Question: Is it possible, beyond just vendor claims, to track technologies that contribute most to member, savings, and/or loan growth and retention?
Greg Crandell, EVP-Business Development & Sales, Digital Mailer, Herndon, Va.
It's possible to track technologies' contributions to member, savings, and loan growth and retention; but likely not through vendors' integrated solutions. At DigitalMailer, we often hear from clients and prospects who want to know how our services can deliver "contribution tracking," and we tell them we can help ... but only help. You can track results, but you must be willing to do some work.
Here's a perfect example: a client using our Autoresponder e-mail campaign service as part of the "new member on-boarding process" found our service's reporting could identify members who opened any of the series of targeted emails and then clicked through to the credit union's offers. Our client used that information, along with its MCIF reporting, to identify growth in targeted loans and deposits, and in services adopted.
By using the specific "recipient data" our client could track specific member behavior, tying it to product, service, loan and deposit growth over a specified timeframe. Any credit union can do this, if the information is available through the technologies it uses. You may not always want to track results but periodic tracking can provide a clear view of the usefulness of the technologies' you use.
Dinesh Sheth, CEO, uMonitor, Memphis
Yes, especially for credit unions that have a culture of sharing in order to work toward the common goal of better serving members. You can reach out to credit unions that are similar in size, technology, and/or member base and even visit them and they will readily share with you what works. You may use vendors to help frame your questions or meetings of this nature. Any company that claims to increase member focused services like new member on boarding, account to account transfer and account management and ultimately improve member retention should have credit union references that can support that fact. Vendors claims of success, results and challenges can always be validated through your peers.
Dan Cheney, CTO, Teres Solultions, Austin, Texas
Some vendors would have you believe that a particular technology offering they provide is the "Holy Grail" when it comes to member growth, retention and cost savings. The truth is it takes a combination of different technologies from different vendors to help credit unions to achieve such goals. For example, technologies like bill pay and online banking help with retention. Solutions that improve efficiency and serve members faster — such lending automation software — often lead to member and loan growth. Credit unions looking to build and retain member roles and achieve cost savings should track results not based on a particular technology but rather on a suite of different solutions that together help them achieve their overall goals.
David Foss, President, ProfitStars, a Jack Henry Company, Dallas
With today's shifting financial landscape, it has never been more important to get a good understanding of your member base. Most credit unions have far too many members to be able to focus broadly on retaining everyone. Members who make the most significant contribution — the most "profitable" members — are crucial to your long-term financial success.
Segmenting your members using member relationship management (MRM) and profitability measurement is key to understanding their balances, products, and profit contributions. Realizing how critical it is to nurture your high-profit members, you can use this information to determine which members you want to target for specific follow up like a retention program.
Member profitability tends to follow the 80/20 rule, where the top 20% of your members make 80% or more of the contribution to your bottom line. Once you've nailed down exactly who those high contributors are, you can examine which technologies they use most and/or which technologies impact them most behind the scenes. These are the technologies that contribute most to your growth and retention.
David McConney, EVP/General Manager of CU Core Systems, Harland Financial Solutions, Pleasanton, Calif.
Yes; it is very possible to track and analyze areas that contribute most to member growth and retention. Again, business intelligence tools are the contributing factor having the ability to track and analyze product/service usage, transaction behaviors, and potential opportunity for each member — adding to the "stickiness" of the member and ultimately improving growth and retention. Additional tools lie with strategic partners that can provide further value and intelligence. Look for a vendor that offers tools that can delve deep into its credit union clients' usage of products and services to determine which are performing and contributing to the overall bottom-line. This brings the credit union one step closer to realizing its overall performance goals by revealing areas, both from a technology and operational people-process perspective, that are in need of change in order to improve the credit union's performance and ultimately contribute the most significantly to member growth and retention.
Question: Is it possible to get an overview of the full spectrum of risk at our credit union, or is risk by category or data silo the best we can hope for?
David McConney, Harland Financial Solutions
With the massive amounts of data from a variety of input sources, it is almost impossible to maintain one complete and single view of each and every risk factor your credit union needs consider on a daily basis. The combination of business intelligence and CRM makes that goal closer to reality when it comes to the member relationship and their value and profitability, and potential attrition risk.
However, our credit union clients tell us they feel the "dashboard" approach is likely a more real world and usable tool when it comes to looking at each category of risk. This approach lends itself to being able to view areas such as credit risk, operational risk, market risk, legal risk, management risk, etc. With the ability to pull from the various data sources and quickly see this information in real-time on a dashboard, the day-to-day monitoring can be much easier to perform. In addition to these types risk factors each credit union needs to consider, also consider business continuity as yet another risk category. Ensuring ongoing and interrupted service is a critical area to employ within the credit union risk management projects.
David Foss, President, ProfitStars, a Jack Henry Company
With both threats and regulatory scrutiny at all-time highs, a detailed analysis is actually what your credit union needs. The best way to get an overview of the full spectrum of risk is to analyze it by department, category, process and data availability.
Examiners and auditors expect a risk assessment to incorporate an enterprise-wide analysis of internal and external threats and vulnerabilities to confidential non-public information. In addition to electronic information on technology based systems, the term "enterprise-wide" also includes paper documents and social engineering types of threats, among others.
Conducting a thorough risk assessment process, department by department, will improve the credit union's ability to address the likelihood and impact of identified threats and vulnerabilities. It will also establish the basis for evaluating the sufficiency of policies, procedures and systems to control risks. This will provide the credit union the most effective way to address modifying existing policies and processes to mitigate the true scope of enterprise-wide weaknesses and risks in your institution.
Take advantage of the team of experts we've put together for you. Have a question you'd like to put before Credit Union Journal's Technology Panel of Experts? Send it to Managing Editor Lisa Freeman at
