Educators Credit Union is First to Offer BIG’s Fully Transactional Google Assistant Action to Members for Secure, Touchless Banking
TAMPA, FL (December 15, 2020) —Best Innovation Group (BIG), a credit union innovation catalyst, is pleased to announce the certification of their first fully transactional Google Assistant Action in conjunction with Educators Credit Union. Educators is a $2.1B credit union based in Racine, Wisconsin serving over 200,000 members. The credit union began offering transactional voice applications to its members 2 years ago through an Amazon Alexa skill.
“We are thrilled to lead the way in innovation in our market,” said Educators Credit Union’s chief information officer, Mike Mikkelson. “BIG helped quickly prepare us to put out our Action and give our members more convenient access to their account. Now that we have an Alexa Skill and Google Action, we know that members who prefer to use a voice assistant have an option that fits them.”
The Educators Google Action marks BIG’s 40th certified voice application for the credit union industry. BIG CEO, John Best, had this to say about the achievement, “In trying times, it is great to have partners like Educators helping us to pave the way for credit unions to take advantage of touchless digital services like our FIVE product. We are honored to be working with the forward-thinking voice pioneers of our credit union industry. These visionary leaders took the leap alongside BIG to bring conversational applications to the credit union movement and shared our vision of putting this industry at the front of the curve for this transformational technology.”
BIG’s FIVE (Financial Interaction Voice Experience) conversational platform is easily extensible in terms of both new voice services and new data sources. In addition to core or online banking integration, the platform can easily extend to include personal financial management data, bill pay, telephony applications, and more so that members can have deep, rich conversations with their financial institutions anywhere and anytime. For clients, that means all of their conversational content is managed in real-time through a web-based portal that they control. All voice applications share a single source of information that they can update any time, a real advantage in the rapidly changing times they are navigating this year.
“Given the rapid expansion of the Google Assistant platform in terms of both hardware and services, it’s seemed like a natural progression to offer conversational transaction capabilities through Google’s 3rd party developer program”, offers Elizabeth Robins, Director of Product and Customer Success at BIG. “We’ve learned so much about voice banking in the last 5 years through our work with Amazon Alexa. We look forward to extending our expertise and best practices into the Google Assistant environment.”
To learn more about conversational banking platforms from BIG, visit big-fintech.com/FIVE.
About BIG
Founded in 2014, Best Innovation Group (BIG) was created to provide clients with the resources to quickly implement digital solutions and adopt cutting-edge technologies. BIG provides research and development in areas including voice banking, distributed ledger, and machine learning, as well as a wide array of development, integration, and consulting services. For more information, visit www.big-fintech.com
About Educators Credit Union
Educators Credit Union is a not-for-profit financial institution serving more than 200,000 members in southeastern Wisconsin. Educators membership is open to anyone who lives or works in Dane, Green, Jefferson, Kenosha, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Rock, Walworth, Washington, or Waukesha Counties.
For more information about Educators Credit Union, visit www.ecu.com.