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Cornerstone Community Financial Credit Union in Auburn Hills, Mich., approaches the lendtech space from a much different starting point. The $420 million asset institution has maintained a 110% loan-to-share ratio for some time.
“We weren’t looking to gain market share so much as to keep the demand going and to improve the process,” CEO Heidi Kassab says of her management team’s decision to implement CuneXus’ digital lending solutions.
As recently as 2021, only 17% of Cornerstone Community’s loan applications were submitted digitally, requiring significant manual effort to perform prescreening for outbound offers. By 2022, this share had risen to 24%, still before the CuneXus implementation.
The credit union waited until CuneXus had established connections with its loan origination system. “Integrating with the core is how you get good data,” Kassab says.
Cornerstone Community was also among the first to roll out CuneXus’ integrated credit score platform, introducing another member benefit.
After two months live with CuneXus, digital submissions comprise 40% of loan application volume. Part of this gain reflects channel shift, which Kassab acknowledges has caused discomfort in some corners.
“Everyone has loan goals,” she says. “But we also recognize that branch volume is down 20% to 25% post-COVID. We know the consumer is now much more comfortable with fintech. They’re already using these types of solutions, so it will probably get tougher to retain our loan-to-share ratio.”
‘We know the consumer is now much more comfortable with fintech.’
Heidi Kassab
Although CuneXus’ model is optimized for digital channels—68% of the company’s volume comes from mobile devices—17% can also be traced to branch activity. “The platform does allow for in-branch upselling,” Kassab says, allowing tellers and other member service reps to convey pre-approved offers or other prompts verbally.
The solution has also unearthed entirely new opportunities.
“You think you have all the demand you’re going to see, then you reach new members you weren’t touching before, probably because they weren’t coming into the branch,” she says. This hard-to-reach segment was unlikely to respond to outbound calling campaigns.
Although Kassab sees lending as the easiest avenue to break into the fintech space, Cornerstone Community also partners with companies such as Pulsate and Atomic for direct deposit adoption. Her team is on the lookout for “any processes that can be improved upon, make us quicker to market, and be quickly embraced by membership and staff.”
She’s particularly interested in AI’s potential for lending decisions and call center efficiency, not to replace staff but to focus them more directly on the member experience.
In these difficult hiring times, however, the contingency benefits are clear. “When our senior management meets every three weeks, at the top of the agenda is always, ‘what can we do better/smarter/quicker/easier?’ and ‘is there a fintech out there we should be looking at?’”
GLEN SARVADY is managing principal at 154 Advisors. Contact him at glen.sarvady@154advisors.com.