How Regional Credit Unions Can Win the Personalization Race
Cyprus Credit Union's Chief Strategy Officer David Sant shares how financial institutions can transform standard banking products into personalized solutions.
By Justin Estes, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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At a time when consumers demand increasingly personalized solutions from their financial institutions, many organizations struggle to deliver experiences that resonate across generations. On a recent episode of the Banking Transformed podcast, host Jim Marous spoke with David Sant, chief strategy officer at Cyprus Credit Union, about how financial institutions can transform standard banking offerings into differentiated experiences that build lifetime relationships.
Q: How should financial institutions approach product development and marketing?
David Sant: I realized our members don’t want our products. There’s not a product we offer that our members want. If we could offer our members a house or a house with a mortgage, they’d take it. If we could offer them a car or a car with a car loan, they’re they’d take it. People don’t want a savings account, they want to provide for their kids’ education, they want to leave a legacy of money they could leave to their kids. They want to retire comfortably. So, our products are simply the tools that help people to accomplish these goals.
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Q: What role does data play in creating personalized experiences?
Sant: You aren’t going to have any way of knowing who your first-time home buyers are or who your new parents are. You think about all these life stages people go through when they need financial products who are newly married, an empty nester, and retiring. So, if you can use your data to mine it, and again, everybody likes data and everybody likes to collect all the data, but data’s worthless unless you’re using it and telling that story with the data.
The Power of Life-Stage Marketing
Q: How can banks better connect products to customer life goals?
Sant: Looking at our marketing approach and how we position our products, you think we could go out and just average mortgage rates as low as this. That’s what a lot of people do. But that product means a lot, means different things to a first-time home buyer versus somebody looking to get more investment properties.
Suppose we can tailor that approach and messaging with that first-time home buyer to like giving them content about how to find the right realtor for you and the investor property. In that case, it’s getting a little more speaking about the details of investment and how you can leverage property for further investments and ultimately, you’re boosting your retirement.
Q: What strategies work best for targeted member engagement?
Sant: One of the worst things you could do is have the marketing team send 20 to 30 emails to a member in a two-month timeframe. However, I don’t want them constantly sending them about products they already have. We need to segment them, personalize them, and go beyond email.
Think about that digital experience: composable dashboards where we can have audience-based home banking experiences. So, if you are a parent with a teen who has a teen account, you can have tools and messaging relevant to the products you need in your life stage.
Q: How can banks create meaningful youth banking programs?
Sant: We see that the highest level of account retention in adulthood is if they open checking accounts in their teen years. As adults, they’ll have the highest level of account retention. So, we’re focusing on providing resources there.
As we did research, we looked at data. This involves collecting your data, conducting focus groups, and getting out there and talking to your members, spending time with them. We really found that the reason they want that account is not just so their kid has a debit card in their pocket. They want to be able to prepare their kids for financial independence, to send them into adulthood better off than they were.
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Q: What metrics show program success?
Sant: We needed a tool that would allow us to serve up financial literacy, track it, and then reward and incent it. So if you get the account, partly you get this account for financial literacy, you have to have the products because the products are the experiential tool for learning these skills.
In our messaging, we’re not going to the parents and saying, "Hey, have your kids go do this." We’re sending out regular email communications saying, "Hey, this month we’re focused on this. Here’s a helpful blog article to read. Here are some tools to do. Here’s a takeaway: here’s a budgeting printout you can do so you can sit down with your teen and do it with them."
Strategic Growth Through Data
Q: How has Cyprus’s approach to data and analytics evolved?
Sant: After our core conversion, because we had better data and the ability to customize and do other things, we added business intelligence to my area. Many people often ask, "Why would you put business intelligence under marketing?" As we view it, data tells a story, and marketing tells a story, so there’s this natural alignment.
After a couple of years as CMO, I was made the chief strategy officer. In that role now, I do all the things I mentioned, plus product management, project management, and big strategy. What’s our strategic planning with the board? What are some of our big strategic initiatives and products that we’re going to roll out?
Q: What organizational changes were needed to leverage data effectively?
Sant: We were having a hard time delivering customized experiences because we were on a core that was harder for us to create customization in. Developing was part of someone’s job, but it wasn’t a single person’s job, data as well. Our data was very siloed and data was part of someone’s job and a singular person’s job, so we needed to invest more in those areas.
Q: What investments were critical for enabling personalization?
Sant: Some of the things we’ve done over the past years are really changing that investment. We now have in-house developers who can write, and we convert it to a core that is easy to write to and easy to integrate with. When we were doing that shopping during our core conversion, a big thing was that we wanted to find one that plays well with everyone else.
Investing in a really good data warehouse that can get all of your data in one place so that you can use the data and create those stories is the first step to creating customization. You have to know who your people are and what they want before you can personalize anything to them.
Q: How does Cyprus approach speed-to-market with new capabilities?
Sant: Without having the official developers or having some of those, we relied on third-party development, or we relied on our vendor partners and that’s a very expensive thing to do. If you’re relying on that third-party developer, it’s expensive, and you lose some of those elements of control in what you want to do because you’re not doing it in-house.
We would see some type of innovation, but we’d have to rely on the vendors. So, then we’re getting slated in for something that now is three to six months until we can start. Then you’re three to six months for development, then you’re training and that speed to market was so slow that oftentimes we’d be ready to launch and there’s already a newer, better thing that’s out there.
The Human Element in AI Banking
Q: How will AI reshape member service delivery?
Sant: If we’re able to free up our agents’ time by letting AI take the small things, we’re able to help our members in a faster way, in a better way, to help them with what’s most important to them and I think that’s really enables us to truly live that mission of people helping people.
I think across the board, AI is going to allow us to push off all of these mundane tasks that can take up the majority of our time so that we can focus on what most matters and what we are best at and what our strengths are and that only benefits our members.
Q: What balance of human and digital creates the best experience?
Sant: You’re not just going to put them in front of a computer and say, "Go ahead and do this." You’re going to train them. You’re going to make sure that they’re properly trained and have the knowledge that you’re spending the time making sure that they’re going to do the job right. It’s tempting to grab AI as an out of the box solution and just plug it and say, "Okay, we have it."
One of the most exciting things about AI is the core purpose of a credit union: we’re here for people, helping people. If we can free up our agents’ time by letting AI take the small things, we can help our members with what’s most important to them.
For a longer version of this conversation, listen to "Creating Dynamic Personal Banking Experiences at Scale", a podcast with Jim Marous, available here. This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.
