As credit unions advance toward their own unique digital transformations, they often find that having access to more electronic data about the members they serve offers significant benefits.

These benefits are enabled by the combination of technologies that are now possible in a fully digital environment. A significant example: marketing automation combined with business intelligence (BI) platforms make leading mortgage lenders much more competitive than their peers.

Home finance divisions in institutions of all kinds were the first to fully embrace the path to digital. With so much data required to underwrite mortgages, it makes sense that leading lenders would make digital lending a priority. Digital data is easier and cheaper to move between systems, and it reduces the risk of data quality issues caused by human intervention. The result is lower loan origination costs, faster loan processing, and higher borrower satisfaction.

The digital search for new members

On the marketing side, many lenders have found that digital processes make lead generation simpler. As a leading provider of marketing automation, we’ve seen credit unions leverage information using technology systems, which allows marketing managers to deliver targeted product offers to prospective borrowers when their activity indicates they will be open to receiving them.

This “trigger” marketing has been very successful, but professionals can make marketing automation even more powerful by tightly integrating it with their BI platforms.

Understanding the reach of marketing automation and the integration of platforms into marketing operations has now become table stakes. Credit unions that accomplish this see greater member satisfaction and growth.

Benefits of a unified approach

The coronavirus (COVID-19) and increasing competition among lenders has accelerated the need for a single solution that can synchronize data and offer business intelligence, data warehousing, and customizable communications.

While Origence (a CU Direct brand) offers formidable systems for customer relationship management (CRM), data warehousing, marketing document management, and direct marketing, we knew we could leverage our technology expertise to make them even more powerful.

In our own surveys of the market, we found that the No. 1 organizational initiative (78%) among credit union management was to drive improved member experiences using “targeted and segmented, product-based campaigns.”

To accomplish this, credit unions must incorporate BI platforms with their marketing automation systems, which is exactly what we have done with the Origence CRM. We recently presented a webcast  that did a deep dive on why this is the future of marketing and the benefits of integrating marketing automation with an industry-leading BI platform.

By combining marketing automation with BI, credit unions can take full advantage of the member data they possess in their core systems, their lending systems, and from external sources, such as credit reports they have purchased during the sale of other products.

Users of any BI platform can use their data to quickly create multiple versions of dashboards and other visualizations that dynamically represent information. When applied in a lending environment that already uses marketing automation, this adds a new dimension and empowers management.

A good BI layer on top of effective marketing automation makes the information in a data warehouse actionable. This information can be used to better understand members, differences between branches, individual loan officers, and product lines in a dynamic way.

Marketers who analyze and understand their data can build knowledge and communicate effectively with members at a personalized level. This ultimately improves the member experience, so members remain with credit unions longer and utilize more offerings.

The result is a more successful institution that sees predictable growth.

KEN BURNS is executive vice president of sales at Origence.