“Kasasa ties them all together and gives us a little better scale because it does provide national name recognition when someone searches for a rewards checking account or high interest checking, or if they search for cash-back checking,” Keith Brannan, chief marketing officer of Kasasa by BancVue, said.

New capabilities provided by the product allow credit unions to be very relevant in comparison to mega-banks, Brannan added. In addition to leveling the playing field for credit unions, they enjoy the advantages of offering products with a recognizable, national brand name.

“We found that about 88% of consumers search for product first,” Brannan said. “Then they look at who is offering that product.”

So, he suggested, offering consumers a free account with beneficial rewards helps increase noninterest income and cost savings for credit unions via the account holders' natural banking activities.

And BancVue's approach appears to be working. Of the company's 707 clients, 226, or 31.9%, are credit unions. One of them is the $129 million, Jackson, Miss.-based Magnolia Federal Credit Union, which has been utilizing Kasasa since February 2010.

“We initially were talking with the BancVue folks about rewards checking,” Steve Pollman, president/CEO for Magnolia FCU, said. “As we were getting ready to implement it, they came out with Kasasa. We backed off and just implemented Kasasa right off the bat.”

Kasasa's technology runs in the background and completes all calculations for the institution, creating a seamless experience for the consumer, Brannan said.

“Our ability to process those rewards, making sure we process the qualification criteria, is a very specific, programmatic operation that runs every month at a different cycle for each institution depending on their needs,” he added.

The rewards processing system plugs into the institution's core provider; currently, BancVue supports more than 60 core systems. In the case of Magnolia FCU, BancVue uses a link to the credit union's server and pulls data from the its transaction registers.

“It figures out who made their rewards and who didn't based on certain criteria,” Pollman explained. “They do that automatically.”

Kasasa also sends alerts to members each month when they fall short of receiving their rewards and tells them what they need to do to get back on track.

Magnolia uses four types of Kasasa products: Kasasa Cash, a free checking account that rewards members with high interest for every month in which they qualify; Kasasa Saver, a free, high-interest savings account which can be linked to a Kasasa Cash checking account; Kasasa Giver, which allows users to send their rewards to certain charities; and Kasasa Tunes, which offers refunds on iTunes, Google Play and Amazon purchases.

To reap the benefits of Kasasa products, consumers must receive e-statements, access online banking and meet a debit card usage minimum.

“Those are all things that either save us money or make us money. The whole rewards checking Kasasa concept is about engagement and allowing the smaller financial institutions to offer the same kinds of exotic products that the big banks can,” Pollman said, adding that Magnolia FCU would not have taken on the research and development initiatives required to achieve that level of engagement on its own.

Kasasa has been beneficial to Magnolia FCU members – who Pollman said love the program – as well as for the credit union.

“Our relationship with the BancVue people has been very rewarding,” Pollman said. “They are constantly looking for ways to make what we do more attractive to our community. Their slogan is to 'win the war against the mega-banks.' It is one of the best moves financially we could have made.”

BancVue also helped design Magnolia FCU's website through another service it offers, FIRSTBranch, a powerful online branch that is exclusively available to community financial institutions.

“If they already have a great website, we don't tell them to go build one, but if they feel that they could use some improvement in their website, we rebuild it and apply account opening services,” Brannan explained. “That way, a member can sign up directly through their web service. For us, that has been a critical part of the performance.”

Brannan maintained that a credit union's web presence must be at least competitive with what consumers can find down the street, or with a service provider that isn't local.

Magnolia FCU enjoys hovering near the latest technological advances, Pollman noted.

“We try to stay on top of things, or kind of near the front,” he said. “We don't like to be the first adopter, but our members like to have what's new.”

For example, Magnolia FCU recently launched Apple Pay, which members can link to a Kasasa checking account or another Magnolia FCU account.

“We provide a broad retail strategy that fits what credit unions are trying to do,” Brannan emphasized.

With Kasasa, credit unions can open themselves up to valuable business opportunities, Brannan concluded.

“In many cases, credit unions are so focused on the retail consumer compared to their banking brethren, that having great retail products is even more important for them,” he said. “We actually see them doing extremely well. We definitely see a performance improvement there that we don't see at other places.”

BancVue's next move for Kasasa is to provide a more complete retail banking experience for community financial institutions with an emphasis on mobile.