But new research from Cisco underscores how critically important it is for financial institutions to understand the potential of the mobile channel: consumers are willing to divulge more details about their finances if they get something in return from their financial institution, such as better protection from identity theft (83%), increased savings (80%), personalized service (78%) and simpler financial management tools (56%).

The clincher: The Cisco study also found that the majority of consumers feel that their financial institutions do not know enough about them to offer the additional services they would welcome.

That's a distressing finding, given the proficiency with which well-integrated ERP platforms can mine big data, analyze it and produce a wealth of intelligence that can bolster member outreach with programs and services tailored to their particular needs. Is mobile the missing piece?

A good ERP platform alone can provide fast, accurate insights to help a credit union remain competitive. What mobile ERP adds to the equation is an even faster mechanism for reaching members when and where they want, with a variety of helpful tools and services.

Aside from the basic mobile banking offerings of account balance and transaction history, bill payment and scheduling, transfers and remote deposit, and other standard information, mobile ERP opens up more complex opportunities for reaching members:

• Person-to-person (P2P) payments to provide truly real-time personal payments
• Financial management tools to help members budget better, improve credit scores and increase savings
• Investment alerts, analytics and forecasts packaged to enhance member investment opportunities
• Loan application processing to not only accept loan applications but process and authorize loan amounts to complete the transaction on the fly – while the member is still on the car lot, for example

With deep member trust and an engaged audience, credit unions are particularly well-situated to take advantage of increasing consumer preference for online and mobile offerings—and to take advantage of the feedback potential of mobile ERP solutions.

According to Forrester Research, 38% of all online consumers and 45% of consumers under 45 years old are always addressable on multiple devices, providing both an opportunity for extended member outreach as well as feedback. Forrester sees four key areas of fundamental business impact from the mobile platform:

1. Continuous engagement—credit unions can reach members any time, any place; and your members expect around-the-clock availability of mobile services
2. Data capture at the point of engagement—from using the camera function to capture check images to monitoring mobile banking activities, your members are feeding your ERP system with a constant stream of data that can be leveraged for better business intelligence
3. Context-aware applications—GPS and other sensors on mobile devices provide yet another piece of the member puzzle that can be accessed to help customize and personalize credit union services
4. Engagement analytics—monitoring app use can help credit unions streamline and improve mobile offerings

Information available from the credit union ERP platform isn't limited to transactions and other highly structured data. Mobile ERP integration transforms information from all the disparate data sources in the credit union – home-grown systems, SunGard, Jack Henry, Metavante, Fiserv, Excel spreadsheets – into information that members and management need.

Credit unions can use their mobile ERP platform to gather members' mobile usage data, mine social networks and extract other unstructured data for value-added analytics and predictive modeling that transform the meaningless noise of big data into actionable business intelligence.

By fully exploring and exploiting the opportunities presented through the mobile channel, credit unions can better serve members' needs now and into the future.

Rom Reddy is president/CEO of Sita Corp. in Somerset, N.J.

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