By Frank J. Diekmann
Listen to this most eloquent description of the credit union mission: “(We) are here to help you on your journey to achieve your dreams. No matter how you got here, we will help you all along the way. We'll walk with you down any path you choose, adding guidance when you need it. Maybe your path needs you to pay off your credit cards, or maybe it needs inspiration from others' stories. We are here for you. We're not a bank. We're people building personal products with a purpose: helping you achieve your dreams and empowering you to live your best life.”
Pure prose about credit union philosophy and mission at its best, right? Unfortunately, it’s not from a credit union. It’s from a company called Payoff that specializes in making loans for just that purpose: paying off debts, in this case, credit cards.
“Payoff is a next generation financial services company, designing products that help people pay off their credit cards faster and save money,” the company says on its website, Payoff.com. “Through a combination of understanding who people are and what motivates them with our unwavering desire to see customers succeed, we are committed to the mission of restoring humanity to financial services.”
The Costa Mesa, Calif.-based company offers “The Payoff Loan” and its CEO, Scott Saunders, says he started the company to “restore humanity and bring a little levity to financial services.” The product is a balloon loan, which Saunders pitches by saying “if you tie enough balloons together, then you can lift up anything and reach heights you never thought were possible.”
He described the company as a “cause-centered community.”
Why point all this out? Credit unions continue to take for granted that consumers know what they are and how they work. They don’t–and that goes for most members, as well. Indeed, if you were to ask most members if they would find a “cause-centered community in financial services” and a “mission of restoring humanity” to be attractive, it’s safe to say many would respond by indicating they might move their funds from the credit union to just such a company.
So consider this Reminder 7.2 Million: tell your members they are already part of just that. Or sit back and watch them leave for onel
CSI, Credit Union Edition
* CSI Has Nothing On These Guys... In South Carolina recently someone used a forklift to steal an ATM from Safe Federal Credit Union. The police indicated they were, and I quote, “looking for a truck carrying the ATM.”
Two Ideas Worth Borrowing
* Stephen Black, VP-marketing with BECU in Tukwila, Wash., was sharing with a credit union audience recently an exercise his credit union went through a number of years ago that every CU should be using. He said BECU sat down and looked at its marketing and advertising and asked this one, simple question: “If we removed our logo from our marketing, could you just insert another bank’s or financial institution’s?”
For an awful lot of credit unions the answer to that question, I’m afraid, is “Yes.” And for a high percentage of those that advertise purely around rate (if your numbers aren’t eye-popping, people aren’t stopping) that’s a big bold YES!
One more effort Black shared that all credit unions should consider cooperatively borrowing: while BECU doesn’t use social media for marketing, it did conduct a social media campaign that urged people to “PIN That ATM” to help people to “understand what the CO-OP Network provides nationally. We provided clues to where a certain ATM was, and if you shared it you got the opportunity for another guess. We know our #1 barrier to membership is people thinking we’re not convenient enough, and we try to use social to address that.”
Frank J. Diekmann can be reached at Frank@CUToday.info.