COMMUNITYAMERICA CREDIT UNION
"By considering each member’s unique situation, we can highlight the products and services that will be most relevant to their needs. That means we can be relevant in our conversations with the members, and ultimately realize our goal of helping more than a million members achieve financial peace of mind."
Provides
easy-to-use APIs for integrating member data into analytics processes
Enables
360-degree member view for personalized marketing
Creates
compelling up- and cross-selling opportunities
Case study details
CommunityAmerica Credit Union has a compelling vision for the future of the banking industry. Its goal is not to grow for growth’s sake, but to help members achieve financial peace-of-mind by supporting them on every step of their journey.
Whitney Bartelli, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, explains: “We want to continue our strong growth trajectory by helping more members on a path to thrive and achieve the financial peace of mind. That means embracing an even broader range of individuals, businesses and communities with their own unique needs and definitions of what peace of mind means. Data is crucial to understand our members and personalize our services to meet their requirements.”
Ravi Peru, Chief Information Officer, adds: “We need to understand each person’s financial situation, but we don’t want to have to ask them a bunch of questions when we already have years of data about their financial history in our systems. We want to bring that data together and use it to build a better member experience.”
One of CommunityAmerica Credit Union’s top priority projects is Life Planning. The aim is to enable the organization’s wellbeing coaches to create an achievable, personalized financial plan for each member, connecting them with the best product and service offerings to help them realize their unique goals.
“Life Planning posed two main technical challenges,” says Peru. “First, we needed a data platform that could host both structured and unstructured data and analyze it with AI and machine learning. We solved that by building it ourselves.
“Second, we needed to bring together all our data, which was scattered across internal and external systems, and make it available to our analytics team. After building AI models to generate personalized recommendations, the next step was to make the information available through all our channels. When a member logs into our online channels or walks into one of our branches, we want to personalize their experience in real time. To achieve this, we targeted a high-performance API integration layer.
Selecting an enterprise-class solution
After evaluating several market-leading API management solutions, CommunityAmerica Credit Union selected Amplify Platform, an end-to-end platform for automated API discovery and management. The first iteration of the solution uses over 100 API endpoints to integrate multiple applications and data sources, including CommunityAmerica Credit Union’s core banking applications as well as its online and mobile banking systems.
“I don’t see Axway as a vendor; they’re a long-term partner for us,” says Peru. “We want organizations who are aligned with us, and Axway is an excellent fit for the credit union market.”
Working with an expert team from Axway, CommunityAmerica Credit Union deployed and configured Amplify Platform in the Azure cloud. Using prebuilt accelerators from Axway, the organization completed the deployment platform in just six months and rewrote legacy APIs and added new APIs to the platform over the following eight months, increasing its responsiveness to member needs.
Building on a robust integration layer, CommunityAmerica Credit Union has consolidated multiple core banking solutions into a single platform, rationalizing its environment and reducing complexity. The organization plans to harness Amplify Platform to forge partnerships with banks and fintechs to bring value-added solutions to its members.
Enabling real-time personalization
Amplify Platform allows CommunityAmerica Credit Union to deliver data to any touchpoint in real time — enabling a consistent omni-channel experience. For example, CommunityAmerica Credit Union offers a “profit payout” to members who meet certain relationship-based criteria. Today, the organization automatically alerts members about simple changes they can make to qualify for the payout, such as enabling direct deposits for paychecks or logging into online or mobile banking.
Whitney Bartelli adds: “We can now experiment more easily and see how campaigns influence member behavior. Around the time of the NFL draft, we created a campaign that offered a free Kansas City Chiefs t-shirt and a charitable giveback to Patrick Mahomes’ foundation for people who opened a new Chiefs checking account. We could immediately see the spike in new members, and a lift in engagement from existing members.”
Helping members achieve financial wellbeing
Thanks to API integration from Axway, the credit union can unite multiple data sources seamlessly, enabling personalized experiences for existing members and allowing prospects to move seamlessly between channels throughout the account-opening journey. Looking ahead, omni-channel integration will create a single data repository for member insight, helping the organization to better tailor its services.
“When you have more than 50 products, handling integration in an agile way is very important,” says Peru. “With Axway, we can interface with anything and move data between any internal systems we want. That would be really slow with point-to-point integration, but Axway makes it quick and easy.”
By better understanding individual member behavior, needs, and preferences, CommunityAmerica Credit Union is promoting more relevant — and therefore more compelling — member interactions.
Bartelli concludes: “By considering each member’s unique situation, we can highlight the products and services that will be most relevant to their needs. That means we can be relevant in our conversations with the members, and ultimately realize our goal of helping more than a million members achieve financial peace of mind.”
