Fintechs Step Up to Help Financial Institutions During Pandemic

Many fintech suppliers stepped up and retooled to help credit unions, and other financial institutions, mitigate circumstances brought on by the response to the coronavirus outbreak.

The Boerne, Texas-based CUTEK, a provider of credit union IT products and services, created a COVID-19 Member Aid Package. This discounted package looks to help credit unions better serve members impacted by the coronavirus outbreak by offering specific product arrangements when members need financial relief.

CUTEK’s Member Aid Package offers credit unions three modules:

1. Loan Modification Workflow, which assists in offering members lower loan payments or rates on existing loans.
2. Skip-A-Pay program including a batch SAP and a single sign-on for home banking.
3. ATM Foreign Fee Reversal program.

In addition to its custom programming services for Symitar’s Episys core, CUTEK maintained it has the resources and expertise to help credit unions incorporate a staff remote work program during this time of social distancing.

“Sometimes your members may need a helping hand, for whatever reason, perhaps an unforeseen circumstance causing financial hardship,” CUTEK Vice President of Sales and Client Relations Dawn Murray stated. “Whatever the reason, CUTEK is always looking for proven solutions to ensure our credit unions can continue to do what they do best – provide excellent member service to their membership in the good and sometimes not so best times.”

The Rahway, N.J.-based e-signature provider IMM, announced the launch of a new one-year Quick Start eSign Program designed specifically for credit unions and banks that cannot currently complete and sign key documents remotely. Leveraging this new program, financial institutions can begin remotely processing documents within approximately 48 hours and have the ability to migrate to IMM’s full enterprise e-signature platform, IMM eSign, at any time during the one-year program period.

This program, designed as a stop-gap measure to assist institutions in navigating the current unprecedented situation, enabling financial institutions to electronically send documents to customers to sign remotely such new account openings, loan originations and modifications, and other account service requests.

Michael Ball, vice president of IMM’s markets and strategy, said, “Now more than ever, e-signatures are a critical component of a financial institution’s business infrastructure. Having worked with banks and credit unions for over two decades, IMM clearly understands that being able to conduct business transactions in this new ‘remote-oriented society’ is paramount for business continuity in any organization, but especially for financial institutions.”

The Portsmouth, N.H.-based SilverCloud, Inc., which provides automated creation, management and delivery of knowledge for credit unions and banks, including a banking-specific database of customer questions, announced it released its weekly Digital Support Trends. Digital Support Trends outlines the weekly trends on what banking customers are asking on websites as well as within mobile banking.

For instance, the week of March 9-15 saw a spike in customers looking for online banking assistance. The week of March 16-22 saw a huge number of lending questions (rates, mortgage rates, refinance, loans) across both the website and mobile banking. This data also showed the need for digital support has never been higher. The number of questions asked increased between 5% and 8% a day since March 1. Usage on SilverCloud’s Banking Chatbot also increased by 50% since March 1.

SilverCloud Vice President of Insights DJ Haskins said, “Our data shows that the need for digital support has never been higher. For most institutions, really understanding what customers are looking for has been a challenge. Our hope in releasing this data is that financial institutions are able to better understand how they can serve their customers, not just during the COVID-19 pandemic, but beyond.”