Think of it as Shark Tank with a credit union spin, and it’s just been renewed for another season.
The 2024 Innovation Series from CreditUnions.com and Callahan & Associates is underway. Every year since 2018, this series has offered a select group of suppliers 10 minutes each to impress an audience of credit union decision-makers. It’s simple: Each vendor pitches its offerings and attendees vote on their favorites.
The Innovation Series was a hit from the get-go and continues to grow in popularity. This year’s focus areas include member analytics, fraud, lending, member experience, and payments.
Read on for more from this year’s member analytics finalists: Exagens Corp., Total Expert, Datava, and Gemineye and join us for the Innovations In Member Analytics webinar. Register Today!
Datava
Describe your innovation.
Datava’s Complete Data Activation Platform helps Credit Unions say goodbye to managing multiple systems such as a Data Warehouse, CRM, BI, Predictive Analytics and more. Datava can also effortlessly integrate with existing systems if a Credit Union has a solution it prefers to keep utilizing. Our platform seamlessly connects your disparate and siloed systems, consolidating your data into a single, unified platform. It manages every step of a Credit Union’s data journey from start to finish and then takes it further by deploying fully activated data to all levels of the organization. Activated data is what empowers your Credit Union with crucial, AI driven insights and directives delivered to the right staff member at the right time so they can serve members better. We are the catalyst for fueling exponential growth, elevating member satisfaction, maximizing employee performance, and boosting revenue. With hundreds of readily available metrics, dashboards, and reports, Datava also ensures immediate and measurable ROI as well as a complete understanding of cost of ownership.
What Opportunity or challenge does it address?
In today’s influencer-driven landscape, Credit Unions who leverage data and technology assume a pivotal role. Much like the preference for ChatGPT over Google reflects an important shift, members seek Credit Unions that embody leadership, credibility, and innovation. Datava serves as the conduit for Credit Unions to attain influencer status through our innovative technology. Our platform also enhances efficiency and productivity across the board. Credit Unions often grapple with an unwieldy vendor landscape, averaging over 400+ vendors. Datava significantly consolidates this complexity while fully integrating disparate systems. Frontline staff benefit from a unified login and system and are equipped with data-driven insights, visually compelling dashboards, and actionable directives which foster a seamless, concierge member experience. Furthermore, establishing a robust data foundation positions Credit Unions to embrace generative AI technology, ensuring competitiveness and relevance in the industry. Lastly, Datava catalyzes Credit Union growth, exemplified by our clients achieving multibillion-dollar asset expansions. Our platform drives impressive metrics, including a 50% increase in cross-selling, a 20% increase in new loan dollars, and a remarkable 200% surge in new indirect loans. Notably, VPs and Branch Managers have witnessed a reduction of 60 days (about 2 months) of manual labor annually. These statistics underscore Datava’s transformative impact.
How does it increase member value?
Datava ensures seamless member experiences at every stage of the member journey, from outreach and referrals to onboarding and retention. Our platform equips Credit Union staff with powerful tools for a concierge-level service, enabling faster and smarter member assistance. With our 360° Member Dashboard, staff can efficiently handle inquiries, reducing call center handle times. The platform offers closed account alerts and attrition likelihood metrics, enabling proactive member outreach to prevent relationship loss. It also notifies staff of retention events and tracks referrals for follow-up, ensuring a simplified onboarding process. Moreover, Datava recommends products tailored to members’ needs and life events, fostering trust and deeper relationships. Our platform streamlines the lending process, providing members with a seamless experience. These are just a few examples highlighting how credit unions leverage Datava, but there is so much more with not enough room to cover here that a credit union can do with our platform to increase member value.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Unlike competitors, who only provide fragmented solutions, Datava orchestrates the entire data journey, all the way to achieving full data activation so that credit unions can more effectively grow revenue, deepen member satisfaction, manage risk, and increase employee productivity. This means that Datava stands alone in the industry, since it is the only Platform that offers Credit Unions so many unparalleled capabilities within a single system coupled with pioneering seamless integration of a Credit Union’s disparate systems. Other companies provide just a piece of our platform’s capabilities and then will only take the data part of the way, which leaves the Credit Union splicing in yet another vendor to fill the gap. Datava’s Complete and Deployable Data Activation Platform resolves all those concerns. Our platform also delivers immediate ROI, deploying hundreds of robust dashboards, reports, and metrics within a mere week, a stark contrast to solutions that typically require months to set up. Furthermore, we offer professional services, enabling full in-house management without straining internal resources. Our developers, sourced from prestigious US universities, ensure top-notch expertise. Our company is founded and led by industry veterans and Datava recently secured a round of funding from several influential Credit Unions, cementing our position as a leader in the Credit Union space. Lastly, we work hard to ensure our clients are happy and successful with our platform and it shows up in our incredible 100% client retention rate.
