WASHINGTON–CU Direct will soon be unveiling an Innovation Lab as part of 10,000 square feet of space it has built out with a goal of helping credit unions make more loans.
The goal is to innovate, prototype, and, just as importantly, bring to the market strategies for driving lending volume, the company is stressing. Those innovations will include all types of loans, not just automobile loans.
“The keys for us have always been how can we make more loans and how can we do so more efficiently,” said Tony Boutelle, CEO of CU Direct. “We have always looked to come up with new ideas, but with the Innovation Lab we want to do more than just applied research. With the Innovation Lab, we want to research, prototype and test these new lending ideas that improve the member experience.”
The new facility is separate from CU Direct’s current offices in Ontario, Calif., and is located in the Irvine Towers in Irvine, Calif. It will also house the company’s marketing personnel and also have meeting space available. CU Direct has recently named a new marketing director, David Reeve, and hired a new SVP of marketing and innovation, Brian Hendricks.
“Innovation has always come from three places: your staff, your members or customers, and the competition,” said Boutelle.
But that’s often the easy part, he acknowledged, citing the definition of “innovation” by Stanford University as being “invention plus adoption.”
“There is a lot of invention,” he noted, “but not enough adoption.”
Working With Advisory Councils
The Innovation Lab is designed to take those concepts and push them forward to the point they bring a benefit to credit unions.
To that end CU Direct will be working with the six advisory councils it has in place, including with auto dealers themselves, as it seeks to resolve what Boutelle called the “pain points” in the lending process and then to scale those ideas to improve the member experience, the dealer experience, and the credit union experience.
Boutelle said plans call for bringing together a mix of product people, developer groups, would-be end-users and others as part of the Innovation Lab process. He added the company has been in contact with the Filene Research Institute regarding its plans, and has invited Filene to use the new facility, as well.
Boutelle stressed the CU Direct Innovation Lab is dedicated to identifying and putting into place improvements in all types of lending, not just the auto lending in which it specializes, but also its OnSpot lending program, mortgage lending and home equity lending.
Asked by CUToday.info about an area where he might like to see some innovation, Boutelle said he’d be interested in seeing the Innovation Lab tackle the traditional paper-based preapproval check credit unions provide to members and digitize it so it can be shown on a member’s telephone.