Breaking Your App Away From the Pack

Members of $200 million Cy-Fair Credit Union, Houston, can download two CU apps. One is a fairly robust version of the CU’s mobile banking. “It supports electronic bill-pay, funds transfers, remote deposit capture and lets members see their balances, transactions and ATM locations”—common features for other bank and CU apps, explains Brett Wooden, SVP/marketing at the time of this interview.

But Cy-Fair CU members can also get another app that almost nobody else can get: an academic calendar for the Cypress Fairbanks Independent School District, one of the largest in Texas with 22,000 teachers. The district is also the CU’s legacy and still dominant select employee group.

Big deal? Maybe not. It’s hardly setting records at the Apple app store, where 1,000 copies have been downloaded in its first year, says Wooden, now working full time with Wooden Consulting, which he co-founded. Teachers get the app free without joining. In fact, it’s a digital alternative to a paper calendar Cy-Fair CU has been printing for years at a cost of about $22,000 a year.

In a way, it’s just another attempt to migrate members from paper to digital service to reduce costs, and to allow quick, easy updates during the academic year. But in another way, it’s revolutionary because it’s a mobile app that a CU has produced on its own, a step toward radical differentiation.

People use CUs and banks for a finite list of products and services. Once you make those products and services available through mobile devices, subject to security and screen-size limitations, where do you go from there? Once the wave of mobile adoption has crested, mobile banking could become a commodity, a new delivery channel to support, but not a differentiator.

Cy-Fair CU’s calendar is a mobile app, but not a mobile banking app, which raises the question of whether CUs can benefit from providing apps that go beyond banking. Whether financial institutions can shoot through old boundaries like Uber and Air BNB have done is not clear, but Cy-Fair CU has a toe in the water.

The calendar app was coded by two independent programmers from Monetary Labs in Portland, Ore., for $15,000. Wooden almost has the background and skills to code an app, but using outside coders made more sense.

“There are lots of smart people who do it for a reasonable price,” he says. “The trick is finding the right ones.”

The Cy-Fair CU calendar app duplicates the paper calendar, but goes beyond it in that it’s always up to date and includes features like links to phone numbers, directions to events, a news feed, and special promotions for teachers. For example, Cy-Fair CU works with Chick-fil-A, which sometimes puts discount coupons for teachers in the calendar. At this point, Cy-Fair CU doesn’t sell advertising on the calendar and earns no revenue from its cooperation with Chick-fil-A, but it’s looking into those possibilities.

“We have relationships with Liberty Mutual and Century 21,” Wooden notes. “We might see if they’d pay to advertise.

“If you buy the product of one of the big mobile banking vendors, your program looks the same as everyone else’s except for the logo,” he points out. “We’re not just looking at what other financial institutions are doing. We’re watching Target and Best Buy and Wendy’s and Home Depot.”

Apple has homogenized its customer experience so that it’s almost identical whether the customer uses the website, the mobile app or comes into a store, he points out. “Banks and CUs are trying to catch up.”

Apps are a complementary channel at this point for FIs, Wooden notes, but could become mainstream quickly. “Now 70 percent of Facebook users use apps exclusively and bypass URLs. What if CU members did that? We’re not ready yet,” he warns.

Meanwhile, when an academic event was cancelled due to rain, users of the mobile calendar app were alerted, while users of the paper calendar had to make a call or take their chances, he notes.

More conventionally, Cy-Fair CU is looking for ways to pre-stage banking transactions, just like you can pre-stage a fast-food meal, ordering and paying before you just drive by and pick up the food. With some banking services, you may not even have to drive by.

“Whatever saves our members wait time and driving time and saves us interaction time in our lobbies is what we want,” Wooden concludes.

Richard H. Gamble is a freelance writer based in Colorado.