If you don’t know where you are going, even the best technology will have a hard time getting you there. North Shore Credit Union’s Fred Cook understands this well, and the CIO, recognized as a top innovator last year, has made it his business to be clear-sighted about where the business is headed.

NSCU’s Web site, for one, will provide its members with a real-time view of their relationship with the credit union. Members will be able to view the full spectrum of their dealings with the Vancouver-based credit union whether it be banking services, loans, credit, investments, or insurance products, and will have the opportunity to connect with a financial advisor or take an action that makes sense for them depending on their needs and long-term objectives. Financial advisors, for their part, will have at their fingertips all the information they need to best advise valuable members.

“I would like to couple financial planning with BI strategy and make it relevant to our members.”  – NSCU’s Fred Cook

“I would like to couple financial planning with BI strategy and make it relevant to our members,” says Cook. To do that, “Business Intelligence from a financial point of view needs to extend not just through the corporation but over into our members so that they can look at information in a quasi real-time fashion through dashboarding to see how well their relationship with us is going.”

First though, BI comes with some challenges. One is making sense of the information within segmentation of your customer base, notes Cook. What does the information tell you about how to “move certain segments up the profitability ladder?”

Another challenge, according to the CIO, “is trying to assess the needs of all the business units and give each one what they are looking for,” as there is yet “no common dictionary for data analysts from the different disciplines.” Profitability doesn’t mean the same thing to a marketing department looking at a product and to a financial analyst, for instance.

The credit union is on the case, planning to replace its banking system by the end of the year. NSCU chose TEMENOS T24, which includes interfaces and functionality developed specifically for a Canadian credit union. The modular core banking system runs on HP hardware using the Microsoft Windows platform.

By implementing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 in conjunction with TEMENOS T24, NSCU gets an easy-to-integrate platform for all of its banking systems.

“Having a core banking engine that easily talks to our various systems means we can more effectively use the information in all of our data stores,” says Cook. “This helps our financial advisors better understand both our members and our products, and strengthens their ability to meet our members’ financial goals.”

The banking system interoperates with the Pivotal CRM system to deepen the member relationship. Enhanced with a Microsoft-powered browser-based user interface, SQL Server enriches the BI tools NCSU uses to stay focused on member wealth management.

“We are at least 50 to 60 percent there in terms of understanding the current value both of the member relationship and of our front-line staff,” Cook asserts. That means that not only will financial advisors be closer to having a single real-time view of each member to assist them in their advisory role, but they will also be measured on how well they are doing, both at advising members and bringing money into the organization.

NSCU’s focus is on its high-value members. “We’re differentiating ourselves from other credit unions and financial institutions by focusing on providing high-value financial advisory services. A rich database platform based on SQL Server 2005 helps us do that,” says Cook.

Indeed that focus has helped NSCU accomplish the dramatic growth it has seen over the last few years, from $600 million in assets under administration in 2002 to $2 billion today.

“We could chase new business like everybody else, but we have hardly tapped our existing relationships,” he says. “We shifted our retail strategy – what we call Member Intimacy – to better understand how we can provide financial services to our existing membership. It is all about anticipating their needs so that we can reduce their churn, but it was also critical to determine which members were the ones we needed to retain.”

“The person yelling the loudest will not necessarily get the relationship pricing,” he adds. “Because of our tools, now we can look at the relationship overall. It has to be mutually beneficial or it doesn’t work.”

So what does Cook see for mobile banking? “Right now it is just a transactional window into member accounts,” he says. “I see members looking at current account balances. I see payment opportunities extending to these non-traditional devices. There is also an opportunity to give advisory services, but at this point, I see it more driven by the moment and the transaction rather than summaries.”

For now though, Cook is focused on replacing NSCU’s banking system and embedding BI in the enterprise. Indeed, that’s the only way any of his visions for the business are going to be realized.

www.nscu.com

By Nadine Kjellberg