One of the most important things to understand about operating a credit union is that increasing efficiency is usually less the product of any one major move and is more about a series of smaller and more strategic ones.
Case in point: digital account opening. On the surface, this may seem like "just" a convenient way to allow people to apply for and open a new account from the comfort of their own homes - increasing the quality of the member onboarding process along the way. In reality, it brings with it a wide range of additional benefits for both your credit union and your members alike, all of which are more than worth a closer look.
The Power of Digital Account Opening
When your credit union offers digital account openings, you're accomplishing more than just making it easier for someone to perform a simple task. You're opening the door to a wealth of information that you can then use to improve your financial services products, your services, and even your entire credit union moving forward.
Consider the fact that digital account opening allows you to accomplish the following goals, including but not limited to ones like:
- Effortlessly capture and even auto-fill basic personal identity information. You not only collect more information about your members than ever, but you do so in a way that makes it easy to share that data across your organization.
- Based on the information that you've collected, you can then qualify any applicants from a risk and/or fraud perspective in a more organic way. To put it simply, the process itself makes it easy to see whom you should say "yes" to and who needs additional scrutiny.
- Easily verify an applicant's identity. This process is typically completed by comparing the information in the application itself with readily available third-party data sources.
- Fund members digitally in real-time, likely through a credit or debit card, or via some type of pre-existing mobile deposit capture solution.
- All of this information can and should be built into your core banking system. Because the data was captured digitally, you don't have to worry about issues like data silos - it can be fed into the entire organization in an instant, making sure that the people who need access to this information to make the most informed decisions possible have it, no matter what.
To achieve these benefits, your credit union should look for a number of important features when it comes to any digital account opening process that it is thinking of implementing. For starters, contextual pre-qualification should be considered essential. Based on the information that an applicant provides (and after that information has been checked for accuracy), people can then be pre-qualified for additional products and services. This makes it easy to see new opportunities in terms of cross-selling and up-selling to existing members.
In terms of the overall digital services experience of your credit union, this can be another way to improve things that carve out a significant competitive advantage for your institution. By offering online and mobile banking single sign-on capabilities, for example, you allow people to avoid tedious data entry and identity verification steps that are so common in these processes. This means that they get the desired outcome that they're after faster than ever, which only improves the way they feel about your credit union as well.
Additional Trends to Be Aware Of
In a larger sense, it's critical to look to the sheer wealth of information that your credit union has access to by taking a step as seemingly simple as offering digital account opening. Once someone's identity has been properly verified via this process, electronic signatures can then replace signature cards - increasing efficiency for both the member and for your staff.
Members also have the ability to upload photos of supporting identification documents for future use, which will only make things even easier in the future. Today, they've uploaded various essential documents for the purposes of opening a digital account. If they then decide to apply for a new loan later on, they don't have to repeat the same process. Everything is already available and has previously been verified, which again results in the most satisfying conclusion possible for all involved in a more efficient way than is likely available right now.
Make Everyone Happy By Increasing Efficiency
Overall, any steps that you can take to improve the member onboarding experience for your credit union will accomplish a few different goals, all at the exact same time. For starters, it will dramatically increase the efficiency of the credit union itself. The faster you can get people to become members, the easier it will be to get them to embrace other services and solutions in the most efficient way.
Secondly, it improves the quality of the experience that your credit union is able to offer in general - something that improves both trust and loyalty in terms of the members that your organization depends on. This in and of itself is the most important benefit of all.
FLEX has recently published a Member Onboarding Guide that outlines a lot of these concepts in more detail, in addition to offering actionable tips that you can use to leverage digital account opening solutions and other services to your benefit. To find out more information, click the button below to get started.
