Future-looking.
Forward thinking.

The “member experience” is central to credit unions, and in theory, it’s a key differentiator between CUs and their rivals: banks and (increasingly) digital-only fintech platforms. In practice, it’s ever-more-difficult to provide a genuinely superior experience for your members. Increasingly they’ll choose to bank digitally, so getting to know them face-to-face is not the option…

Even the best-run institutions seldom enjoy an indefinite run of steady, gratifying growth. Banking trends run in cycles and slowdowns and reversals will happen, sometimes with little warning. Some institutions will hunker down defensively, conserve their resources, and wait for the situation to improve. Others will leap to the opposite extreme, reacting with alarm and…

While the white marble pillars of traditional financial organizations may have come down long ago, a number of banking practices and principles still shouldn’t get left behind. With digital innovations making banking continually more convenient on any mobile device or computer, even digital financial institutions would be wise to keep some of these evergreen practices…

Last month at Lumin Digital, we rolled out Google Authenticator support to all our client financial institutions, for no additional charge. This feature, which allows users to scan a barcode with their mobile phone and use a rotating, time-based one-time passcode (TOTP) as a replacement for an email or SMS message, helps protect users of…

A fundamental difference between a credit union and its competitors — conventional banks and faceless fintech startups — is that a credit union is community-based. This is true not just in the sense that a CU serves a specific community, but also in the sense that a CU is — or can be — a…

So far, the evolution of financial technology hasn’t been good to credit unions or small regional banks. Non-bank start-ups have done well because their pure-digital strategy keeps costs very low. The big banks have also thrived because they have massive resources to throw into their digital banking platforms. The J.D. Power 2019 U.S. Retail Banking Satisfaction…