Exagens Corp.
Describe your innovation.
Behavioral Banking enables emotionally significant relationships to be created and nurtured, cost-effectively, individually, and at scale, with the growing pool of members who now rarely interact with your credit union in-person. It makes possible the benefits of customer engagement, loyalty and financial wellness in an era when most interactions and transactions occur through digital channels. MoneySparxs, exagens’ latest Behavioral Banking solution, fuses behavioral economics, neuroscience, advanced data analytics, psychology, and AI to understand the financial decisions of individuals, and then effectively engage and influence them to make smarter financial decisions. It adds incredible new value to your existing data and enriches it further. Behavioral Banking is needed because people are constantly being swayed by cognitive biases, emotions and social factors, and therefore rarely make rational decisions when it comes to their finances. Behavioral Banking solutions enables credit unions to grow with their members by catalyzing them to save, spend, invest, and borrow wiser both through their digital channels as well as in-branch.
What Opportunity or challenge does it address?
The Challenge: The ease and convenience of digital banking has yielded an explosion in the frequency of banking interactions and significant cost savings for financial institutions. It has also fractured financial relationships and their benefits. People who primarily bank through digital channels report being significantly less engaged with their Financial Institution resulting in lower share of wallet, reduced loyalty, decreased customer satisfaction and an adverse impact on financial health. The Opportunity: This disconnect provides credit unions with a unique opportunity to differentiate and grow by leveraging their historical strengths to differentiate their member experience and compete with big banks who otherwise far outspend them on technology. Exagens MoneySparxs enables credit unions to elevate their digital and in-branch experiences and move beyond providers of mostly commodity products and services to trusted and valued financial partners in the lives of their members. The results: Credit unions utilizing behavioral banking have benefited from increased deposits, expanded wallet share, higher card utilization, membership growth and great loyalty all while helping improve the financial lives of their members.
How does it increase member value?
MoneySparxs enables credit unions to grow financially with their members by delivering Behavioral Baking at scale through their digital channels. It delivers emotionally and financially engaging Sparks* (personal & community money-related tips, wisdom, suggestions & fun insights) which catalyzes individuals to save, spend, invest, and borrow wisely.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Based in Behavioral Science and leveraging AI, goes well beyond traditional methods of segmenting, personas, and journey mapping by treating and interacting with each individual member in terms of their unique financial situation. With a deep understanding of human behavior and financial decision making (why decisions are and are not made), MoneySparxs is able to catalyze members in ways beneficial to them and their credit unions. Exagens designed MoneySparxs from the ground up with the sensibilities and realities of credit unions in mind. It is cost-effective, requires no PII, produces results quickly, and does not require any additional credit union resources to operate – exagens does most of the work, credit unions and their members get all of the benefit.
Gemineye
Describe your innovation.
Our data analytics platform solution runs entirely on Databricks architecture, allowing us to provide an unbelievably efficient, leading-edge, flexible, and low-cost single-stop-shop for credit unions. Seems too good to be true? It’s not! So how do we do it? It all comes down to the tech stack. By creating an environment where our data platform runs on Databricks, which is widely considered the world’s best data technology, we just have one gear in motion. In your standard data analytics program, multiple gears (various services, separation of database, compute, storage, and ingestion) are in motion, creating ever-compounding inefficiencies in time, labor, and cost. So what’s behind Databricks? Something called Apache Spark, which is used by top companies like Netflix, JetBlue, and eBay. This heavy-weight analytics engine is deeply efficient in processing and storing immense amounts of data – the parts that create a foundation for an ideal analytics solution for credit union. Why has no one else done this? We envisioned what the future of data analytics would look like before it became mainstream, and, back in 2020, acted on it by rebuilding our new cloud-based solution from the ground up. While others were (and still are) burdened by tech-debt and legacy tech stacks that prevent them from keeping pace with the rate of technological changes, we can iterate and innovate swiftly and affordably. Plain and simple: we aren’t passing on the massive costs of legacy technology investments onto our clients.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
To be frank: many credit unions cannot afford what other data analytics vendors are charging, despite the critical role data analytics plays in the vitality and strength of a credit union. Herein lies the opportunity to foster data democracy, or “data for all,” as we colloquially call it. Data democracy is created when a high-performing data analytics solution is accessible for credit unions of all sizes. Smaller credit unions have limited opportunities to obtain a quality data analytics solution that doesn’t drain their resources or sacrifice member experience.
