Faced with growing demand from customers for online banking services, SAFE Credit Union turned to a familiar provider of consumer accounting applications to introduce big bank functionality without spending big bank bucks.
Online banking is one of the great mobilizers: a popular application for people interested in managing their assets from wherever and whenever they like. Despite the obvious customer appetite for online banking, many financial institutions struggle to deploy the functions necessary for a rich and seamless experience. That's particularly true for small and midsize financial institutions that lack the substantial IT resources required to develop and support the requisite technology. The technological barriers to entry put these banks and credit unions at a disadvantage when competing against global financial giants for customers.
As Tarrah Palomino-Prim, Web services manager for SAFE Credit Union in Sacramento, Calif., explains, "We have had to strive just to meet what the big banks offer their customers." The credit union, with 29 locations in Northern California, took a big step toward competing with the big institutions in the online finance space late in 2008 and is already seeing results. "We installed Intuit's FinanceWorks at the end of last year," says Palomino-Prim, "and have had a good adoption level in just the first six months after making it available."
Intuit's FinanceWorks is a hosted online finance solution. According to Mark Shulman, Intuit's product manager for the FinanceWorks Consumer product, "Intuit recognized an increasing opportunity to deliver online banking with its acquisition of Digital Insight in 2007." FinanceWorks is available to banking institutions that want to deliver advanced online banking features to its customers but typically don't have the internal resources needed to develop and maintain the solutions customers expect. And while it may seem an obvious product offering based on Intuit's history of making consumer-friendly accounting, FinanceWorks is Intuit's first offering to banking institutions.
A significant hurdle that financial institutions like SAFE Credit Union face implementing online services is integration with the systems that manage banking transactions. FinanceWorks solves that issue by interfacing directly with the banking institution's financial data and transactions seamlessly thanks to Intuit's ownership of Digital Insight, which is the online banking provider for SAFE. That integration ensures that transaction reports and balances are as accurate as the credit union's own records.
This direct connection also makes a difference in the speed of deploying FinanceWorks. According to Palomino-Prim, "We devoted almost no internal resources to getting FinanceWorks online and available to our customers. The actual deployment took one to two days. The bulk of our time was spent building excitement in our branches, and giving our employee members an opportunity to try the system before we went live to our full membership."
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FinanceWorks delivers a range of online money management services to subscribers, including transaction history and balances. But even more interesting is the set of tools that appeal to customers who are increasingly interested in taking more control over their financial lives. Palomino-Prim says, "We are seeing high adoption levels, particularly from our members we categorize as high income and credit driven. These are typically in the 18-to-34 age range. But interestingly, we also see significant adoption among our 45-to-54 age range members."
FinanceWorks fits the needs of customers who want quick updates and automated analysis of their spending trends. The system also takes advantage of technology developed for Intuit's Quicken applications to automatically categorize transactions and identify trends. For example, the system identifies monthly expenditures such as car, rent, and mortgage payments as well as other recurring expenses. It also recognizes regular income amounts and predicts account balances at key times during upcoming months. This kind of analysis helps users anticipate times when account balances may be low or even insufficient to meet upcoming bills.
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