In times of disruption and financial uncertainty, it’s inspiring to see credit unions stay committed to serving their communities.
Despite the ups and downs of the market, you continue to put people first.
This dedication is a testament to the values you uphold. And it’s exactly why credit unions must address current industry challenges like ecosystem disruption, financial fragmentation, outdated technology, and poor service integration. Because you, more than most financial institutions, are needed.
You’re needed by members who count on you to guide them with the right technology that will make their financial lives better and easier to manage.
The How And When Of Technology Modernization
Successfully responding to these industry challenges so that you can better serve your members lies in how you plan and when you execute a technology modernization strategy.
Updating your existing technology can help you improve your efficiency, speed up your product and service launches, and ultimately, help you survive disruptions in the market.
The pace of your modernization journey will be unique and will ultimately depend on how you prioritize your strategic initiatives, set realistic milestones, and occasionally take calculated risks.
As you evaluate the quality, security, integration capabilities, and flexibility of a modern technology stack, consider four key strategic factors.
1. Unlocking Member Insights
You already know that meeting member expectations for transaction accessibility is paramount to attract, engage, and retain relationships — and that leveraging technology to provide personalized, omnichannel experiences requires a deep understanding of your members’ needs.
In order to deliver personal and personalized experiences to them efficiently and safely, it’s important to understand your members’ needs and provide them with the right information at the right time through an omnichannel experience — creating a foundation for relationship banking.
By having all your information in one place, organizing it, and making it more useful, you can help your members get a better handle on their finances — helping them get one step closer to financial freedom.
2. Enhancing Security And Fraud Mitigation
Effectively managing enterprise risk has become more complex than ever.
You’re challenged with a wider variety of more sophisticated threats and an increased frequency of risk management obstacles — like securing data and mission-critical systems, combating fraud and financial crimes, and reducing credit and interest rate risk, all of which leave you and your members vulnerable.
Luckily, the realm of fraud mitigation has seen some of the most innovative solutions, like behavioral analysis tools. These innovative solutions monitor end-user behaviors, enabling the identification of potentially fraudulent activity and timely notifications. There’s also modern, cloud-native financial crimes platforms that correlate fraud across all channels, addressing real-time fraud issues with event-driven communications to enhance security capabilities and ensure rapid threat detection.
3. Enabling Ecosystem Growth
In today’s financial landscape, it’s vital to constantly evolve to effectively meet your members’ needs and prioritize their experiences.
To create a successful ecosystem, it’s important that your technology platform is open to integration with no barriers — financial or otherwise. It should also have clear design standards to help you standardize your brand experience. To remain successful in the midst of disruption, it’s important to prioritize developers and high-grade fintech partnerships by leveraging a technology platform that supports such partnerships.
4. Converting On Your Own Terms
While modernization is essential, it’s just as important to think about the velocity and timeline of your credit union’s journey.
Modernization doesn’t need to be a disruptive, all-at-once transformation. For instance, that’s why you’ll see that at Jack Henry, we advocate for a gradual approach. Our next-generation platform gradually replaces legacy systems with cloud-native microservices, offering the flexibility to choose what to modernize while allowing for rollback options.
This strategic approach prioritizes progressive transitions over abrupt shifts, ensuring your credit union can adapt at its own pace.
The Way Forward
While it may be a challenging time to operate your credit union, we’re here to serve you and your members with our people-inspired innovation and modern technology. For almost 50 years, we’ve been passionate advocates of the role you play in our economy, and we believe the world is a better place with you in it.
We look forward to innovating with you and uncovering the many ways we can connect possibilities to put people first — so you can serve them better.