How does it increase member value?
We are lowering the barriers for credit unions to know their members through data, which allows them to personalize products and services to their members, which promotes retention and acquisition. By offering a data analytics solution that is affordable, fast to implement, and nimble, a much wider spectrum of credit unions can leverage this vital technology to improve their member experience. This not only applies to the $1B+ credit unions but to those smaller credit unions who have historically been underrepresented in the analytics space.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
There are several key differentiators that make Gemineye exceptionally unique in the credit union data analytics space.
- Rapid deployment: We can deploy your data analytics solution in days (sometimes 72 hours!) and weeks and not months and years, which allows you to obtain ROI much earlier.
- World-class software: Most of our systems run on Databricks, globally recognized as a best-in-class data solution, used by Fortune-50 companies, with the industry-leading Power BI as our visualization tool
- Cloud-native: While competitors still use on-premise or mixed-cloud solutions that are antiquated and clunky, we’ve been cloud-native from the start. This makes our solution inherently more nimble, efficient, and affordable.
- Single environment: Our data analytics solution operates in just one cloud environment owned by the credit union. What that means to you is that we’ve removed the complexity, limitations, and additional costs of two separate cloud environments while keeping your data secure in your environment at all times.
- Client control: Our structure allows the client to retain control of their data. Instead of you conforming to your data analytics provider’s requirements (like member definitions), we conform to you.
Total Expert
Describe your innovation.
The Total Expert platform combines a sophisticated intelligence system with a dynamic action framework that supports the growth of both sides of the balance sheet; encompassing deposits and loans. By harmonizing data from POS, LOS, core, and warehouse systems, our platform offers a comprehensive view of every contact, enhancing the ability to boost deposit acquisition while simultaneously driving loan origination. Aa a complement to our data centralization is Total Expert Customer Intelligence, which enriches contact profiles with intent data for timely outreach and identifies opportunities to encourage deposit growth and loan uptake. This dual focus ensures that members receive the right financial solutions at the right time—whether for saving or borrowing—to enhance their financial health and stability. The initial focus of Customer Intelligence on mortgage lending insights allows credit unions to proactively engage members who are entering the housing market, either as sellers or prospective borrowers, facilitating both the retention of deposits and the generation of new loan business. Automated alerts and personalized outreach ensure members consider their credit union first for their mortgage needs, reinforcing deposit loyalty while capturing loan opportunities. Customer Intelligence will also identify and surface members with substantial home equity, paving the way for discussions about home equity loans, lines of credit, or cash-out refinancing to further drive the loan side of the balance sheet. The upcoming inclusion of life event data in Customer Intelligence will deepen this approach by recognizing critical moments in members’ lives that often precipitate significant financial decisions affecting both deposits and loans. By embedding this nuanced understanding of members’ financial journeys into their profiles, Total Expert empowers credit unions to engage in more meaningful, context-driven conversations. This builds trust, cements loyalty, and strategically positions the credit union to support its members’ needs across the entire financial spectrum— from deposit growth to loan services—fostering overall balance sheet growth.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
The Total Expert platform addresses the critical opportunity of deepening member relationships and the challenge of staying competitive in a rapidly evolving financial landscape. Integrating rich data analytics with proactive engagement strategies empowers credit unions to anticipate and meet member needs more effectively, driving both deposit growth and loan origination. This dual approach enhances member loyalty and trust and positions credit unions to provide guidance at critical financial moments in members’ lives, ensuring they remain the preferred choice for financial services.
How does it increase member value?
The Total Expert platform elevates member value by delivering personalized financial solutions and insights at pivotal moments, ensuring members receive tailored support and advice across every financial milestone. This personalized engagement fosters financial wellness, enhances trust, and solidifies the credit union’s role as a key financial advisor. By addressing member’s unique needs with precision and care, the platform not only enhances their financial experience but also deepens their connection with the credit union, creating lasting value.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Total Expert sets itself apart from competitors by emphasizing actionable intelligence. While many platforms offer insights, Total Expert translates these into strategic actions, enabling credit unions to understand and respond immediately to member needs. This proactive approach ensures that insights lead to tangible engagement and service enhancements, differentiating our solution by its ability to drive actual results and foster deeper member relationships.
