The Modern Credit Union Experience: Delivering High-Touch Banking in the Digital Age

With digitization being a necessity to meet customer expectations, the financial industry needs to embrace their local and relationship building "roots." Credit unions need to identify relevant strategies to bring the best of the in-person experience to digital channels. Credit union leaders discuss which aspects of physical banking interactions should be translated into digital experiences; how to prioritize and test UX for ease of use and accessibility; how to use data and transaction history to offer customers the right product at the right time; and when to implement self-service options versus those that require more in-depth discussion and support.


Transcription:

Chana Schoenberger (00:11):

Hi everyone. Thank you for joining me here in the customer experience room. If we haven't met yet, I'm Chana Schoenberger. I'm the Editor-in-Chief of American Banker and I have with me here Stacy Armijo. Am I saying it right?

Stacy Armijo (00:32):

You are. That's right.

Chana Schoenberger (00:33):

Who is the CXO at Amplify Credit Union and Grant Karsas, who is the VP of Digital Experience at Travis Credit Union. So two very interesting digital credit union execs here to talk about the modern credit union experience delivering high touch banking in the digital age. Okay, let's just start off by, oh, thank you for coming. Thank you. Welcome to digital banking. How do credit unions start building momentum digitally? Everybody wants a digital experience. We've talked a number of times today about how people think their bank is Starbucks and they very much want the stars. They want that sort of everything gamified, everything's sleek and apt X a credit union.

Stacy Armijo (01:20):

You want to dive in?

Grant Karsas (01:21):

Yeah, sure, sure. So there's a couple different approaches, but one that we've done actually a few times since I've been at Travis is we start with a digital audit. Now, most of us in the room have done the audits, the risk assessments. I'm not talking about one like that, I'm talking about one. When you're actually looking at your digital platforms and trying to see, okay, how long has this been around? When was the last update? Who signed this contract? Why did we go with this vendor? Things like that. We also take a look at what's our member feedback and internal feedback. When was the last time you asked anyone internally about their thoughts and stakeholders on your digital platforms that you have there? Third part of this audit we like to look at is our talent assessment. Do we have the right people internally to do what we want? Stacey and I were talking earlier where I told her a story early on at Travis where the team was really motivated to do all this front end development and everything, and we gave 'em a list of 50 things and they delivered one of them. So we figured out we probably don't have the front end experts that we need internally. So just starting with that digital audit is a great place to level set your credit union or your financial institution on some of that.

Chana Schoenberger (02:39):

So sorry, is that not then a matter of you need to swap out your people or you need to upskill your people?

Grant Karsas (02:48):

Do you have them doing the right responsibilities and role in there? So it's not necessarily you need the right people, but this is something we can talk about as well. You do need the right people to do what you want, but also where do you need to supplement with a lot of vendors or FinTech partnerships to get done what you need to? So that kind of where we could get into a whole build versus buy scenario as well.

Stacy Armijo (03:11):

So one thought to follow onto that, if you're doing a digital audit that can feel like you got, the irony is a bunch of paper tends to be the outcome of a digital audit. These big long reports and they have multi-year bajillion dollar investments associated with them as part of the recommendations, which all might make a lot of sense. Also find a quick win. So when I am at the executive table and I'm trying to pitch a multi-year project, I definitely want to cast the vision, right? Here's what I really see happening. Here's what I see longest term, but here are the results you should see over the course of the first quarter, the first half year, the first year. Because if all you've got is the big long strategy, you're going to run out of patience, you're going to get patients at the start, but then you're going to run out of executive level patients and even patients among your team,

Chana Schoenberger (03:59):

And funding you will run out of funding.

