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The Power of Omni Stack: Why Credit Unions Are Mimicking Challenger Banks’ Approach

In the past year, credit unions across the globe have experienced a seismic shift in the way they operate and serve their members. To adhere to social distancing guidelines surrounding the global pandemic, credit unions and their members have become reliant on digital services. While the pandemic may have catalyzed digital banking, studies show that it is here to stay.

Furthermore, this change in consumer preference has allowed challenger banks to take the financial industry by storm. They have gained traction due to their ability to meet customers through the channel of their preference–digital.

Although challenger banks have gained momentum, there is still a key component missing from their modernized take on banking. They lack a customer-centric approach. In today’s world, customer-centricity has become an indispensable part of the banking experience and that’s one of the reasons many consumers still prefer a traditional credit union.

Credit unions need to revamp their operations to keep up with the evolving needs of their members. The right concoction of a digital-first and member-centric approach is what they ideally require to achieve. How can they do that? The answer is by switching to an omni stack or a unified stack.

Implementing an omni stack can help credit unions enter a new realm of banking. It can enable them to provide services like a challenger bank, further empowering them to grow their member base and increase revenue through additional offerings. Let’s explore how an omni stack can help increase their internal efficiency and create a member-centric approach to banking.

Increasing user functionality and internal efficiency

In today’s world, investing in modern technology is one of the pivotal ways a credit union can improve user experience for their members. Traditionally, credit unions have been partnering with vendors to deploy new services and solutions into their operations. While this may seem like a feasible approach to digitization, it only creates disparate functionality for members and management difficulties for credit union staff.

Vendor management can be quite a time-consuming activity for credit unions that choose to outsource their services. As the number of providers goes up, the time spent to ensure their smooth functionality increases too. Therefore, this often creates the need to hire additional staff or hand over extra tasks to existing employees who already juggle many responsibilities.

Since most employees exhaust their time managing vendors, this approach takes away from the primary reason members choose to bank with a credit union- an enhanced user experience.

Here’s where the omni stack helps. It enables credit unions to create a robust approach to digitization without having to deal with vendor issues and the exorbitant costs involved. An omni stack also empowers them to offer all their services through one cloud-native platform. This way, users can effortlessly conduct software upgrades and seamlessly integrate new products into their platform.

Creating a member-centric approach to banking

While many members are increasingly switching to digital services, they also want to bank with a credit union that can cater to their specific needs. Members’ requirements rarely align with each other as all have a different set of predetermined factors that affect their financial status.

According to a survey, 82% of respondents expect financial institutions to personally understand them and only 38% think their financial institution is effectively doing so. These numbers clearly show a significant opportunity for credit unions to attract and retain members by personalization of offerings based on individual needs.

Credit unions that strive to remain viable need to partner with a technology service provider to implement an omni stack into their operations. By doing so, they can securely gather their members’ data to create hyper-personalized products and services.

In turn, credit unions can increase their members’ loyalty and see a significant growth in their revenue too. Taking the omni stack route can help credit unions create the perfect combination of a digital-first and hyper-personalized approach to banking, ultimately providing an unparalleled user experience to their members.

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