How can credit unions move to the front of this rising wave? The first step is to adopt a new perspective that the information you have stored in your databases, data warehouses, and transaction applications is not only of interest to your internal employees, but also to your members, partners and other third-party stakeholders outside the business.

Just like financial or human capital, information yields higher returns the more it is used. You can extract this information and make it accessible with business intelligence software.

Market-leading credit unions are turning to BI tools to create a new generation of interactive eStatements that empower members to glean important insight at a glance, such as how this month's financial position compares to last month. They can identify spending patterns and outliers across several financial products, forecast progress toward savings goals, and calculate next year's budget, for example. They can also see their allocations and shares, obligations and liquidity, and the efficiency of their investments over multiple time periods.

The best eStatement platforms provide many of the analytical and visualization advantages available in today's personal financial management apps, such as online and mobile budgeting. In addition, they fulfill regulatory requirements by depicting a point in time financial condition.

Interactive eStatements reliably depict the transactions associated with prior periods to effect the point-in-time condition, and can be audited on demand. PFM tools do not fulfill this obligation.

Empower your members

Business customers appreciate reports about their credit cards, debit cards, corporate cards, and other types of electronic payments.

Merchants can drill down into daily sales data by store as well as aggregate summary information to reflect the operation as a whole. This self-service app makes it easy to access information about cash flow, as well as to consolidate statements, so merchants spend more time focusing on their customers, and less on routine administrative tasks.

Merchants simply need a standard web browser to access all of the rich capabilities of these online eStatements, making it easy to scale to hundreds of thousands of users.

Of course, as with any BI app, offering eStatements that are intuitive and visually appealing isn't all that's important. These apps aren't truly valuable unless they can access trusted information. They need to tie into a robust back-end infrastructure to ensure the quality and integrity of the information. They also need to be scalable to serve the needs of a large and growing user base.

Differentiate with analytics

Already, online banking services are the rule rather than the exception as credit unions and their competitors focus on delivering unique digital experiences. Routine electronic banking services are just the starting point.

Differentiation and competitive advantage will go to those institutions that can take the next step of figuring out ways to teach software to replicate complex behavior, in particular, offering advice and insights.

Almost all of the by rote activities such as transfers, deposits, withdrawals and loan applications have been partially or fully automated. Progressive credit unions are creating personal financial management applications, dashboards, and eStatements to help consumers analyze their assets and achieve their financial goals.

Jon M. Deutsch is vice president and global managing principal for banking, financial services & insurance at Information Builders. He can be reached at 212-736-4433 or [email protected].