Stacy Armijo (04:01):

Not especially, and that will happen exactly when interest rates change and all of a sudden, yes, it was improved in the budget and now all of a sudden it's not approved in the budget anymore. And so to insulate yourself from that is a big deal. Question for the audience though. Do we have credit unions in the room? How many people work for a credit union? Handful. Okay. Yay. Credit unions. That's exciting. One thing that I like to say specifically to credit unions as different from banks is the way credit unions invest in digital infrastructure is different from the way that banks think about it. And in fact, I would encourage you, there's a lot of disadvantages to our business model as credit unions and over happy hour. I would be glad to tell you my woes about what those are. One of the advantages is we can play the long game, so we get the choice to not have to optimize shareholder returns every single quarter. And so we can play the long game when it comes to digital strategy, and so lean into that strength if you're in that area.

Chana Schoenberger (04:56):

That's super interesting. Okay, grant, tell us about the cool project you did at Travis with principal only payments.

Grant Karsas (05:04):

Well, so part of collecting our member feedback of what we've tried to do is not just do surveys a couple times, but we've tried to pair on data that our members are telling us to our internal data as well for how our members are currently using our different feature sets and functionalities. So for instance, one thing that we recently did, we did a feature survey where we took 10 items from our roadmap that we had on our backlog that we were going to do at some point and put it in our online banking platform and had all of our members that would log in, prioritize those and tell us what are you really interested in seeing from prioritization of this list. We got a thousand responses, which was really good, and the number one feature was principle only payments. So we thought, okay, let's move that up.

(05:52):

That's something that's interested. Then we dug into the data with the lending team to see how often are people actually making principal only payments today? And it turns out there were over for our institution size over 4,000 happening every single month where people would go into a branch or actually call a contact center to do this. So now we have the internal data and the member feedback of seeing this, and it just became a very quick win with readiness and rolling that out. So really trying to give our members something that they had been wanting clearly for a while and help out the branch and contact center where we're decreasing some of that volume and traffic.

Chana Schoenberger (06:30):

So how many people are many of those 4,000 transaction or digital now?

Grant Karsas (06:36):

Well, we actually just rolled it out a week and a half ago,

Chana Schoenberger (06:38):

So not very many yet.

Grant Karsas (06:40):

But an interesting thing about it is that we have plans to do marketing with it, but we wanted to keep it very slow from the beginning and see how adoption would happen in the first, I think it was seven days, we saw over 800 of them happen, and it wasn't the 30th or the 15th or the first of the month. It was people just finding this organically and going in and using the feature. So really excited to see how the adoption is going to go once we start to market it more.

Chana Schoenberger (07:08):

Fascinating. Okay. Stacy, you had another interesting project about digital loan payments at Amplify. Tell us about that.

Stacy Armijo (07:15):

Sure. One thing that I consider, I still relatively new to credit unioning slash banking, so I have been in the role that I'm in at Amplify for seven years, and prior to that I was in public relations and marketing, and when I came in I realized our online banking portal is the place where we get the most opportunity to market to our current customers. So how can I get them doing everything I want them to do through that portal? And I said, oh, why do we have these other loan payment opportunities over here that's just taking them away from the eyes I want them to see on this ad that is in my online banking channel? And luckily, I had the wisdom to listen to people who have been at the credit union longer than me and they said, I promise you there's a reason.

(07:54):

And I said, okay, I'm willing to be patient. That reason is online banking is great for visiting your bank accounts and doing banking. It can be really challenging when you're going to pay a loan, when you're trying to do those two very different things through the same channel. It's only going to do one of them the best way that it can do it from a user experience point of view. And so we maintain three or four other ways online that our members can go in and pay their loan. Our most common loan payment is a mortgage payment. That's the primary area of lending that we're in. And what we know is 65% of people still use online banking. That's great, but 35% of our members choose something that is not the most convenient way to pay with us. So we're pushing online banking to you where we're trying to help you do it.

(08:40):

They're choosing another platform because they want to do one thing and they want to do it fast and well. And those that we have a separate online payment portal for that. We have a few other avenues. And so the lesson to me is when you have to choose between what the institution wants and what the customer wants, hopefully we want the same thing and we spend a lot of time and energy designing products and making decisions to align those in the same direction. But sometimes they come into conflict and when they come into conflict, we choose our customer's preference over ours. So we have to maintain a level of operational complexity with multiple different payment avenues, and I miss the opportunity to get to show them my ad for the great rate I have on a CD right now, which is what I really want them to do when they go on and make their loan payment. But I have to choose to forego that because I need to play the long game of loyalty and good experience because I need them to come back to me for another mortgage.

