LAS VEGAS--The good news for American Heritage Credit Union? It grew by $1 billion in approximately 18 months. The bad news for American Heritage Credit Union: It grew by nearly $1 billion in assets in one month.
How it responded so the good far outweighed the bad was outlined by one executive with the credit union during remarks here.
Speaking to NACUSO’s Network Conference during a session titled “How Fintech CUSOs Help the CUs Invested in Them, the Fintechs Themselves and the Credit Union Movement as a Whole,” Breana Wolfert shared how the $3.6-billion, Philadelphia-based American Heritage has turned a disparate and often frustrating experience for both members and employees alike into a much more enjoyable process that has driven strong growth in household relationships. It did that, she explained, via the formation of a CUSO that provides CRM solutions and internal dashboards in partnership with a data analytics company called Datava.
Turning to a CUSO to create solutions is not new for American Heritage, which has about 230,000 members and which is primarily SEG-based, with approximately 800 of what it calls “workplace partners.” The credit union also has other CUSOs, including First Heritage Mortgage Services, American Heritage Realty, and NU Direction Lending, a small business lending subsidiary.
“The reason we formed all these CUSOs is we had needs and we elected to work with companies that would help us meet member needs in all of these spaces,” said Wolfert, AVP of branch operations project management.
Some Catching Up
A big one of those needs was delivering a better member service experience as assets surged.
“Our growth was very rapid and we have some catching up to do,” said Wolfert. “That means leaning on solutions like Datava to bring us to scale.
“With our rapid growth we were bringing on new bodies all the time and in the Great Resignation faces are changing all the time,” Wolfert continued. “It’s harder to establish those relationships with your members. Their information had stayed with team members and we didn’t have a good space for sharing all this information. We have mortgage teams, small business teams, front line staff working with members, but we had no way to jointly share our information. That was a struggle. When we would speak with a member it was as if a member was starting fresh, and that’s not what we want to do. We want to recognize the member’s face and we want them to recognize us.”
Wolfert further noted that with employee turnover the issue isn’t just the resignations but all of the resulting resource constraints, as new projects put new strain on teams already bogged down with the projects in front of them.
“That’s when you look outside,” said Wolfert, who had had experience with Datava’s CRM solutions in a previous position. “We wanted some sort of cohesion with our members, our partners and all the data on various systems. And that’s where we thought it made sense to form a relationship with a CRM vendor to create a CUSO to unite all our CUSOs.”
How to Solve the Problem
According to Wolfert, the first step the credit union/CUSO took was to aggregate all of its data in order to not just reduce aggravations but to better utilize employees’ time.
“We were very good at finding a solution to a problem, but then what happens to all those solutions? It made sense to focus on (employee) skills in uncovering members’ needs rather than training them on segregated systems.”
The next step was to curate all of its data and to clean it so it had a true definition of each member “so we can create the best member story we can create.”
To that end American Heritage/Datava created dashboards so employees could interact with the data for the benefit of the next person who interacted with that member, she said.
Prior to doing its RFP, Wolfert said American Heritage ruled out an out-of-the-box solution as a “little too cold for us” as well as an in-house solution, as it would suffer from resource restraints.
“Ultimately we landed on a need to find someone in the fintech space who could make something we want to make,” said Wolfert. “We want all the functionality that will help any credit union easily transform their data and make consumable dashboards for the front-line staff. That’s when we settled on Datava.”
The Rollout
With Datava in place, American Heritage began to roll out the solution to various functions with the credit union.
“The first deployment was SEG management, as business development doesn’t have a lot of interaction with the core, they are front-facing,” said Wolfert. “For them we needed a solution that could help them to prospect new members and new workplace partners. We needed it to be mobile and to able to be taken on the road. The dashboards for management team needed to measure performance of the people on the road.”
Rollout of the SEG management solution took six weeks and resulted in a 29% increase in retail deposits from workplace partners, she said.
American Heritage next rolled out its CRM solution for its indirect lending team. That required 12 weeks to deploy and resulted in a 200% increase in indirect lending approved loans in one year. It also provides historical views to allow the credit union to better measure auto dealership performance.
The next piece of functionality to roll out was the credit union’s Member Dashboard, said Wolfert. That required four months to deploy and has led to a 25% increase in household cross-sell. It was designed in-house in conjunction with the Datava team, said Wolfert.
‘Jumping for Joy’
Wolfert said American Heritage employees can now use the dashboard and with one click “know the whole member story. With one click-through they can see all the information pulled from the LOS, for example. There are drill-downs any place there is a number.”
The dashboard includes predictive analytics using the Datava analytics engine to help present the next best product to the member.
“Our front-line employees have jumped for joy in that they don’t have to essentially do homework before meeting with a member,” said Wolfert. “We had the data, and we just needed to present it in a better fashion for them.”
The next piece to roll out at American Heritage was the Executive Dashboard.
“They wanted some GL information on multiple levels,” said Wolfert, along with information such as average age of members, household product penetration and data broken out by branch. “We tried to make it as easy as possible to navigate so they are not wasting time sitting in another training class teaching where we are teaching them how to use another system.”
The Final Piece
The final piece to roll out as part of American Heritage’s CRM solution has been new member onboarding, according to Wolfert.
“One of the most important things for any credit union is onboarding,” said Wolfert, noting that prior to the new solution the credit union had in place a cumbersome, paper-based process that involved a lot of labor to get all the pieces in front of the CU’s Concierge team. Anecdotally, before putting onboarding into Datava, our onboarding was very labor intensive, involved printing out a lot of reports and manually sending them to Concierge team.
“A lot of time was spent where we were not speaking with members and uncovering member needs. We automated all of that,” said Wolfert. “Datava recognizes a new account, a first new account for a member. Once a new account is recognized (the solution) generates tasks that are automatically round-robined out to the Concierge staff and puts together accounts that belong together. For the team it is very easy for them. There is a funnel with their pipeline—the first day calls, the check in calls, and the final calls. It stores notes and retains information for the benefit of next person.”