4 minutes
New Members in Minutes
A new mobile app gives consumers the opportunity to become members of USALLIANCE Financial and fund their new accounts in just minutes, transforming what has traditionally been a cumbersome process.
The enrollment option, which is included as a feature of the credit union’s Apple and Android standard apps, guides prospective members to scan the barcode of their driver’s license. That simple step serves to pre-populate the enrollment application, reduces keystrokes, aids in verifying their identity, and provides key information for qualifying them for membership, notes CUES member Kristi Kenworthy, AVP/e-commerce for the $1 billion+ Rye, N.Y., credit union serving 80,000 members throughout the Northeast.
The mobile enrollment process also employs GPS to compare applicants’ physical locations to the address on their driver’s license, adding another layer of security. The native app, developed in partnership with GRO Solutions, Atlanta, offers “a slick user experience with a focus on making it easy, quick, and secure,” Kenworthy says.
The onboarding app is also installed on iPads used in new member enrollment at USALLIANCE Financial’s 22 branches, which creates “an opportunity for employees to provide a better member experience,” says VP/Marketing Tori Burton, also a CUES member. “They tell new members, ‘We can open your account in less than three minutes,’ and they also let members know the process is so intuitive they can open additional accounts in the future from their phones.”
Since this new enrollment process was introduced in early 2015, the credit union has seen a 50/50 ratio in usage between the mobile and in-branch account applications. The new app is credited with reducing the abandonment rate in the self-service enrollment process from 80 percent to 35 percent, Kenworthy notes. (Read more at “Online Account Opening Abandonment”.)
After enrollment, new members’ contact information is passed along automatically to a dedicated outreach team who follow up to ask about their experience in joining the credit union and to provide additional offers.
Providing a quick and simple path to enroll by smartphone is in line with USALLIANCE Financial’s “mobile-first” strategy. “We feel that mobile has become the first and, for some, the only touchpoint with their credit union,” Kenworthy says. “Digital services are a key channel to reduce friction and maintain a high-quality member experience.”
Creative Forecasting
Creative types who’ve had their ideas deep-sixed by managers will probably not be surprised by Stanford research indicating managers are not the best judges of good ideas. But neither are creatives good judges of their own proposals.
According to Justin Berg, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, the best judges are the creator’s peers, because they’ve spent time generating their own ideas about the situation.
“Managers Are Not Always the Best Judge of Creative Ideas” talks about a large study Berg conducted on creative forecasting (or predicting the success of new ideas) in the circus arts industry. In the study, he found creators overestimated how well their own videos would do with the audience, but were more accurate judges of their peers’ videos than managers.
“Managers tended to undervalue novel ideas in favor of conventional performances. Creators were better at predicting these novel hits,” even though most of the managers were former creators.
“One might think that if you’re a successful creator, you have good taste, and when you get promoted to a manager role, it stays with you,” Berg says in the article. “But this research suggests that the creator role may promote good taste, while the manager role may undermine it.”
Stanford Graduate School of Business is host to CUES’ Strategic Innovation Institute™ II.
Letters to the Editor
Shared Compliance
Oh my, this (“On Compliance: Six CUs Share Risk Officer,”) is an awesome and much needed compliance management business model for groups of smaller to mid-sized credit unions. So much valuable talent is being spent on non-value-added activities due to regulations.
Donnie Price
Principal/Founder
Omaha Associates
Omaha, Neb.
Auto Lending
“Auto Lending Mistakes to Avoid” offers some great tips on fine-tuning the auto lending process. Even if it’s a product you think you know, there are ways to improve it for the member!
Madeline Anderson-Balmer
VP/Director/Digital Marketing
McDougall & Duval
Amesbury, Mass.
Mobile Branch
“This. Is. Awesome. Congrats @johnsoda123 and @InnovationCU on taking #innovation to a new level” (a tweet about “Mobile Branch Does Double Duty,”).
Chad Huseby
Branch Manager
$14 billion Servus Credit Union
Edmonton, Alberta