Chana Schoenberger (09:32):

So this is the classic example with Netflix when they got rid of mailing DVDs, and I don't know how many of you were Netflix customers back when you used to mail DVDs, right? Lots of us. And there were some people who did not want to stream, they didn't have the ability to stream, they weren't interested in streaming and they just wanted to mail DVDs. And when Netflix got rid of that, there was a huge customer backlash because now people needed to sign up for a subscription that wasn't necessarily giving them what they wanted. It's like a classic marketing fail.

Stacy Armijo (10:01):

Absolutely. Well, and so it takes a lot of courage to be willing to do that because this is, it's a difficult industry when you choose to make less money. So I'm leaving some money on the table doing that, right? I'm missing some potential cross-sell opportunity, and I'm certainly taking on additional cost. I mean, we've got to maintain all those channels and there's all the things that we have to do there. It takes your organization's support to say, yes, we all agree that when you have to prioritize those things, this is how we see it playing out in the business, and we're all willing to go there with you and to stay there with you even when the financials are challenged. So everybody agrees with you when we just had a great quarter, it's when we didn't have a great quarter that everybody says, really? Is that what we're going to do? So if you're in that moment, I take heart to say I looked at those payments that are being made in online banking as recently as two days ago to say how many of them are recurring payments? So they set and forget it, right? They went into online banking and they just set it up as a recurring payment. 60% of those payments are set up as recurring payments. So really I'm not losing as much as I thought. So when you prioritize the customer's interest, you're probably going to come out ahead.

Chana Schoenberger (11:06):

No, that makes perfect sense. Okay, cool. So how do you know what your customers want? What is the way to determine what they want? And do they always tell you what they want and do they always know their own minds?

Stacy Armijo (11:20):

Can I start?

Grant Karsas (11:21):

Yeah, please.

Stacy Armijo (11:21):

I want to say the first way to not know what they want is ask them. So that would be the answer, right? Say, oh, well, how do you know what they want? Ask 'em what they want. If you ask me what I want, I would tell you I would like the best suite in this hotel and I would like the best bottle of champagne delivered to my doorstep, and I would like a massage. And then you ask me, how much am I willing to pay for that? And all of a sudden asking me what I want is a different opportunity. And what I would tell you is what we want and what we say we want is different than what our behavior tells we the financial institutions we really want, especially when it comes to as financial institutions. I like to think we're sexy and I'm really excited about what we do, but we are the water company to our customers.

Chana Schoenberger (12:11):

There's nothing sexier than a credit union.

Stacy Armijo (12:14):

I mean, yeah, it's very exciting. And so if you remember, you're a commodity. You are the water company and no one thinks about you unless they turn on the tap and it doesn't work. If you accept that as reality, then you recognize people can rail and complain and talk about what they want, but you got to watch what they do with their feet or more specifically with their dollars, and that's how you really know.

Grant Karsas (12:34):

I think that was back in the day, a famous Steve Jobs quote when people asked him, how do you know what people want? How are you determining what your customers at Apple want? He says, well, I tell them what they want. He just had that mindset because of when there is new technology coming out as a consumer, to your point, it's very hard for us to conceptualize, well, that sounds kind of neat, but I can't see it. I can't feel it. I can't touch it. I don't know how to visualize that new thing out there for it. So it's kind of where we're trying to do this blend of, how do we say the word, especially as a credit union, be innovative versus trying to make this run where we're trying to compete with the big banks in our market and try to be competitive digitally.

