'The Power of Instant' Project: PSCU's Investment for Better CU Digital Lending

For the past 10 months, the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based PSCU has been testing out new technology in the credit union wild using its strategic fintech partner, Amount, in which PSCU is also an investor. The Chicago-based fintech builds software to better embed finance solutions to make credit union digital banking simpler.

According to PSCU Managing Vice President of Innovation and Emerging Services Scott Young, this partnership is Amount’s first venture into the credit union marketplace, and Young has credit unions testing out a PSCU instant digital lending project that he calls “The Power of Instant.”

In short, the idea is to bring forward the nearly frictionless way big banks can process loans in a very short amount of time. The trick, according to Young, is bringing together a lot of technology that must reflect the nuances, regulations and customization needs of the credit union nation.

“We are trying to portray to credit unions, that if you’re not going to do instant digital lending, your members are getting it elsewhere,” Young said. “So these days of paper applications or in-branch authentication, while that may seem safer, that’s full of friction. It just really is, from the long gain, is not going to be sustainable, considering that everyone else’s eyeballs are on digital and instant.”

According to research and credit union advisory boards that work with PSCU, the pain points of many credit unions’ current loan origination system is the reason the CUSO launched this project.

CU Times spoke with Young Wednesday during PSCU’s Member Forum in Tampa, Fla. He was asked if he believed any credit unions were leading edge when it comes to being faster and addressing the pain points credit union members have in this instant lending space.

“I wouldn’t say they’re not. I would say a lot of people are realizing they need to move to more instant,” Young said.

“I think where the industry’s lacking is a fully-integrated solution. And when I say fully integrated, it’s taking the Amount authentication technology, the Amount decision logic and attaching it to our assets where it comes to real-time account builds and instant issuance. So Amount technology gives you the ability to get the instant decision. The handoff comes to our technology where we build the account and we provision it right to the wallets so you [credit unions] can push it to Apple Pay and use right away.”

He continued, “That’s the experience where we’re going to. From my understanding, it doesn’t exist today in the credit union world where you have a fully integrated end-to-end where you can get your account in your wallet within the same minutes.”

Young explained that he has his team working very hard to make everything seamless. To him, it seems that’s the ultimate goal. “Not only are we doing loan origination, we’re doing account opening at the same time – which is a big thing!”