CAMBRIDGE, Mass.-Everybody's jumping on the mobile payments bandwagon, but one person is advising CUs to spend the second half of 2013 examining whether or not they should be in that space.
Christian Klacko, co-founder and SVP of field operations at Micronotes, told Credit Union Journal that "having a new payments system is great, but if you're not interacting properly with your customers or they're not coming on your site and using your system to transfer money, what good is it?"
Klacko also advised that CUs not be bullied by the major vendors into implementing a system their members don't want or need-and that the CU may not actually be able to afford. CUs, he said, "are very dependent upon those big vendors that make the financial system work...because every time they want to implement a change that makes that interaction better, they have to go through hoops. Sometimes it takes six months to change something on your website. So how can a credit union or bank move fast when the vendors that control the system are not the ones moving very fast?"
Rather than racing to put a mobile offering in place, Klacko suggested CUs spend the next six months focusing on building member advocacy that will translate back to increased services and eventually bring increased revenues.
That advocacy is increasingly important, he said, because the big banks are finally understanding why so many customers migrated to CUs, and they are now working to win some of those folks back.