(13:24):

And a lot of these conferences, and I've been in different meetings where folks are scared of, I'm sure you guys had talks about the Amazon and Bank and the Googles as a bank and all of these and saying, well, we can't compete with that. We can't compete digitally experience wise with them because they have a $2 billion credit budget for, I'm sorry, a budget for all their digital. Actually we can, it doesn't mean that we're going to make this huge differentiator. We're going to build from scratch and take years to do. Maybe we could partner with somebody, get it in market and start having that kind of equal experience that they would expect from a larger financial institution. And they get to a credit union and they're like, wow, this is with my big bank, and you guys have really the great rates. Now I'm looking at you in a different sense.

(14:14):

So how do you test some of these things out? And we're starting an influencer group right now with our membership base to have them come along the way with us so that we can start to have them visualize these, design them out, have them look at them as user testing and say, what do you think about this? What kind of feelings does this resonate? Do you think this is an easy experience, yes or no with this? So that they can actually play a part in designing the future of what we are doing technology wise at the credit union, and really excited to kick that one off here in the coming month.

Chana Schoenberger (14:47):

That's very cool. No, speaking of Steve Jobs, so when the iPhone came out, I was a foreign correspondent for Forbes Magazine in Japan, which super fun, highly recommend living in Japan for anyone who hasn't tried it. And Docomo NTT Docomo is the big phone carrier there. And everyone said the iPhone will never make a splash in Japan because the Japanese really want the phones that they have, which are heavily reliant on dropdown menus and a lot of little interrelated apps within their own ecosystem, and there's no chance that they're interested in what Apple is selling. And on the day that the iPhone came out, there was a line around the block at every Apple store and it was a huge success. The corporate types and the forecasters don't always know what's going on. Just because people have had one consumer behavior in the past doesn't mean that that's what they'll do when a new option comes on the market.

Stacy Armijo (15:42):

One way that we think about this, and I think this might be Steve Jobs as well, is people are experts in their problems, not in the solutions to their problems. So when it comes to getting that member feedback, and so when I say don't talk to your customer, I don't mean don't talk to your customer. What I mean is don't make them do our job. Our job is to come up with the solution and to predict what it is that they resonate with best. They know best what their problem is. And so we got to hear about their problem, we got to do our job with the solution, and then let their behavior dictate what we continue to invest in versus what we pivot away from.

Chana Schoenberger (16:17):

Right. No, that makes total sense. But the sort of flip side of that is you're a business, even though you are not for profit, you are a business. You have to make money for your members or at least not go out of business with their deposits. So how do you balance what the customer wants and what the institution needs?

Grant Karsas (16:40):

I think it's a fun conversation, and we were talking about this too, Stacy and I, a little bit about the credit union mentality versus banks. And I've worked in banks, I've worked in credit unions, fintechs, it's a very different mindset when we're in the bank, it is product, product, product. But on the credit union side, we can skew a little too much sometimes to doing what's right for the customer, and we're always there for them because of our relationship and trust.

Chana Schoenberger (17:08):

Stop doing that. Stop doing what's right for your customer.

Grant Karsas (17:11):

I mean, it's not saying don't do what's right for your customer. That's not what I'm, there's two sides to the right and to the pendulum to swing. But to your point, you have to stay in business. We have to stay in business. So how can we think about this a little bit more if we're the credit union and knowing that our core focuses are, we're a state chartered credit union, so we're huge in our community. We have this huge relationship with the different locations that our branches are in throughout the East Bay area. How do we think about that? And then also drive our mission and our business as a credit union. So what we tried to do is, again, it starts from the top down, really aligned and did a very thoughtful process with the executive team and the board to come up with our new North Star to align everyone on the team, okay, what are we trying to be?

(18:03):

We're not trying to be the greatest credit union in the country, but how great can we do this to be focused on Northern California as a credit union? And then where does the business mindset come in for us to drive that with our products? So really everything needs to align to certain aspects of our mission, whether it's driving compelling value, operational efficiency, or people management for our teams. Those three areas is really where we try to align all of our projects to make sure that we're focusing on driving the business and doing what's right for our members.

