Digital banking puts so much revelatory data within your credit union’s reach that The Financial Brand suggests your institution has all the information it needs to anticipate the financial needs of each of your members.

Even so, many traditional financial institutions still struggle to tap into that incredible power, while industry challengers like neobanks are excelling at it.

Why the struggle? Credit union data is often trapped in siloed processes and disjointed systems. This leaves your institution with an incomplete view with which to fully analyze your members’ habits, needs and preferences, along with the risks associated with them.

The only way to unlock this valuable data is with a fully integrated, all-in-one core that yields real-time data analytics that explore the full spectrum of your operations and are visible across your entire institution. With this kind of insight, you’ll be able to improve your bottom line in multiple ways, including the following:

Expansive Member Intelligence

With every debit or credit card swipe, remote or ATM deposit and mobile or online loan application, your members are telling you something about their spending habits and financial goals. Every voice, text, chatbot, branch, email and social media interaction with your credit union adds relevant detail to these stories. This is everything from member channel preferences to current credit scores and gathered documentation, like uploaded driver’s license photos.

All of this information comes together to form a complete picture of each member. When your staff has full access to this profile through an enterprise dashboard available from your core, they avoid critical blunders like:

• Asking members for information they’ve already supplied
• Failing to seamlessly approach members or present offers in the channel of their choice
• Not proactively anticipating member product and service needs
• Pitching products or services not customized to members’ actual needs

Such errors cause members to lose trust in your credit union, which can decrease their satisfaction, weaken your relationship and possibly lead them to another financial institution.

CU*BASE has a comprehensive suite of real-time data analytics containing more than 180 report-generating tools and 40 pre-canned query tools that credit unions can use to make informed, data-driven decisions that benefit members as well as the institution.

Improved Efficiency, Productivity and Accuracy

Conversely, an incomplete member picture can derail cross-selling and up-selling efforts from the start. Badly timed and poorly targeted marketing campaigns waste valuable dollars.

However, expansive member intelligence lets you segment members by various criteria, such as credit score, age or location, to create hyper-segmented, highly customized campaigns that yield higher response rates and lead to stickier and more profitable relationships.

Plus, with a fully integrated core, neither member-facing nor back-office employees need to toggle between disparate systems to enter information—a typical cause of errors and duplicative work. This also leads to faster response times and increased productivity when your staff needs to access and retrieve information to address member needs or assess their requests.

Risk Reduction

An integrated core also provides better insight into your risk exposure from the following areas:

• Individual members: With complete member profiles, you can make more informed lending decisions in less time, which are more effectively priced for risk.
• Overall portfolio: Complete loan tracking and reporting helps you monitor your entire portfolio for early detection of problematic trends, such as rising delinquencies, charge-offs and foreclosures.
• Regulatory: Built-in compliance functionality streamlines your ability to meet your obligations to things like the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), anti-money laundering (AML) regulations, fraud prevention and OFAC watchlist screening without creating undue friction for your members. This also reduces your chance of a costly enforcement action.

Greater Employee Satisfaction and Retention Rates

No matter an employee’s role, whether it’s a member service representative, loan officer, fraud analyst, marketing specialist, etc., they’re much happier when they can fulfill their responsibilities without the friction and complication of multiple tools that don’t speak to each other.

At a time when overall voluntary employee resignations still hover close to 4 million people per month, such employee satisfaction is as critical as ever. It’s also easier to attract top talent when your credit union boasts the seamless technology that employees enjoy in their personal lives and now increasingly demand in their work lives. 

And don’t forget, happier and more talented employees are more likely to deliver exceptional member experiences. This further boosts your member satisfaction rates on top of the personalized banking you’re providing through in-depth data analytics.

Overall Competitive Edge

In the age of digital banking, no financial institution can afford to ignore its data, especially not your credit union. It’s time to put all that data to work for your members and your employees, and give your institution the advantage it needs to compete against other traditional banks and all the newcomers disrupting the market.

This is just a snapshot of the benefits you’ll experience from the data analytics generated by an all-in-one core. And when that cutting-edge solution comes from a CUSO like CU*SOUTH, you’ll have the added satisfaction of knowing it’s been created and perfected with feedback from member credit unions based on their real-world experiences.

Contact us to learn more about the data analytics benefits of CU*BASE. 

CU*SOUTH is building a collaborative, peer-to-peer community of Credit Unions
through shared development of technology and service platforms. CU*SOUTH is headquartered on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, with a nationwide network of CU experts.