PHOENIX–Credit unions really are in a “race to excellence” when it comes to digital transformation, and there’s no reason they can’t win, according to one person.
Speaking to the THINK 18 meeting here, Samantha Paxson, chief marketing and experience officer with CO-OP Financial Services, said every credit union needs to be asking itself “how do we go faster into the future” while simultaneously retaining everything that makes a credit union a credit union.
“It may not feel like it, but you can change rapidly,” Paxson said. “Why not us? Why can’t we harness the power of digital transformation to propel the credit union to places it’s never been before? Why can’t we be first?”
Paxson said she would like to see a world in which credit unions are at the conferences of other industries telling them what’s happening in the credit union space and how credit unions are doing it smarter and better.”
But why should a credit union care?
“The reason is our members don’t and won’t wait,” she said. “In the race to excellence we have one competitor: our members’ expectations.”
Core Strategies in the Race
Paxson said CO-OP has several core strategies as the foundation of its own race to excellence as part of its digital transformation strategy, including:
- Be Member Centric. “This is the centerpiece of the overall digital transformation strategy at CO-OP.”
- Use data to optimize engagement. “I really think we should use all the bits and bytes from our members to start a conversation with members. By optimizing that engagement with data, we get to a place where we can anticipate the needs of members before they even know what they want. We can get in front of member expectations.”
- Be digitally accessible. “That means reaching into channels a credit union doesn’t fully control. The solution lies in APIs.”
- Drive excellence through AI. “AI allows us to expand accessibility, our speed and our service.” It also allows a credit union to capture member stories and uncover insights, she added. “We can discover things it would not be humanly possible to see.”
- Make Security a Growth Driver. “People are getting savvy about how their data is accessed, messed up and sometimes messed with. Security is a key to driving trust.”
- Integrate channel experiences. “The member should be able to enter any channel and exit form another one in a completely seamless journey,” said Paxson. “The member should be able to bounce around from channel to channel depending on where they are in their journey and at any time. We need to look at this from their perspective.”
- Embrace Platform Thinking. “In Europe, banks be obligated to allow third parties to access customer accounts through open APIs. It comes from a philosophy that financial services is truly an ecosystem, and at CO-OP we are pretty darned sold on this. We believe that credit unions, CO-OP included, must operate like a financial services ecosystem based on a very human foundation—we share with each other. That’s a very basic credit union philosophy.”