Stacy Armijo (18:41):

So one thing that Grant and I discovered when we chatted earlier is that both of our credit unions are CEOs who were bankers. And so I find it's interesting because at Amplify we say revenue is not the reason that we do what we do, but it is the evidence of our mission well delivered. And so we make no apologies about being financially disciplined and about making money because if we can't make money, we can't continue to deliver our mission. And so we're very forthright about that. I do believe our credit unions as a whole could be better about that because I believe that what we do is really impactful and we do have opportunity to do it better than anybody else can do it, which is the standard that we should have, but we've got to have disciplined practices behind it to be able to do that.

(19:26):

So I think your original question was about how do we align what our customer needs and how do we navigate that with what the institution needs? The primary way that Amplify has done that is we try to make sure that our interests are in alignment with the customers, and when they're not, we fix that. So our biggest example is we are only credit union. We're the only financial institution in the country that offers entirely fee free banking. So it is impossible for any depositor with any balance of any behavior to incur any fee ever. And I've learned we have to say it that way because nobody believes us. So it's Oh, a free checking. No, it's not free checking. A little over three years ago, we turned off every single deposit fee that our institution has. So you still send wire transfers, they're just all free.

(20:10):

We still extend overdraft protection to all the same limits we always did. It's just always free. Everything that you could do before you can do now, we just won't charge you one dime for any of it. And so the reason we did that is because we realized when it comes to that type of non-interest income that is non-interest income earned off the backs of your members who don't have money. So look at that type of fee income and your organization, and guess where the majority of it comes from? I can tell you the majority of it comes from overdraft protection. In our world, I think it was of all that type of fee income, even though we turned off all the fees, I think close to 90% of the income we no longer collect was income. We were earning previously from overdraft protection as a mission-driven financial institution whose mission is to improve the financial lives of our members and the strength of our community.

(20:59):

It is not okay for us to make money that way. So we decided we're not going to, and we took two and a half years to change our business model and to change our technology stack to be able to do that. So my colleagues, Chrissy and Jennifer are here in the audience and they know how much work it took to adapt our technology to get it to stop charging fees because every system we've got is designed to optimize fee income, right? And so when you say, no, no, I actually don't want any, you actually have to do a lot of configuration to make your system not do that. So it's a little bit of an extreme example where you're like, well, we're just going to not So our customer, nobody woke up and said, I want to buy a bank fee today. Nobody did that. And so we decided we aren't going to rely on that as our income stream and we changed the business.

Chana Schoenberger (21:39):

That's fascinating. That's really interesting.

Stacy Armijo (21:42):

We like it.

Chana Schoenberger (21:42):

Yeah. So did you make up that revenue in some other way?

Stacy Armijo (21:47):

We did. So the theory was where all this came from actually with some research that we commissioned about what actually makes somebody change their checking and savings account. So this morning, I think it was during the first panel discussion on customer experience in the general session, I believe it was the gentleman from Truist who said, who's changed your bank in the last year? And right after we had heard it's so easy to change your banks, which it is so easy to change banks today.

Chana Schoenberger (22:13):

Nobody does it,

Stacy Armijo (22:14):

But no one does. You know why? Because no one woke up today and said, I would like to do a lot of administrivia and change banks. No one wants to. You only do it when you are forced to in some particular way. And what this research revealed to us is one of those forcing functions, or I'm going to call it inspiring functions, can be a bank fee. And so not as in I can't afford it, but as in that's my money. I woke up today and I suddenly had a $25 fee that I stumbled into and I'm mad. And the way to get somebody to do something that's difficult is to inspire emotion. We'd like to inspire a positive emotion. Negative emotion motivates much more effectively, especially when you're trying to get somebody to do something new. So for us, this started as well, how about, so the researchers were giving us this presentation to our senior team, and all of us were like, oh, that's interesting. And we were talking about ham, maybe we could lower the fees, maybe we could change them whatnot. And our CEO said, what if we just got rid of him? And we all laughed actually, because we all thought he joking.

Chana Schoenberger (23:09):

Your CEO is a banker, right?

