Even for a town accustomed to severe weather, the tornado that walloped Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in April defied imagination, leaving behind a trail of devastation that included hundreds of businesses and thousands of homes in need of expensive repairs if not outright rebuilding, not to mention hundreds of families that were separated from their money because of electrical disruptions.
The credit union learned both the benefits and challenges of using automated channels to provide instant access to financial services and deliver new credit products to allow recovery to begin as quickly as possible. It learned the ability to communicate with customers when power and PC banking is hindered is key to delivering services, making mobile a big part of future plans.
The credit union's headquarters, while not destroyed, were locked down in the immediate aftermath of the storm and traditional phone services were unreliable for a couple of days. So the credit union turned to shared branching (literally, letting customers use another credit union's branches), a common business-continuity plan for credit unions to allow members to continue to bank, and offered access to online banking on its website.
But that, too, posed a problem — with electricity still partly out, PC-based Internet access was limited (the bank has its own generators to drive its network). So people used their mobile phones to call the bank rather than execute transactions via mobile banking apps. "And we had fairly limited phone service for several days," says Kevin Maguire, president and CEO of the credit union. DCH's member adoption of mobile banking is still rather limited, he acknowledges, though the bank is expanding its mobile banking capabilities.
The credit union is now looking at how mobile access can be improved over time, including taking advantage of the available bandwidth — Maguire says mobile access has vastly improved in northern Alabama recently. That will allow the credit union to accommodate a quick spike in mobile activity after a future storm.
Expanded general use of mobile banking will also help in the future, since the effect of stresses on "traditional" web banking due to power outages would be minimized if more people were using mobile banking. "One of the first things down in a storm is electricity and so many rely on Internet via cable that sometimes just a brief outage clobbers online banking. But anything that keeps folks out of the branches is helpful," Maguire says.
