NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — When South Carolina Federal Credit Union went searching for ways to build relationships with members, Beth Jaskiewicz, senior vice president of marketing, looked at reward checking and all its other income-generating products.
"Then we did some focus groups and heard that people wanted simply packaged benefits, they didn't want to count transactions," Jaskiewicz said.
One participant even pointed out that programs with multiple requirements don't match the credit union's branding and slogan, "Life simplified."
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"I thought to myself, 'good point', so we took that information and created our own program that would be a win-win for everybody," she said.
Now, as advertised, the idea is fairly simple. The new account, launched publicly last week, is called eChecking. To qualify, members must actively use four services: direct deposit, bill pay, debit card, and e-statements. Active usage is defined as one transaction per month. Other parameters look like a basic free checking account, with no monthly service fees or access charges and no internal foreign ATM fees.
Meet the requirements, earn points for each debit card transaction and bill paid online. Rewards are doled out on the bill-pay side, 200 points per bill paid, with a monthly ceiling of 5,000 points.
Don't meet the requirements? It's still free
checking.
How are they paying for it? With more business, they hope.
"The relationship is what we're after and also to encourage them to use online bill pay, which is a sticky product," Jaskiewicz said.
"Obviously, we're interested in growing core deposits, which this does, plus members are more likely to bring other deposits over if they're active. But for us, the primary thing was building a relationship in a manner that is beneficial to asset-liability management, as well as being a benefit to the member."
Further encouraging more products per member is the additional offer of a year of free Equifax Credit Watch if a member has a loan at the credit union or funds a new one.
The program was created from scratch internally, with IT staff spending about three months pulling together a number of vendors, including core processor Summit, card processor PSCU and online bill payer Digital Insight. Another three months were spent testing the product, using employees as testers, which Jaskiewicz said served as a self-training program and enthusiasm builder for front liners.
It's too early to track how much new business eChecking will bring in, but Jaskiewicz said 800 existing accounts have already made the switch. Rather than make the switch for members, the credit union promoted the account heavily with likely users, then allowed them to decide.
Signing up can be done entirely online, because as Jaskiewicz pointed out, "it didn't make sense to ask them to do everything electronically, but here, fill out this paper form first–walking the walk is important to us."
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