Profile: Vantage Credit Union (VCU) is a progressive, full-service financial institution that is owned and guided by its members.  Because VCU is a not-for-profit financial institution, the members enjoy better rates, lower fees and superior service to that of a bank. VCU's philosophy of “People Helping People”, rather than the need to pursue profits for shareholders, drives decisions made about rates, fees, services and involvement in the community.  VCU provides various products to meet the financial needs of individuals including general transactional accounts, consumer loans of all types, and a wide range of financial services at little or no cost.

Business Challenges: For years, VCU's marketing department made decisions that were based on a monthly “book” of printed reports and facilitated promotional activities with “lists” that were produced by an outside agency based on a monthly snapshot of VCU member data.  This turnkey service became less and less effective for growing VCU because it took up to 6 weeks to receive output, information was based on a single systems data, reports only really provided “account breakdowns”, and changes were expensive and time consuming.
In order to provide more value added services to its members and continue to recruit new members, VCU needed a way to generate flexible, on-demand reports dynamically to determine how to effectively market to its current and future members.

Challenges:

• 6 Week Old Information
• Inflexible Report and List Generation
• Missing Internal and External Data
• Disconnected Systems

How Global Image Helped: Global Image developed a solution that brought together information from the previously separate retail (Savings, DDA, etc.) banking, loan administration, and retirement account management systems in addition to integrating commercially available lifestyle and home ownership data.  The result was an easily accessible, current, and comprehensive view of all of the members' credit union activities, in one central location.  Global Image also created a process to allow Vantage marketing personnel to create and track marketing campaign impressions and costs on an ongoing, ad-hoc basis.  Management personnel can now produce reports “on-the-fly” through an easy to use interface and monitor graphically depicted key performance indicators on a daily basis.

Success: VCU now has access to more complete member profiles than before and well equipped analysts (not IT personnel) have the capability to provide all of the previously purchased support and produce much more granular, relevant business insight that management requires.  The tangible benefits that VCU has realized from the Marketing Intelligence solution include:

Process Improvements:

• Eliminated dependence on inflexible external reporting services
• Reduced annual costs for reports that provided limited value.

Information Availability:

• Decreased the age of their marketing information by 41 days
• Expanded the member profile to include important demographic information
• Reduced the lead time for mail file generation from 4 weeks to less than 1.

Reporting Efficiency:

• Reduced aggregate weekly report preparation effort
• Reduced new report generation lead time

Management Visibility:

• Enabled the early detection of ineffective marketing campaigns which is projected to save (or enable the effective reallocation of) a significant portion of the marketing budget on an annual basis
• Provided more detailed insight into member product/service adoption and usage patterns to guide future development resource allocations
• Established an information base that can be used for operational scorecarding
• Created a platform for developing a model for and the tracking of member profitability.

System Performance:

• Produced a stable technical operating platform that is scalable
• Automated the consolidation of data from 4 different sources for business analysts.

For more information on the success at Vantage Credit Union, please feel free to contact Global Image at (800)325-8565.