How a Strong Credit Card Program Strengthens Your Institution’s Brand and Community Ties
By Liz Froment, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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A credit card is one of the few products a credit union offers that a customer can use on a daily basis. That makes it one of the most-used products a financial institution puts in a customer’s hands. And, by extension, it’s also one of the most visible ways a credit union can show what it stands for in the community it serves.
But community banks and credit unions are often losing that daily moment. About 61% of credit union account holders use the institution as their primary financial relationship. Yet, according to a recent study from PYMNTS Intelligence, only 48% of cardholders have their credit union’s card at the top of their wallet.
There is an opportunity to fill that gap. Closing that gap starts with treating the card as a brand and community asset, not just a lending product.
Need to Know:
- The card is the highest-frequency brand touchpoint an institution has with members. That makes it one of the most used and most visible pieces of a credit union’s brand.
- Credit unions hold the primary relationship with most members, but not the top-of-wallet spot. Only 48% of credit union cardholders put the credit union’s card at the top of their wallet.
- Matching national issuers on rewards is a losing battle. Instead, community banks and credit unions can build a program around local merchants, employers, and sponsorships.
- The strongest card programs start with the brand and members. When the card team owns the program and doesn’t bring marketing in at the beginning, the community connection may break down.
Key insight: Most credit unions still evaluate their card program on revenue, but that underestimates what a strong card program does for the brand and local community.
A Card is a Daily Brand Touchpoint
Bank marketing is a fight for attention. Marketing dollars, from sponsorships to ads to events and direct mail, are spent to try and capture customers’ attention for just a moment. A credit card can do that for free, every time a member takes it out of their wallet, without the credit union having to spend to earn it.
“There are no other brand assets that have as many touch points. It literally lives in the customer’s purse, wallet, or pocket and gets accessed multiple times a day,” Karen Leland, founder of Sterling Marketing Group, a brand strategy firm, told The Financial Brand. “Nothing else in the bank’s marketing mix generates a brand impression that frequently.”
That daily brand impression is a good thing when the credit union’s card is being used. But for the more than half of credit union members who reach for a different card, it means the other issuer is the one collecting those impressions instead.
What Credit Unions Can Do that National Issuers Can’t
Closing the top-of-wallet gap and recapturing brand impressions means credit unions and community banks must take a different approach. Matching national issuers on rewards is a losing battle. Instead, where credit cards can become a real advantage is by looking at where scale works against the biggest issuers.
“A national is required to build one program that works as well in Sacramento as it does in Seattle. That is a real and consistent constraint that is required for scale — which means they compete on rate and points,” says Leland. “A community institution has the opportunity to build something that is perfect for a local market but might not make sense for a client 100 miles away. That’s the advantage.”
A credit union’s advantage is specificity. It can build a program around one region, a few key employers, or the shops on Main Street, because it doesn’t scale. For example, this could mean offering cash back at a small set of local merchants instead of 5% at gas stations nationwide. Then the card becomes a link between the institution and the area it operates in, connecting it to local businesses and organizations members already care about.
“The opportunity is to use the card as a bridge between the institution, the partner, and the member,” Kristin Llewelyn, founder of The Sponsorship Company, a sponsorship marketing consultancy, who spent over a decade running affinity and co-branded card programs at BECU, said. “For example, a sponsorship or affinity relationship may already include tickets, hospitality, experiences, content, events, or other benefits. Those assets can be turned into cardholder value through presales, exclusive access, cardholder-only experiences, giveaways, merchant offers, or usage campaigns.”
Chip Griffith, chief member experience officer and certified financial coach at OneAZ Credit Union, describes something similar at his institution. There, rewards, merchant partnerships, and local promotions turn routine card transactions into support for local businesses and causes. “It creates a powerful cycle: members receive value, local businesses benefit, and the institution demonstrates that its commitment to the community goes beyond traditional banking,” says Griffith.
Key insight: That kind of card program has a receptive audience. A recent poll from America’s Credit Unions found credit union members rate their credit unions 17 points higher on caring about the local community than bank customers rate their banks.
Start With the Brand, Not the Card
The strongest card programs start by focusing on the credit union’s brand and its relationship with members. The product decisions come after.
“I would start with the member and the brand, not the card product. Ask what you want members to experience, what your institution stands for, and how the card can reinforce that promise every time it is used,” says Griffith. “Then build the rewards, strategic partnerships, digital experience, and community components around that strategy.”
Many credit unions start the process backward. The card team owns the program from the start, and they evaluate it on rate and revenue. Or they only focus on competing with national issuers on rewards. Marketing gets pulled in near the end, if at all, and sponsorship may not be involved until after the fact.
“Having worked with institutions on both ends of the size spectrum, I’d say the mistake is the same everywhere, and it’s organizational: the card program gets designed by the card team, and the brand team never touches it,” says Leland.
Llewelyn says there are a few common traps. Sponsorships, co-branded card deals, and the marketing plan are often siloed across different teams, when they should be built together. And most institutions pour their energy into getting new cardholders in the door, instead of learning what keeps a member using the card and creating an activation strategy.
Credit card programs can also go stale if they run on autopilot. Leland calls it brand drift. A program built a decade ago around a different economy and a different member base may not be optimized for what works today. But because revenue still comes in, no one is checking under the hood. She suggests a yearly look to catch what has slipped and realign it with the program’s goals rather than waiting until a full teardown is needed.
The credit unions that get this right end up with a card program that much more closely reflects the institution’s specific identity, and not a generic product with their logo on it.
“Where institutions can get it wrong is treating the card program primarily as a rate, rewards, or revenue conversation. Those things matter, but they are increasingly easy for competitors to replicate,” says Griffith. “The bigger opportunity is creating something that is difficult to copy because it is rooted in your relationships and your community.”
Bottom line: The real advantage credit unions and community banks have is to build around the local community. Designing cards around local partners and merchants, instead of a separate product, helps credit unions keep card programs connected to marketing and brand.