Stacy Armijo (23:11):

See, bankers can be people too. But we all thought he was joking. And then I went and dug into it. I was like, maybe we could have gotten criticism for our limited non-interest income up to this point of account fee income to where, because we've always had a fee averse membership. And so what we realized was this would be a bet that we could actually make. And I said, lowering the fees doesn't get you anything from a marketing point of view. If you want to make the claim, you got to go whole hog. You got to do the whole thing. And so that's what we chose to do. We gave up $4 million, $2 million a year of net interest income, which for us is a lot of money. And the bet was if we could grow checking and savings accounts above baseline, then we're going to get those core deposits that's going to improve our net interest margin.

(23:57):

And if we can activate debit cards on those checking accounts to the same extent that we activate them, typically we're going to get that interchange income net net. We actually come at a winner. Did it work? It did. Wow. So we grew checking accounts 5% faster than baseline over the course of the first year after we launched, we grew savings accounts 8% faster than baseline. So the growth worked. The part of it that didn't work as well, the interchange income, we've been watching interchange income get eroded generally over time, and we couldn't isolate those accounts and whether they were performing exactly the way that we wanted. So hard to say, did we get the win on the interchange play? I don't know. Did we get the growth that we were looking for? We did. And we actually got, everybody thought, well, okay, if you're going to do that, you can get a bunch of low balance accounts.

(24:40):

Who wants that? Which I'm like, that's wrong with banking a bunch of low balance accounts. Who's going to waste their time? Gee, who wants to serve people that can't keep $15,000 in their checking account? I do. They need a bank and they're doing good things in their community. But also we actually got much bigger accounts than that because it's not about the dollar amount of the fee, it's about the emotion of I don't want my bank to screw me over. That was the language the researchers uncovered. I'm afraid my bank is going to screw me over and we're telling you we never will. And so people like that.

Chana Schoenberger (25:08):

So it's basically just like a behavioral finance hack slash marketing ploy.

Stacy Armijo (25:13):

Totally.

Chana Schoenberger (25:14):

Wow. Okay. That is fascinating. That's really interesting. Has anyone else tried this? Has anyone else tried getting rid of all the fees?

Stacy Armijo (25:24):

Come do it. It's really fun.

Chana Schoenberger (25:26):

Come find Stacy after the session if you want to know how to get rid of all your fees. Okay, different question, which is credit unions have a big over-reliance on older members, and a lot of this is for historical reasons, but it's also because Gen Zs are really into their phones. How are you dealing with that demographic challenge by using digital?

Grant Karsas (25:47):

So a variety of ways. Obviously we've been talking about community and a lot that we're doing there. We actually have a program called Generation Wealth where we have a team that goes out into the community, does a lot of financial wellness and education within schools and in the public sector. And these are very well received within our areas that we serve. And so what we're also trying to do here is foster that next generation of folks. But then we also realized, wait, we go and we do these talks and have people there, but we really don't have something that we're giving them to take away outside of just this knowledge to actually tie them into us as well. And so what we're also trying to do, yes, we do offer youth accounts, but we need to do more there, especially digitally for those populations. So we're trying to develop right now how we have that tangible benefit to have them tied to a youth account if they're under the age of 18 with their parents. So they're not only educated on this, but they can continue to manage it in a day-to-day basis as well.

Chana Schoenberger (26:53):

This is one of our, another bank just won our innovation of the year awards for an under 18 financial wellness product. It's very cool. So those of you who are coming to our award ceremony tonight, we'll get to hear about that.

Stacy Armijo (27:06):

We do something similar. We have a product called Bonsai that is sort of a build your own adventure digital tool for financial education. So hopefully it's less stayed than somebody standing up and giving a presentation about budgeting. It's something a little more interactive that audience would find appealing. And we also use Greenlight. So we offer Greenlight to our members. If they fund it through their Amplify account, it's entirely free because we're fee free. So I actually used Greenlight before Amplify had it with my two boys. And really what we're trying to do there is we're trying to create inertia in our favor. So our biggest competitor is Inertia. It is not any other financial institution. It is inertia. And so my very unscientific survey, every time someone says, oh, I'm a member of Amplify. When they ask what I do and I tell them and they say I'm a member.

