Wealth Access Report FINAL - Flipbook - Page 11
Use Case:
Cultivating Profitable Relationships
What makes a customer or member
products and services: deposit accounts,
“increasing products and services to an
profitable? How can a financial insti-
auto, Visa cards and e-statements,
average of two per member.”
tution become a consumer’s primary
known as DAVE.
“This was our campaign to get us [to be
banking provider? These are two quesThe credit union, which now has $8.2
a member’s] primary financial institution;
billion in assets, then used member data
DAVE was how we would accomplish
to identify those who had three of the
that,” he says. “It gave us something to
The first step was identifying the attri-
four products and services, and built
look at; it was easy to run campaigns and
butes of profitable long-term members,
marketing campaigns to communicate
sales promotions for our employees.”
says Benjamin Maxim, the credit union’s
with those members. This included get-
chief technology officer. They analyzed
ting members to switch from paper to
Maxim points out that the DAVE ini-
the financial performance of different
e-statements, bring their auto loan to
tiative took place more than a decade
member segments as well as the prod-
the credit union or set up a direct depos-
ago, when it was still very routine for
ucts those members had to understand
it. Maxim says this use case was a suc-
members to receive paper account state-
what led to a member’s longevity with
cess because it had specific, measurable
ments. “The postage alone was worth
the credit union. They settled on four
campaigns, rather than a vague goal like
the savings,” he says.
tions that MSU Federal Credit Union
addressed early in its data journey.
just mandate,” says Daniel Haisley, chief product officer at
Associates on an early predictive analytics project. That part-
digital banking provider Apiture. “It is a [daily] honing of
nership led to MSU FCU realizing that members were likely
the blade based on the experiences that you have. You start
to buy their next car 22 months after they purchased their
with problems and use data to solve them, and that grows
previous vehicle — an insight that gave the institution a time-
the contagion, which ultimately defines culture over time.”
line of when to reach out to members about auto loans. MSU
FCU has added more data as it has grown and hired a vice
The cultural shift has been one of the biggest revelations
president of data analytics to oversee these efforts.
during MSU Federal Credit Union’s decade-plus data journey, says Benjamin Maxim, chief technology officer at the
Maxim realizes all this work, and all these conversations,
$8.2 billion credit union.
“seem big and scary — but you need to start somewhere.”
He advises executives to pick a straightforward use case
The East Lansing, Michigan-based credit union’s first steps
in its data journey included creating a centralized business
intelligence team that pulled these metrics together into a
SharePoint site, which is a content and knowledge management tool from Microsoft Corp. This allowed business units to
that can be solved with a discrete dataset and build from
there — a process that will be laid out in the next section of
this report. It’s easier, he says, when executives are working
toward a specific goal, versus a vague concept such as “using
my data better.”
share data with other areas of the credit union, and the group
eventually added household and membership information. But
“If you have something small, start small — but start,”
it also required Maxim to educate his colleagues working in
Maxim adds. “And then data quality, data governance, the
legal, information technology and risk so they could under-
sooner you bring in those things, the easier it’ll be longer term.”
stand why better data collection and analysis mattered.
Kiah Lau Haslett is the banking & fintech editor for
Along the way, the credit union received an assist when it
Bank Director.
partnered with core and technology provider Jack Henry &
EFFECTIVE DATA MANAGEMENT: CRAFTING YOUR DATA STRATEGY | 9
