Based in Western Massachusetts, EverythingCU.com doesn’t often get a CU executive stopping by our offices to say hi.
So it was such a great pleasure that EverythingCU.com member Fred Brown, from Northeast Family FCU in Manchester, CT stopped by for the nickel tour. Fred is originally from Holyoke, and knows the area well.
I was delighted to be a guest yesterday on Carla Day’s new weekly internet radio show on Credit Unions. Carla is a fantastic host, and is wonderful credit union advocate. I first met Carla in person at EverythingCU’s Little-B Pokagon, held in Indiana earlier this year. Carla later came to TQ NYC to continue her social media immersion.
A huge thank you to Carla for having me as a guest on her show! I thoroughly enjoyed talking about BarCampBanks and PodCamps, as well as EverythingCU.com’s new social media product for credit unions, PlumWall. Here’s a recording of the show in case you missed it:
Tune in weekly, Wednesdays at 3:00 eastern/2:00 Central to listen to future CU Chat shows!
I was saddened to learn that Randolph Brooks FCU, a very large credit union in San Antonio, now calls itself RBFCU. Yet another excellent and distinctive credit union name falls by the wayside into a vast sea of sameness. This is the opposite of the differentiation and distinction goals that good business practice calls for.
Some days it’s tough being a credit union professional, so I just wanted to say thank you for all that you do on behalf of your members and future members. Especially since most of them probably don’t appreciate how hard you work to make their experience the best it can be.
HUGE thank you to Christophe Langlois of Visible Banking for interviewing me about EverythingCU and social media for credit unions while we were at Finovate NYC 09! Mentioned in this video include: William Azaroff, Tim McAlpine, Ginny Brady, my girlfriend (Lesley Lambert), and Cammie Morrow. Tim, Cammie, William and Christophe commented on the Facebook version of this video.
It’s been a great pleasure getting to know so many of our Colorado Credit Union friends. They are so lucky to live in such a beautiful environment! I know they’ll be using social media to further the CU movement with their membership in the coming days, weeks, and months!
A few photos from the event can be found on the facebook event page, and the slides I used for some background in the first part of the session are on slideshare.net.
There was one presentation at Finovate that I, in my role as Credit Union Marketing advocate, rated a 1 (lowest possible score). And that was the presentation given by BankVue/First ROI announcing their new, rebranded Kasasa program. I think I can summarize the thinking behind their new announcement:
We have created an amazing rewards checking product that is going gangbusters in sales. Community banks and credit unions everywhere are signing up for this, offering it to their members, and we’re raking in large profits from it. But the public doesn’t know it’s really our product. Banks and credit unions are all offering our reward checking, but they are each calling it something different. So rather than have our product fractured in the marketplace, let’s rebrand it with OUR name, because it’s really our product that people want, not the financial institution that is re-selling it. And they blow chunks at marketing anyway, we could really pump sales up if we unify the market for this and do a national marketing campaign with slick TV and web commercials. That’s what our clients want – instead of being limited by their own regional marketing budget, they’d become part of a national campaign. We’re helping the little guys of the F.I. world, and big banks need not apply.
I think that’s basically the reasoning. I may be overreacting to their presentation, but that’s the feeling I got as I listened. I think they are dead wrong. At least I hope they are. This is the largest slap in the face to the credit union marketing world I have ever witnessed. They are saying several things with this announcement to F.I.s everywhere. 1.) You suck at marketing. We can do it better than you. 2.) It’s not your crappy financial institution that your members/customers want to do business with, it’s our reward checking product that they really want. 3.) National marketing trumps regional marketing.
Starting with point number 3 – Everything the past 10-20 years has taught us is that the OPPOSITE is true – more personalized, customized, regionalized marketing trumps impersonal generic national advertising. It’s about connecting with people, not about spending money on slick creative and TV commercials ad buys. This is the opposite direction that the trends have been going for at least the past decade. And as for points 1 and 2, the gauntlet has been thrown down. Are you credit union marketers (and community bank marketers for that matter) going to take this lying down? Isn’t it the relationship with your institution that your member/customers want, and not just your reward checking?
So here’s what I really can’t fathom about this Kasasa concept: Why would they think that credit unions and community banks would want to appear to be drinking from the same pool, even if they are? How does it help to further *my* F.I.’s brand if I’m offering the same product as every other credit union or community bank in my area? As a credit union marketer, I want the OPPOSITE. I want MORE differentiation for my brand, not this staggering morass of sameness.
The hubris from BankVue/First ROI with this move/announcement is mind-boggling. I’ve already been contacted with a nice email by the CEO of BankVue. He has basically asked me to please not paint them in a negative light, and that while we may disagree in strategy, they have the best interest of smaller community banks and credit unions at heart. BankVue/FirstROI is certainly welcome to chime in on this discussion here.
I’m more interested in hearing from credit union professionals (and even any community banking professionals too). I posted this same message last Friday on EverythingCU.com, and if you are a credit union professional, you can check out the animated discussion which ensued here.
I had the pleasure of attending this year’s Finovate NYC last week.
I met long-time EverythingCU member Sonya MacDonald in person for the first time. She was in attendance because her CU, Randolph Brooks FCU in San Antonio, is piloting a program from mobile banking provider mShift, which will allow mobile banking from any cell phone, not just an iPhone. But really caught my attention were two other items that she shared with me. Sonya told me that her credit union has done $35 million in remote deposit capture since January, which is when they launched the program with mShift and EasCorp providing the back end. Wow. $35 million is some serious transaction volume.
Sonya also asked me if I knew where Charlie Kroll, president of Andera was sitting. I told her he was right across from her, and Sonya told me that her CU is currently doing 700 new accounts per month via Andera’s online account opening out of a total of about 4500 to 5000 new accounts per month total. That is a healthy 14-15% of total new accounts being opened online.
There was one thing that caught my eye on the negative side. And that will be the subject for tomorrow’s blog post.
I haven’t written before about what twitter banking would look like because of the poor adoption rate of SMS/text banking. But it’s a logical evolution. Vantage CU in St. Louis, MO, is the first to launch twitter banking, and they’ve called it TweetMyMoney. EverythingCU member Eric Acree, EVP, has led this charge for Vantage, while Technovation guru Cam Minges was largely responsible for implementation and deployment. Good for them. Innovation AND differentiation at it’s finest. Huge props.
Why is this a big leap forward? For several years, the new layer of information supplied online, that overlays the physical world (think Geocaching, Brightkite, GPS devices, etc) has been hidden from ordinary view. The concept of Augmented Reality has been around for a few years now, with perhaps the most well known example being the yellow first down line that is superimposed in real-time in televised national football. But that is a high-cost application available only to major businesses that can afford to produce it. The new class of Augmented Reality applications for the iPhone are the first that make World 2.0 visible to regular people on a consumer-level device. Also, anyone who writes software can potentially create an AR app for the iPhone. The possibilities for new applications seem endless. This is absolutely a game changer.
Augumented Reality for the iPhone is truly a major development. I’d love to hear what you think about it.
Next week, I will be publishing two more recent watershed developments, along with what I consider to be a huge punch in the face to credit union and community banking marketers everywhere.
Based in Western Massachusetts, EverythingCU.com doesn’t often get a CU executive stopping by our offices to say hi. 
Fred was kind enough to give us some Credit Union Man™ schwag, including the hat I’m wearing in the above photo! (That’s Fred on the left, and me on the right.) Thanks so much for visiting us Fred!