(27:52):

Oh great, how'd you become a member? I always ask at least half the time, oh, my dad was an IBM er. My mom was an IBM er. So IBM is our historical field of membership. We converted to a community charter about 20 years ago and it's still a huge center of gravity for us. And so what I know is that I can transfer my kids' allowance on an app and when they say, mom, can I go get that game that I wanted to play? And I can say, here's what you got in your account. You sure you want to spend it? And they say yes or no, and I do it right there and then in the future I'm going to have to, my sister has kids in college and I see how often money goes back and forth between their accounts. So in my mind, banking is just like your cell phone plan. Is your whole family on? Are you an Apple family or an Android family? You're probably one or the other. You probably don't have an outlier. I think banking is the same, and so we want to educate future generations, but I also want their parents deposits today. And so it's tried to do both.

Chana Schoenberger (28:46):

Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. One of you had a great stat about the number of Gen Zers you need to replace a Gen Xer or a Boomer.

Stacy Armijo (28:56):

It's horrifying. I do have these statistics. So we looked at our depositors from 2024, and we always look at new behaviors. So when we say new behavior, we look at brand new memberships. So all in dollars you have with us, regardless of how many accounts, brand new memberships, and what does that tell us about where we're getting new money from, which we learned a lot from this past year, we were able to compare that to closed memberships. So for memberships that were closed in 2024 as compared to those that were open, what we learned is for every member of the silent generation, so the silent generation is ages 80 to 97, for every member of the silent generation who closes their membership with us, it takes 24 new Gen Z depositors. So I have to go find 24 members of Gen Z to replace one member of the silent generation just to stay even on dollars.

(29:48):

Here's what is more horrifying than that. Our silent generation members who are closing their memberships, they are most likely is because their wealth is moving on to the next generation. What's happening here? And so what is that next generation going to do with that money? Do we think they're going to put it in a CD or a money market or their savings account? I think the keynote speaker this morning said 25% of adults have some sort of digital asset. Even if they're not going all the way to something like cryptocurrency, they're certainly putting it in the market from where they are. So as we think about not just the impact to us, but it's not just that we want to get that new member to bank with us, it's that they probably aren't putting it in a bank. And so how are we running that race to be able to keep up?

Grant Karsas (30:33):

Yeah, I was going to say, when you told us that on the phone, I thought that was brilliant because it actually aligns a lot with what we're doing too, because with the younger generations, they want more features from their digital tools. And so that's what we're looking to do now as well because it's no longer, when I came in and I'm looking at our digital banking platform at the time, and members were like, yeah, we're happy with it. It's because they were just going in to see their balance. They didn't care about anything else, and that was the generation and segment that we had. Now we have a much more robust feature set that we're offering to bring in those generations. But not just that, we are very much deep into adding the investment type of product to our platform now, which at one time I was like, how are we doing this an investment product.

(31:25):

There are entire apps out there for that yet. We want to take an entire app and put it in our banking app. Well, no, it's actually possible and can be very straightforward and we're not trying to unhinging like a Robinhood or anything like that, but if we're someone's primary credit union, we want to give them the option to actually try and start investing with us rather than continuing to funnel out to the Robin Hoods in the betterments out there, there's, we have tons of stats of our members of how much money they're pushing out to those platforms. Why not keep some of that? And that's what our younger generations are looking for and we want to be there when they're coming to us asking for those types of features.

Chana Schoenberger (32:06):

I unfortunately have to shut this fascinating conversation down. I think next we have the demo challenge. Is that right guys? Yes. So if you want to see very cool fintechs get judged on how awesome they are in the most brutal way possible. Please join us over there and thank you very much to Grant and Stacy. Thank you.

Grant Karsas (32:24):

Thanks so much.