Vantage Credit Union of St. Louis says it has dramatically improved customer engagement by enabling members to access the Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. social-media websites from within online banking. Those who access Facebook and Twitter through its online-banking tool spend twice as much time on the credit union’s website as the users who do not.
“We basically integrated many social-media applications into online banking, so while customers are paying bills, if they want to check their status on Facebook, they can do this in the online channel,” says Cameron Minges, Vantage executive vice president for information.
Vantage’s strategy today is an evolution of a 2009 service it introduced called Tweet My Money, which enables members to send a message through Twitter to the credit union, which in turn would tweet back the user’s account balance as a direct message viewable only by the accountholder.
Vantage, which has $680 million in assets and 103,000 members, half of whom bank online, also created an online and mobile-banking suite for consumers ages 18 to 25 that it launched in June. Called Not Your Mama’s Account, the service integrates social media and personal financial management tools. Users may check balances and automatically track spending while updating their status on Facebook. The account also offers users electronic coupons that provide discounts on various goods and services, which they can share with friends over Facebook and Twitter.
“[The account] was tailor-designed for this age market,” Minges says.
Of the total Internet traffic accessing the credit union’s online services, 10% comes from mobile devices to these accounts, which is twice the industry average for mobile access to financial institutions’ websites, he says. So far, the credit union has 2,300 such accounts.
“The 18-to-25-year-old market clearly told us that they want to interact with us online, and they are not interested in branch infrastructure,” Minges says, noting some of the account’s features, such as penalizing for bounced checks once a year, in fact are money-losers for the credit union.
But they may have a longer-term impact on young users, such as greater customer retention. “We are not going to make money on them right now, but in the future,” Minges says. “When they graduate from college and want a mortgage, and all the other services we offer, we hope we will be the first one they consider.”
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