Credit Unions thrive on relationships. We build and strengthen these relationships by understanding member needs and providing the products and services that meet those needs, serving as a partner our members can rely on.
However, anticipating how those needs evolve in this digital-first world is more challenging than ever. Competition from new types of financial service providers, footprint expansion from global entities, and the continuing presence of various malicious actors make it increasingly difficult to meet those needs. Intuition is not enough to drive management decisions with important consequences for your members’ financial health and security.
Credit Union managers know financial analytics isn’t just a corporate buzzword. They’ve talked to peers, read the literature, and attended the seminars. They’ve seen how these tools can help them understand their business and better serve their members, but the question remains, how to begin? Facing so many unknowns with limited resources and tight budgets makes starting your analytics journey feel like a daunting task.
But that’s the secret to understanding it: as a journey. Using analytics to understand your business does not have to mean an immediate and massive IT overhaul where every decision is solely and soullessly dictated by a computer. It is a journey of curiosity and discovery. It is a journey where small gains of insight lead to more questions and another step.
Studying member churn is a good example of this ripple effect. Finding out who is leaving the Credit Union leads us to asking why they are leaving the Credit Union and then to discovering how to save them from leaving. We’re not trying to build the ultimate dashboard on Day One, we’re stacking knowledge on knowledge, making incremental gains that improve our member relationships and fostering a culture that encourages questioning.
As a manager, you already possess the tools to start this journey. Standard core reports, vendor reports, and Call Reports are more than simple rows of numbers in an Excel sheet, they are your point of origin on this journey. Use these to look at trends in product usage, loan originations, and share penetration. Tracking these pieces of information over time instead of at end of month snapshots can give a fuller picture of what is, or isn’t, working for members. Use your current tools to answer the what, pushing to answer the why along the next stage of your analytics journey.
From there, low-cost, accessible custom reporting tools such as SQL, or core- or spreadsheet-embedded AI tools will help you answer those deeper questions without breaking the bank. Managers use these, for example, to segment data, such as loan types and balances by member age and credit score, members with high savings balances but no loans, and plastics usage. These tools can easily crunch larger data sets in transaction analyses, fee load reports, and even incorporate geographical components to your analyses! Building the skills to use these tools is another step on the journey, but as these skills are refined, so is your understanding of your membership.
Partnering with strategic vendors that specialize in Credit Union data analytics can be an important turning point along this journey. These vendors employ highly educated and experienced teams that can dig deeper into how your business is working and where improvements can be made that strengthen the member relationship. Partnerships like these will require more resource investment, but the answers you discover will transform your business and may even lead to structural changes to your organizational chart. The level of insight they provide can be astonishing.
Whether you level up your SQL skills or invest in a relationship with an analytics vendor, these tools will help you bridge the gap between raw data and actionable management strategies. Better analytics means an opportunity to provide better products, more personalized service, and the ability to more accurately anticipate membership needs.
There is no endpoint to the journey, only a continual refinement of understanding. As we strive to improve our relationship with our members, we must pursue the knowledge that allows us to do so. Take the first step. Turn the page from feeling overwhelmed to feeling curious. Open a core report today, find one interesting data point, and ask the next question.
