By maintaining a laser focus on knowing its members and meeting their needs, CommunityAmerica Credit Union has grown into a major regional financial institution with $4.6 billion in assets and more than 30 branches in the Kansas City and St. Louis areas. Behind this growth is a story of digital transformation aligned with an ambitious mission: to help members achieve financial peace of mind by supporting them on every step of their journey.
Toward that goal, CommunityAmerica Credit Union needed to gain a deeper understanding of their members’ circumstances, needs, and behaviors. How could the IT team combine information from multiple data silos to build a single, 360-degree view of member products, preferences, and histories?
Whitney Bartelli, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, explains:
“We want to continue our strong growth trajectory by helping more members on a path to thrive and achieve the financial peace of mind. That means embracing an even broader range of individuals, businesses and communities with their own unique needs and definitions of what peace of mind means. Data is crucial to understand our members and personalize our services to meet their requirements,” says Bartelli.
Ravi Peru, Chief Information Officer, adds:
“We need to understand each person’s financial situation, but we don’t want to have to ask them a bunch of questions when we already have years of data about their financial history in our systems. We want to bring that data together and use it to build a better member experience.”
Creating a 360-degree member view
Gaining a comprehensive view of member products and preferences was critical to the success of Life Planning, one of CommunityAmerica Credit Union’s top priority projects.
This service assigns participating members to a well-being coach. Together they create an achievable, personalized financial plan, connecting members with the best product and service offerings to help them realize their unique goals.
Life Planning required the IT team to bring together all their data, which was scattered across internal and external systems, and make it available to their analytics team.
After building AI models to generate personalized recommendations, the next step was to make the information available to members through multiple channels. The goal was to provide a personalized experience to members in real-time, whether they walked into a branch location or logged into an online channel.
To achieve this, the credit union targeted a high-performance API integration layer to unite multiple data sources seamlessly, enabling personalized experiences for existing members and allowing prospects to move seamlessly between channels throughout the account-opening journey.
Building credit union services on APIs
CommunityAmerica Credit Union selected Axway’s Amplify Platform, an end-to-end platform for automated API discovery and management. The first solution roll-out uses over 100 API endpoints to integrate multiple applications and data sources, including the credit union’s core banking applications as well as its online and mobile banking systems.
Working with an expert team from Axway, CommunityAmerica Credit Union Union deployed and configured Amplify Platform in the Azure cloud. Using prebuilt accelerators from Axway, the organization completed the deployment platform in just six months, rewrote legacy APIs, and added new APIs to the platform over the following eight months.
“When you have more than 50 products, handling integration in an agile way is very important,” says Peru. “With Axway, we can interface with anything and move data between any internal systems we want. That would be really slow with point-to-point integration, but Axway makes it quick and easy.”
Learn how Axway is helping credit unions thrive in a new world of digital banking.
Enabling real-time personalization
Amplify Platform allows CommunityAmerica Credit Union to deliver data to any touchpoint in real time — enabling a consistent omnichannel experience.
For example, the credit union offers a “profit payout” to members who meet certain relationship-based criteria. Today, the organization automatically alerts members about simple changes they can make to qualify for the payout, such as enabling direct deposits for paychecks or logging into online or mobile banking.
Looking ahead, omni-channel integration will create a single data repository for member insight, helping the credit union to better tailor its services. In addition, CommunityAmerica Credit Union plans to harness Amplify Platform to forge partnerships with banks and fintechs to bring value-added solutions to its members.
Bartelli concludes: “By considering each member’s unique situation, we can highlight the products and services that will be most relevant to their needs. That means we can be relevant in our conversations with the members, and ultimately realize our goal of helping more than a million members achieve financial peace of mind.”
Read the full case study here.
Discover how banks and credit unions are delivering personalized financial services with APIs.