The value of cooperation

By Todd Clark, president/CEO, CO-OP Financial Services

Every time I attend a THINK conference I am always amazed at the level of collaboration and knowledge-sharing taking place. I can’t think of another industry that puts as much emphasis on partnership and cooperation and is as committed to thinking about the needs of its core constituents like the credit union industry. It’s what our members value most about us and will continue to be the key to the success of our movement.

THINK 19 brought to light many of the challenges and opportunities facing our industry. In addition to the content presented on the main stage and in the Power Sprint and Master Class sessions, we were able to sit down in true partnership with more than 180 credit unions during 1:1 advisor sessions to help them strategize on ways to optimize payments performance, unleash the power of data, and enhance the member experience. This kind of valuable interaction results not only in smarter, more integrated solutions but a deeper understanding of your business, creating a solid partnership to help you meet and exceed member needs.

THINK 19 was also an opportunity to elaborate on what CO-OP is doing to help credit unions navigate a rapidly evolving digital landscape. I’m about to mark my third year as CEO of CO-OP, and transformation has been my main mission from the start: to fully realize CO-OP’s ecosystem as a platform business model, fueled by deep data integration to truly deliver the scale and seamless solutions required for credit unions to succeed not just today, but tomorrow and for the next 10 to 20 years.

We do this work incrementally and it comes to life via new initiatives such as the organization of our core solution lines: Pay, Integrate, Engage, Protect, and Consult. These solutions within the CO-OP ecosystem are designed to provide your credit union with everything you need to support your members throughout their financial lives and deliver a superior member experience:

• Pay – Access to the most comprehensive set of debit, credit, prepaid and digital payments solutions. We want to continue being at the forefront of payments innovation, empowering members to make payments anywhere, anytime, and anyway they want.
• Engage – This includes every product or service the member experiences; an expansive set of digital tools, mobile innovations, branch self-service, personalized communications, and live support.
• Protect – Safeguarding your credit union and members with the most sophisticated fraud mitigation tools. COOPER will build the foundation for state-of-the-art machine learning and artificial intelligence deployed across the CO-OP ecosystem.
• Integrate – The ability for your credit union to manage all of the different services you provide to members seamlessly along with access to data and analytics in order to understand, drive, and optimize them.
• Consult – Access to consultative strategy and thought leadership that empowers credit unions to find hidden opportunities and exceed member expectations.

This feeds into our product roadmap, enabling delivery of new products and services such as CardNav Refresh, coming this summer, COOPER Fraud Analyzer, which launched earlier this year and already has analyzed more than 30.2 million transactions, protecting more than 6.4 million member accounts, to upcoming releases such as Springboard Expansion, the CO-OP Developer Portal, and CO-OP Insights Center, as well as our Contact Center upgrade – all designed to provide the scale and resources to credit unions to compete with the big banks and fintechs.

Partnership on display at our contact centers

And one of the most important points I wanted to reiterate from THINK 19 is that CO-OP is not just a service provider; we are your partner. Think of us as aggregating and extending the more than 5,500 technology teams in the credit union movement; our mission is to protect the relationships you have with your members and help you grow those relationships.

Perhaps nothing better exemplifies what that partnership looks like than the transformed member experience we’re delivering through our contact centers. I invite you to view this video highlighting how we partner with credit unions like Coastal Credit Union to help them enhance member support and increase member satisfaction.

Roadshows coming to a city near you

Finally, even though THINK 19 is over, we are keeping the momentum going with upcoming regional CO-OP Roadshows including one in Houston on Oct. 10.

We will be continuing the conversation on many of the topics we discussed at THINK 19 and providing more opportunities for personalized strategy sessions with our experts. I hope to see you and some of your team at an event near you!

CO-OP Financial Services is a five-star premier business partner of Credit Union Resources, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Cornerstone Credit Union League.