The Decision Maker

Trellance just concluded its annual conference, IMMERSION19, where ideas and strategies took the shape of keynote presentations, breakouts and networking among credit union professionals. As in past years, there were many key takeaways. Here are the top 10 takeaways from the keynote presentations.

60% of all data analytics endeavors fail.

Tom Davis, President & CEO of Trellance, shared a warning in his opening keynote that many data analytics efforts within organizations fail more than they succeed—and cost more money than expected. Tom urged credit unions to consider partnerships to advance their moves into big data.

Take big data and make it small.

Credit unions have more data about some of their members than what Amazon knows about its customers, according to Erik Qualman, an author recognized by Forbes and Fortune as one of the Top 100 Digital Influencers. Credit unions need to be using their collective data to customize the member experience according to each member’s unique needs. That’s taking big data and making it small.

Digital leaders are made, not born.

Eric Qualman also spoke about how, with advanced technologies, everyone can exert more direct and indirect influence than ever before and become an effective digital leader — anywhere at any time.

Disrupt or die.

Former IBM Chief Innovation Officer and best-selling author Linda Bernardi gave several examples of companies that didn’t see changes coming. Nokia, Motorola, Kodak, Blackberry, Toys R Us, were just some corporations that were blindsided by changes in consumer preferences and changes in technology. Linda suggested that companies have two choices – be the innovator or get pushed out of the way.

If someone is going to eat your lunch, it might as well be you.

Eric Qualman also shared the same cautionary message as Linda Bernardi regarding companies that need to innovate or be left behind. His perspective, though, was to not be afraid to disrupt your own organization. He gave the example that Netflix used to be in the business of mailing out discs; at its peak in 2002 Netflix was mailing around 190,000 discs per day. But the company also saw that streaming content was about to take off, so it created a streaming video product that cannibalized its own video-by-mail business, and upended Blockbuster’s market.

Enhancing member experience has been the subject of many blogs and white papers, and there is a reason why this topic is so popular. In fact, there are three good reasons why this topic is especially relevant now.

1. Competition- Competition among financial institutions, challenger and online banks is getting fierce. Banks and online financial institutions like Marcus and Ally need your members’ deposits to fund their loan activity, and are offering higher returns for their business. Also, the huge credit card issuers want to put their cards in your members’ wallets, and are enticing them to do so with sign-up bonuses. Plus, every financial institution wants your best members’ loan activity on their income sheets.
2. Technology– Technology has become affordable for credit unions of nearly any size. The technology to harvest data to drive decision making, segment your members, create targeted offers, and get a real-time view on each member, is much more accessible.
3. Expectations- Your youngest members as well as the next generation that could become your newest members, demand a unique experience. They, like other customers (retail customers and e-commerce shoppers), all want a customized, digital experience. If it’s not fully digital, they want an experience that has some digital component. How do we create that experience?

The Answer is Technology

Of the three factors that make this topic especially relevant, technology is the one that drives everything else. Creating a personalized, positive experience that differs for each member relies heavily on data. This includes collecting, normalizing, and combining data from multiple sources to create a unique view of each member. This view is then used during the narrow window of opportunity you have while the member is in the branch, on the phone, in an online chat session, or engaged in online or mobile banking. This unique member-centric view is also used to determine which of your members should receive a special offer, which member should get fees waived, which members deserve bonus interest on money market accounts and other business decisions that help to enhance the member experience.