SPOKANE, Wash.–It’s no longer a case of consumers demanding digital access and services: they’ve become dependent upon it, according to one person.
Todd Clark, CEO of CO-OP Financial Services, said recent research among 33,000 financial services consumers found:
- 72% said it’s OK to be entirely digital
- 67% demand personalization
- 61% are channel agnostic
- 73% will share personal data for new benefits
- 50% of Gen Y willing to bank with GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook Amazon)
“The good news is consumers don’t think they’re going to change their behavior much over the next four or five years,” Clark told the Northwest Credit Union Association’s MAXX Conference here. “The bad news is merchants are leaning into it and want consumers to change their behavior.”
Clark noted that real-time P2P is moving quickly into the mainstream, with services such as Venmo. Many credit unions, as well as CO-OP, have partnered with the P2P network Zelle, which signs up 50,000 new consumers every day he said. Already, the Zelle network has seen 100 million transactions already.
“The opportunity here isn’t just P2P, but also P2B (Person to Business payments) and bringing this back into the hands of the financial institutions,” said Clark. While some CUs might object to partnering with a network in which major banks are involved, Clark asked, “Would you rather work with Zelle and other financial institutions, or have members move to Venmo?”
Clark also pointed to a PwC Global forecast that probed which part of the financial sector is most likely to disrupted by fintech over next five years and which found the top two areas were consumer banking and funds transfer/payments.
For those reasons and others, he said, CO-OP is “crazy focused” on getting its core services better, including credit/debit, shared branches and call center. He said CO-OP has been working around the clock to remove silos inside the company, where the motto is “integration is innovation.”