2 minutes
A few weeks ago, my husband and I were trying to solve a problem with one of our two yellow tabby cats. I tossed out an idea that was more outrageous than useful, and got a fist bump for my efforts at lightening the conversation. I responded: Just trying to think outside the litter box!
The need to think outside the box when building your credit union’s strategy is a concept CU leaders have been hearing for years. And it’s only becoming more important, according to experts interviewed for “Beware the Box,” because the area outside the box is getting bigger.
It’s no longer enough to look at competitors in the far-flung financial industry, even including relative upstarts like Lending Club or Square (read about these and other financial competitors). “More broadly, technology affects customer expectations,” points out Jarrad Roeder, senior consultant with Decision Strategies International, based in London and Conshohocken, Pa.
This means when consumers get an amazing experience at a low cost from a cutting-edge retailer of any kind, it sets the bar at a new level. Members “don’t see any distinction between their interactions with a CU and, say Uber (a taxi cab competitor that operates via smartphone app),” writes Charlene Komar Storey in the article. “Rather, they wonder why you aren’t like the companies they love.”
To help track this bigger playing field, Roeder recommends you “Pay attention to the weak signals in the external environment and set up a system to interpret them. With all the uncertainty out there, management teams need to build optionality,” he adds, or the ability to respond in different ways down the road, depending on how the future plays out.
Developing alternative scenarios of the marketplace your credit union might face in the next five years and ways you can be successful in as many of those scenarios as possible is one way to build optionality. To get an idea of how this might work, check out Scenarios for Credit Unions 2020: Striving to Stay Relevant in a Rapidly Changing World. DSI partnered with CUES to develop the study, which focuses on four distinct future scenarios, and challenges CU leaders to question their assumptions to develop a more flexible view of the future. Access the whole report (with your CUES password) or an executive summary.
With support from CUES Supplier members Co-op Financial Services and MasterCard, CUES and DSI have also released a new scenario report specific to payments. Get The Future of Payments: Scenarios for Credit Unions 2018 when you register for next month’s Strategic Innovation Institute at MIT or order it at cues.org/paymentscenarios.
Mary Auestad Arnold
Editor and Publisher
