Insights From The Outside: Nick Riegal

My background is in marketing and branding, but it was primarily focused on the restaurant and retail industries. At the end of the day, both roles are about service — in restaurants, it’s serving the customer; in credit unions, it’s serving the member. That was the “aha” part.

When Ascend Federal Credit Union ($4.5B, Tullahoma, TN) set out to reimagine its marketing strategy, it didn’t just look for a leader with experience, it looked for a leader with perspective. That search led the cooperative to Nick Riegal, a branding and communications veteran whose career spanned retail, food service, and tourism. Notably, it did not include financial services, but that didn’t deter Riegal or Ascend.

“I come from a world that’s consumer-led, so how do we make sure we’re member-led?” Riegal says. “If our members succeed in their goals, we’ve done our job.”

Now, Ascend’s new senior vice president of marketing is applying a member-first mindset to help the credit union rethink how it connects with community.

Talk a bit about your background. What was your journey to What drew you to Ascend?

Nick Riegal: My background is in marketing and branding, but it was primarily focused on the restaurant and retail industries. At the end of the day, both roles are about service — in restaurants, it’s serving the customer; in credit unions, it’s serving the member. That was the “aha” part. After speaking with our CEO, Matt Jernigan, and Leslie Copeland, our senior vice president of data and analytics, I knew it was the right fit. Hearing about Ascend’s mission to serve its members and seeing those actions directly impact people in our own backyard felt far more meaningful than simply tracking revenue on a ledger sheet. It’s much closer to home. 

Did you have any assumptions about the industry that you have discovered are wrong or different from what you anticipated?

NR: My wife was a part of a credit union when we lived in Florida. My job at the time didn’t have a sponsored 401(k), so it was an opportunity to open an account to put some retirement savings in through a Roth IRA. I had always assumed credit unions had an exclusive membership that most people couldn’t qualify for. I didn’t think about them as an option for everyday banking. 

When I joined Ascend, I came in with plenty of ideas and research questions: What’s unique here? Where can we get different footholds? I had this big idea of a David-and-Goliath dynamic — banks versus credit unions. Yet when we did some initial research, it showed the gap in public sentiment wasn’t as big as I expected, so I knew we needed to find a different angle. 

What were your priorities in the beginning?

NR: Marketing has three goals. We need to increase future demand, capture current demand, and retain and build member loyalty. We were doing really well capturing current demand, but we weren’t doing as well on the future demand and loyalty side. 

One of the first things I did was hire a new advertising agency partner to help rightsize our media plan. We were strong in lower-funnel conversion tactics, but we weren’t telling the full story so people would know about Ascend before they were ready to make a move. Our new agency helped us look at that entire member journey from start to finish. 

From a high level, it’s only been in place for about a quarter, but we’ve seen roughly a 25% increase in people taking action and a similar increase in new visitors to our website. 

Talk about a marketing campaign you’ve led since joining Ascend. What were the results?

NR: We’ve historically offered a $50 incentive for opening a youth account in April for Youth Month. It wasn’t revolutionary, but this year, we upped the incentive from $50 to $100 and took a more focused approach to the promotion. In the past, Youth Month was one of several initiatives running at the same time. This year, we stayed singularly focused across all our communications and made sure Youth Month was front and center. 

We also got the branches behind it. They’ve always been supportive, but this time we gave them a budget to decorate and ran incentive contests for the highest percentage increase in accounts opened. 

The result was the highest new membership month we’ve ever had, surpassing the last two Aprils combined in the number of youth accounts opened. 

How do you define success in your role?

NR: For me, success means helping the brand grow, but not by any means necessary. 

I love technology and new product offerings, but it’s our job to maintain our culture and keep the member at the core of everything we do. 

We recently heard a great story from a woman who came to us with no credit at all. We set her up with a secured credit card and gave her a plan. Within six months, she boosted her score enough to qualify for a regular, low-rate credit card. When we do what we’re supposed to do, we earn business. She’s now telling friends and family about us. That’s the kind of growth I value. It’s not just a referral program or a promotion — it’s the visible actions we take as a brand that help organic growth happen. 

Is there anything strategically that you’re looking forward to in the next six to 12 months?

NR: We’re going to develop a new creative campaign toward the end of the year. It’ll be exciting to talk about the brand in a way that aligns with our new media approach. We’re working through some positioning and messaging, with the goal of breaking down communication barriers that exist in the credit union space. First, we have to overcome the hurdle of explaining what a credit union is. Then, we can focus on who we are as a brand. 

Another big initiative is going to be marketing automation. We’ll be going through a process to find the right partners as well as collaborating with our internal teams to understand the data connection. That’s the missing piece. We need to get everything into our data warehouse, connect it to our email platform, and ensure the two systems talk to each other. That’s been the bottleneck. 

At the beginning of next year, we’ll also look at revamping the website to better support both lead capture and how it functions overall for our current members. 

This article has been edited and condensed. Ascend is federally insured by the NCUA.  

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