 monthly debit fee, since abandoned. It resulted in as many as 650,000 new credit union members, and some $4.5 billion in new credit union deposits, as of last week.
Credit union executives around the country were expecting tens of thousands more since then, climaxing in Saturday’s nationwide event.
Affinity Plus’s Markland said his credit union averages about 1,000 new members per month, but has doubled that over the past four weeks. Of those new members, about 75% are opening checking accounts. New members tend to bring over as many as six different account relationships, he said.
