How Have Recent Technology Developments And Transformations In The Banking Industry Impacted Your Business Environment?

Pete DuPré, CIO, Elevations Credit Union

Whether using Uber to quickly find a ride or ordering a latte in advance on a mobile phone, exceptional consumer experiences across industries have raised the bar for everything to be fast, powerful, personal and easy to use — including digital banking platforms.

In the past, CIOs’ concerns were primarily around availability, capacity, and speed. Is the platform available? Is it ability tested? And is it fast enough? Now, the definition of optimization and how CIOs deliver services has expanded to include customer experience, leveraging AI, data and analytics, and security.

To meet and exceed growing consumer expectations, we are in the initial phases of a digital experience transformation at Elevations Credit Union. We have recently combined our Digital and Marketing Teams to form an Experience Team, led by Chief Experience Officer (CXO) Danielle Quatrochi.

Partnering with our IT team, Danielle’s goal is to create a holistic membership experience — both in- branch and online — that exceeds members’ expectations and yields significant business results. Before joining Elevations in 2018, Danielle held marketing and digital leadership positions at Finish Line, MapMyFitness, Room 214 and Nike. These retail experiences have provided Danielle with a consumer-first and mobile-first perspective that’s driving many of the changes at Elevations, including a major online banking platform upgrade that will roll out in late 2020. We know that our digital platforms serve as the 24/7 branch. We need to provide members with a digital experience that carries through Elevations’ brand promise and supports each members’ financial journey, 24 hours a day, wherever they are.

This means delivering a highly secure and seamless digital-branch connection, where members can easily do and find everything at any time they need and want from their financial institution, whether that’s access to budgeting tools and financial advice, or merely the ability to quickly transfer money.

Through analyzing the data behind our members’ transactions, we see significant changes in the ways they utilize digital banking. At Elevations, 93% of member interactions are now digital, and we see rapid growth. Members who logged in to online banking or used the mobile app increased by 30% from 2017 to 2018. And, remote deposit use is growing every month.

Enrollment in online banking is also up significantly. We’ve prioritized helping members activate online banking early in the onboarding process because the data shows this action leads to higher engagement and sets the stage for elevated service, personalization, and revenue opportunities.

Digital growth has also been consistent on the lending side with 35% of loan applications now submitted through the digital channel, up from 22% at the beginning of 2017. Earlier this year, we revamped our mortgage application process using Blend^©, a digital lending platform with an intuitive design that simplifies and modernizes the typically cumbersome mortgage application process.

At Elevations, we’re committed to delivering exceptional, highly secure member experiences, and we will continue to look for ways to leverage new technology to provide that experience in the best way possible.

About Pete DuPré

Pete DuPré serves as Elevations Credit Union’s Chief Information Officer (CIO). He is responsible for developing and driving the implementation of Elevations’ technology strategy and leading its IT operations and business applications teams.

Before joining Elevations in 2017, Pete was CIO, Latin America Region, for First Data Corporation and CIO of JetPay Corporation. Pete also held IT leadership roles at Amazon Web Services, Vantiv, and Micro Focus. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from State University of New York in Buffalo, NY