On Thursday, September 4, an ad from Silver State Bank asked, “Why do so many of Nevada’s strongest businesses trust Silver State Bank?”

The answer? “Security” and “protection.”

The next day, the bank was seized by federal and state regulators.

Apparently people weren’t buying the bank’s “you can trust us” sales pitch. When you lose people’s trust, you lose their deposits. In the two months prior to the bank’s seizure, customers pulled $264 million of the $1.7 billion on deposit at Silver State.

“A run on deposits
is what kills banks.”
— Tim Coffey
VP/Research, FIG Partners

“A run on deposits is what kills banks,” said Tim Coffey, VP/Research for FIG Partners, in an interview in the Las Vegas Review Journal. “It happened that way in the Great Depression, and it’s happening again.”

Reality Check:

• People already don’t trust banks. Most financial institutions are seen as greedy and self-serving.
• Situations like this, where Silver State advertised blatant lies, don’t help financial institutions shake this image or build any credibility
• People’s B.S. detectors trigger alerts whenever they hear someone say “Trust Me.” Images of used-car salesmen go through their minds.

Key Takeaway: It takes more than just words to earn people’s trust. Reminding people that your financial institution is “safe, sound, secure and stable” is an important communications strategy these days. Just remember: Marketing can’t ever create a sense of trust. As with all our relationships, trust is something earned — usually over time.

In his own blog, Gene Blishen, CEO of Mount Lehman Credit Union, reveals the process by which he chose ‘Textus’ as the name of a mobile phone banking system his credit union is now offering.

The service, known as SMS, allows people to perform certain banking services over their mobile phones by sending text messages.

Blishen said he invited input from “all 10 staff members,” noting that “discussions like these, at this level, are a neat attribute of this credit union. Everyone gets involved, everyone has input.”

But then they got stuck on generational differences: the younger staff aligned under one name, the older under another.

So what did he do? He turned to his friends on Twitter:

“Over the last months there is a group, well it really isn’t a group it is an undefined bunch of people associated with credit unions that actively twitter. Why not throw this one out to the pack of experts and see what comes up? There were some great suggestions but one stood out (thank you Ron!) Textus. This was proposed to the group and was quickly accepted. We now have a new name for a new product.”

Blishen adds his final reflections on using an ad hoc naming committee:

“When I look at this process it is so simple. I imagine we ‘should’ have hired the experts, done the focus groups, etc. etc. etc. Would they have understood the product enough to come up with any better names? It just seems so fitting that the name came through Twitter. A tech name for a tech product from a tech bunch of people.”

If Blishen’s credit union was in the United States, he’d only have to worry about two trademarks on file with the USPTO, one of which is dead and the other is for first aid kits. (Not much to worry about there.)

Bottom Line: Blishen is right. Hiring “experts” might have yielded names as good as ‘Textus,’ but better names? Not likely.