Banking Meets Facebook - Credit Unions, Core Processor Work to Meet Gen Y'ers Where They Live

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- You don't have to be a math professor to understand the implication of these numbers.

By some estimates, 94% of Generation Y (18 to 28 year olds) do not belong to credit unions. But Facebook, the uberpopular social utility that first took off among the college crowd, has 68 million members and growing.

So it's perhaps not surprising that Galaxy Credit Union Solutions is finding a market for MyMoney, an application that places credit unions directly on the Facebook members' home page and gives users functional access to their accounts.

One of the first takers is Carolina Collegiate Federal Credit Union (www.carolina.org) at the University of South Carolina.

"We know a large number of our students here use Facebook and to them it's all about convenience," said Anne Shivers, president of the $55 million CU with branches on and around the main campus in Columbia and at USC Upstate in Spartanburg and Coastal Carolina University near Myrtle Beach.

"In order to provide them our services, we need to make it as convenient as possible for them, or we may not be meeting their needs," Shivers said.

Or the long-term needs of the credit union.

"This is not a passing fad," said Lauren Vance, marketing manager at $215 million Christian Financial Credit Union (www.christianfinancialcu.com) in Roseville, Mich., another early adopter of MyMoney.

"This is something this generation is going to be using through adulthood, and since these are the tools they're going to be using, we need to be there," said Vance, herself a Facebook user whose credit union serves four counties around Detroit.

Galaxy, a Detroit-based Fiserv operating unit with more than 300 credit union clients, now has more than a dozen credit unions live on MyMoney and about 50 signed up for it.

Galaxy wrote an interface to its core processing platform to make the connection happen, a connection that can be made for other core processors, both in the Fiserv family and beyond.

Connections already have been made for credit unions running Symitar and Ultradata platforms, according to Jay Slavin, senior vice president of the Galaxy Business Line for Fiserv. And most of the work happens on the vendor side.

"Once you get to the CU side, there's very little involvement for them," Slavin said.

"Many credit unions we've spoken to are looking for ways to attract younger members. With Facebook's increasing popularity, viral marketing opportunities and enhanced security measures, we felt the MyMoney application was the perfect avenue to help our clients connect with this generation," he said.

Connecting can also mean enticing them to join. Facebook has become the major way a lot of young Americans stay in touch with each other, and one of its features is that it notifies users' friends on the network when they add an application, such as MyMoney.

"In this case, when friends visit their users' profiles, they can see which credit unions their friends belong to," Slavin said. "If the credit union uses Fiserv's iSwitchKit solution for online account opening, Facebook users can join the institution on the spot."

Credit unions also can create their own pages on Facebook, adding their logo, rates, services, locations, events and other details. Meanwhile, more traditional marketing tools are being used to get the word out.

"We're going to be running some ads and we've created some banners that credit unions can download for their Web sites," said Kirsten Gardner, a product marketing manager at Galaxy. "We'll also be providing some printed literature on it and getting the word out through our home banking system.

"In fact, one of our other clients, TexasOne Community Credit Union (www.texasoneccu.com), already has a link to Facebook directly through their home banking home page," she said.

Just Getting Started

Carolina Collegiate and Christian Financial are both still in the early stages of their deployment.

Helen Powell, vice president of human resources and business development at the Columbia credit union, said that right now just a few of its staffers, part-time employees who are USC students, are using it, and that she'll be using advertisements on the CU's Web site and around campus to begin to get the word out.

Vance at Christian Financial also said the Facebook usage remains within its own staff and that promotion is just beginning to get under way.

She's optimistic about the results.

"This is social networking that millions of people use every day," she said. "It's innovative and it keeps us in the position to be seen where all these people are interacting, instead of their having to go to another Web site."

While a Facebook member does not necessarily have to be an online banker at a credit union to use the Facebook access, some credit unions are choosing to go that route, said David Reed, a product manager at Galaxy.

He said the Facebook application allows "members to open up a full-blown home banking site without logging in but if they do want to do that, once they log-in to Facebook they see a 'show me more' button that opens up their full home banking site, which includes everything, including bill pay."

The application also allows the Facebook user to have more than one institution showing on the home page.

Access to different institutions through the Facebook account might lead a user to wonder why he or she can't access all their accounts through a single, combined interface point on the social utility.

Slavin said that's coming. "Aggregation is on the road map," the Galaxy Business Line senior vice president said.

Along with functionality, Powell even sees an educational component to the MyMoney product.

"I teach a course here at USC and at Midlands Technical College and hear horror stories all the time," the Carolina Collegiate vice president said. "We assume because they're very smart and tech-savvy that they understand about finances, too, but it can be intimidating for them at times.

"Using Facebook this way helps us further educate them about their personal finances in away that they can relate to better than many of our traditional ways of doing that," she said.

Her boss agrees, and sees another bottom line, too.

"Without question if we want to make sure our credit union continues to survive, we've got to be able to try to balance the needs of all groups of members and not ignore the needs of those who may be younger," said Shivers, the Carolina Collegiate president.

"Just because we don't understand them well doesn't mean we can ignore them," she said. "We need to try to find ways to connect with them, and doing that will help this credit union survive."

Of course, as the clich?(C) goes, the only constant may be change, something that Carolina Collegiate also recognizes.

"We hope our investment in Facebook and its social networking tools keep us current for the next several years," Shivers said, "but we know we need to stay current and keep an eye on whatever new mechanisms come along, too."

--mrapport@sc.rr.com