“The credit unions that will survive and thrive in the years ahead will be those that take the time to think about how they will respond... those who sit back and wait, then react, will find their path more difficult to navigate and their choices more limited.”

-Dr. Michael Hudson, credit union strategist

Credit unions are constantly faced with having to react to and comply with rapidly changing rules, laws and regulatory reporting such as the NCUAs 5300 Call Report. They also have to make incremental changes to the organization to meet a variety of business goals such as increased profitability, growing membership and reduced operating costs. As a result, when planning for the unexpected, they need to identify, change and enhance the processes and tools they rely on for strategic business decision making. They also require timely access to accurate and empirical data about their organization.
While most organizations rely on trusted data to identify profitable customers, accelerate product innovation, and uncover true drivers of financial performance, these ideas become even more meaningful when applied to specific factors in the credit union market, such as:

• Regulation reforms that permit credit unions to compete more directly with other types of financial institutions
• Research that indicates only 15% of potential membership has been captured
• Opportunities to increase business with existing members

By implementing business intelligence solutions, credit unions may be able reduce the rate of customer attrition and maximize the growth potential of members, however this approach does have some limitations. Access to data generated by and stored in BI reports is often hard to obtain and, historically, there hasn’t been an easy or affordable way to handle semi-structured and loosely structured data from these sources. With the wealth of transactional data being generated, credit unions must find a way to easily capture and analyze it for strategic decision-making that doesn’t involve manually re-entering
 data into Excel spreadsheets or committing to huge data warehousing initiatives that require significant time and financial resources.
With the help of self-service data prep solutions, credit unions are easily able to gain business intelligence from data generated by the reports that run their business. Executives, line-of-business managers, analysts, and even branch managers can get simple, self-service access to operational data currently trapped in static reports and, as a result, have more visibility into and management of their ATM settlements, accrued interest reports, certificate offerings, member card services, loan offerings, daily teller reports and internal auditing.
With this ability to extract relevant data from complex, difficult-to-work-with reports comes multiple benefits including a more strategic approach to credit union management, improved member service and tangible cost savings.