Altura CU Offers High-Tech Music Gear to E-Statement Adopters

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Altura Credit Union is using something high-tech to help drive members away from something low-tech. The $639 million CU is giving away six iPods, the ultra-hip high end of downloadable music players, in drawings aimed at encouraging members to turn off the snail mail and sign up for the CU's cost saving e-statements product. So far, so good, says Stephanie Redmond, Altura CU's e-commerce manager. The promotion began March 14 and ends May 31 and has attracted more than 2,000 new e-statement users. "Estimating that each monthly statement costs us about a dollar, we figured we needed only 450 new subscribers to break even on this, and we've gone way beyond that," Redmond says. "Those 2,000 new subscribers save us about $24,000 a year, and that's every year." The e-statement promotion was launched jointly with a separate deposit campaign and is not the sole reason members are signing up, Redmond says, but it does help. "We gave three away already and one of the winners says he wasn't really expecting to win. We had just made him aware of the service," she says. "But we did go from a couple hundred new e-statement users a month to a couple hundred a week." About 6,600 of Altura CU's 22,000 online bankers now get their statements electronically, a service the 99,000-member CU began offering in November 2003. The paper version is automatically stopped once that starts. "We stress the benefits, besides saving the credit union money," Redmond says. "For one thing, it's more secure. And they get their statements sooner, usually by the second or third of the month. Plus, we can store them for up to two years if the member wants. That's nice if you need them quickly, like for a mortgage loan application." Altura CU, the former Riverside County's Credit Union, is a Symitar core processing and Internet banking client and uses Business Data Inc.'s e-statement solution. Redmond says next up is an online banking promotion. -