News flash: Every credit union does not have to use NCUA’s National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund.
The bad news is that after spending maybe a few hundred dollars to acquire a new member there’s a 50-50 chance that within a year that member will go dormant, assuming he/she actually ever showed any activity in the credit union at all.
That warning comes from Har Rai Khalsa, CEO of Miami based Swaystack and, earlier in his career, he co-founded MK Decision, a digital account opening platform acquired in 2021 by Alkami.
What happened along Khalsa’s journey is that he realized that good as digital account opening is – indeed it’s a must for a 21st century credit union – there also needs to be a systematic digital cultivation of that new member where the aim is to get him/her to fund their new account, set up bill pay, and in other ways integrate the account into their lives.
All that latter is what Swaystack has been created to accomplish and it has gamified the process, taking several leads from Chime which, says Khalsa, is simply extremely good at prompting a new account holder to put that account to use.
The key message here: opening an account is the beginning of the relationship not its culmination.
