Credit Union Develops Omnichannel Experience

For the $1.95 billion, Richland, Wash.-based Gesa Credit Union, creating an omnichannel member experience is not complete without creating a 360-degree view of members for the employees who support and sell to them.

Gesa has grown from running a small, part-time office and serving members of the General Electric Supervisor’s Association in 1953, into the fifth-largest credit union in Washington State serving over 160,000 members today. Gesa turned to the Fremont, Calif.-based Terafina to help tackle the development of an effective digital sales and service platform that can be accessed from any channel or device. Terafina offered Gesa a SaaS-based omnichannel solution that could leverage one platform for every member-facing system.

Gesa Chief Information Officer Raj Bandaru acknowledged the same challenge exists at many financial institutions. His own employees are jumping between several systems during the sales and service process, which is laborious and often frustrating for both employees and members. In addition, cross-sell opportunities are often lost and too much time is being spent training employees on several systems for basic functions.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s our credit union or any credit union in general, you are training them on multiple systems,” Bandaru said. Personal financial or member service representatives, for example, must learn core banking tasks such as opening deposit accounts, using a loan origination platform for financing options, and in some cases, utilizing different methods for business member services such as commercial deposits and loans.

Bandaru confessed it’s an absolutely horrendous process. A rep working with a member might open a deposit product in the core system, then go into the LOS and onto a credit card application, and start typing in the same information all over again.

In addition, member service reps are at a disadvantage. These days, members are already exploring products, rate shopping and completing all their research before coming into a branch, Bandaru pointed out. Sometimes members have more information at their disposal than PFRs or MSRs. “Frontline employees need to be more proficient on the business side and sell the product as opposed to worrying about the technology side. Then, because of all these disconnected systems, we do not have a 360 view of the member,” he said.

Terafina provides an omnichannel sales platform that supports the shared branching philosophy and highly personalized service that credit unions such as Gesa desire. “Gesa had a strategy in place,” Meheriar Hasan, CEO/founder for Terafina, said, adding the credit union provided a very clear set of objectives for the employee experience in terms of sales and servicing. Terafina is taking on the sales perspective of digitization, consolidating all branch and call center capabilities into one unified platform.

Bandaru explained Gesa’s strategic initiative was to provide its frontline staff with a more holistic view of members by creating a “skin” that covers these multiple systems. “What Gesa has done is very unique,” Hasan said, explaining the credit union uses its existing CRM system as a common reservoir for all sales- and service-related activity for member-facing channels.

“It lives on top of all these systems and it’s absolutely a simplified user interface to make the MSR/PFR job absolutely simple and easy, and also gives them the next product to sell, which is the CRM functionality,” Bandaru said. He added a unified sales, service and members relationship management functionality moves Gesa closer to a universal employee and omnichannel experience.

Bandaru said Terafina mastered this strategy, vision and concept. Additionally, Gesa wanted everything to be in real-time and to use application programming interfaces. “All the data access retrievals and reads and writes are happening in real-time. That was one of our requirements. Then that becomes an extremely powerful tool. That was our go-in strategy.” Other vendors offered bits and pieces of the technology it wanted, but none offered the complete package Gesa desired.

Currently, Gesa is rolling out the consumer sales and CRM system. The entire consumer side, which includes loans and deposits, is in place and ready to go live. Gesa is in pilot mode at one location and expects a full-scale rollout to its remaining branches soon. Phase two, which will be completed by the end of the year or during the first quarter of 2019, will include commercial deposits and loans, mortgages and a servicing component for all accounts. “What this is going to do is provide 100% sales, service and CRM capability all in one platform for us,” Bandaru said.

With their new system, Gesa’s frontline team will have all member information available with talking points. “It will actually assist them in the sales process,” Bandaru noted.

Bandaru described how the Terafina platform operates like a shopping cart. Reps fill in one unified application form, and then select appropriate products such as deposit accounts, credit cards and loans. The system prefills as much information as possible from the core, then the rep enters any missing information, hits submit and the process is complete.

The Gesa chief information officer noted the product can also be extended to external interactions through online and mobile banking platforms in the future. “So what the member is seeing and what our staff is seeing is exactly the same. At this point, you’ve simplified the frontline job so much that now you can get to that universal banking concept down the road once the product is fully built out.”

When it’s fully up and running, Bandaru expects the new system to pay for itself as long as Gesa sees a 10% uplift in sales. “Of course we are expecting a lot more. Based on the pilot, what we have seen is the cross-sells have definitely improved.”

Terafina indicated its platform also supports Gesa’s long-term growth strategy by enabling the credit union to launch new offerings quickly, all while providing modernized digital services and improved responsiveness to member inquiries by engaging in high-touch, high-value interactions. It also, according to Terafina, disrupts the service status quo with refinements to member self-service, multichannel delivery and team engagement; integrates digital sales capabilities with physical branch locations; lays the foundation for future innovative services; and supports smartphones, tablets and mobile wallets.

Transformational investments in improved service across channels, products, devices and touchpoints enables Gesa to leap over its competition without surrendering the member expectations that reinforce its brand, Hasan suggested, adding that Terafina’s integrated digital platform connects people, devices and digital options to provide greater value to Gesa’s members.

Gesa’s use of transformational technology is not new. The credit union pioneered Fiserv’s Verifast Palm Authentication biometrics to reduce identity fraud, shrink transaction times and improve overall branch service, for which Gesa won two awards.

That included a pilot rollout to eight branches, in which one teller line per branch was converted over a six- to nine-month period before its rollout to its entire 18-branch network. Most locations received two authentication readers and the busiest branches installed them across the entire teller line.

Bandaru noted most members love the palm vein technology for its speed. “They are not engaged in a dialogue with a teller, who’s trying to authenticate them with a driver’s license, account or membership number, which they may or may not possess, when they walk into a branch,” he said.

Gesa’s game plan is to eventually incorporate palm vein biometrics into an effort to transform branches into a self-service format.