MADISON, Wis.–There are two forces racing with each other in the market, and credit unions often fall behind. But so do most other providers, according to one analyst.
Those two forces are the actual institution itself, which is very traditional, and the consumer/member, who are most likely to move quickly and leave providers to catch up–and some never do.
In an opening keynote to CUNA Mutual’s Discovery Conference, Scott Bales, a global futurist, innovation and digital strategist, and managing director of Innovation Labs, Asia, shared observations he had gleaned and lessons learned in working with numerous brands around the world.
Not surprisingly, he said those brands are confronting the same quickly evolving challenge as are credit unions.
“There is a proliferation of data in society. It will accelerate year after year,” he said, citing all the behavioral data that is available on just how much happens on the Internet in just one minute. “There is too much to pay attention to.”
What every business must pay attention to, he said, is how it will impact the business and how to prioritize one option over the next.
“By the time we reach 2020, the data volumes around the world will be 44 times bigger than they were in 2009,” said Bales. “In a world where data is only going to grow up, how do we pull in the data that is appropriate for our business?”
The answer, he said, can be found in big data and the cloud.
“The complexity here isn’t from the user story; it’s how do I look at that from a technology standpoint and build the sensory inputs to know when to respond and when to anticipate,” he explained. “The key is knowing which ones are most likely to disrupt our business. Big data becomes the underlying rich lake of insights into how the world is evolving.”
The last—but not in importance—component of all that, he added, is data security.
4 Forces
Credit unions often hear a message around disruption, and Bales said there are four forces driving it that are all part of the Customer Centricity Index:
- Complex experiences
- Broken trust (“Trust is now a highly valued commodity.”)
- Redundant intermediaries (Can we leapfrog over something?”)
- Limited access (“This is where we see a number of start-ups spinning to their advantage.”)
“The challenge we have with this is while we know the data points, we still have very traditional organizations,” observed Bales.
“The questions is how do we equip these organizations to be agile and responsive. The inhibitor is the industrial age hierarchy, where information flows up and decisions flow down. This is great when you’re building steam engines. But making decisions in real time is very, very challenging.”
Bales said if there is one effective motivator in organizations today it’s recognizing their vulnerability.
“Vulnerability is one of the most key motivations in the innovation space today,” he said. “It’s what gives us the internal motivation, the desire to change. It’s far more motivating.”
For credit unions failing at evolving, Bales said it all comes down to mindset.
“The inability to try new things as an organization is a mindset challenge,” he said. “It’s about growth mindset vs. a fixed mindset, optimism vs. pessimism. We need to embrace a more optimistic view. That needs to be a natural habit in our organization, with prepared mechanisms for responding to input. You need to know where you want to be in the future.”