BALTIMORE — Call it a painful paradox in the numbers-driven research presented by James VanDyke, president of JavelinStrategy & Research at the NACHA 2012 conference here. 

The good news for credit unions: they have a dramatic lead in customer satisfaction, with more than 90% of members saying they like their credit union, per Van Dyke's numbers.

The bad news: the big banks have taken a massive lead in rolling out cutting edge technologies such as mobile banking, remote deposit capture and person-to-person payments and the reality, said Van Dyke, is that “smaller institutions are struggling with these technologies and this will negatively impact them.”

“If these technologies are going to be essential” – and Van Dyke left little doubt in his Monday presentation that he believed they would be, given the enthusiasm for younger demographics in tools such as mobile banking – “there is going to be a lot of small institution instability in the future.”

Van Dyke's numbers painted a picture of a much more tech hungry customer base at large financial institutions – more than 10% of their customers are signed up for mobile alerts, for instance, whereas the signups among credit union members are much lower, per the Javelin research.

Credit unions, in Javelin's numbers, do one thing very right: they pace the field in member usage of debit and check cards, showing higher usage than even the biggest banks.

But, suggested Van Dyke, small institutions and their technology vendors – where, he admitted, most credit unions and community banks turn for high-tech products rather than brewing them internally – are simply going to have to step up their games.

That is about the only way forward in staying competitive with younger consumers, he stressed.