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First impressions count, no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. This is true regardless whether you’re talking about huge corporate endeavors or community-level organizations. When your credit union (CU) customers want help accessing your products and services, the frontline staff need to be well-versed ambassadors for your brand who are ready and capable of providing it.

Stats from the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) show a high percentage of members don’t fully understand the difference between a credit union (CU) and a bank. The need to educate consumers on this and other topics offers CUs a rare opportunity to use content as a means to member retention.

The widespread use of smartphones and the Internet is changing the way a lot of people live their lives and giving rise to a range of new terminology. According to research by Pew, smartphone usage is not just growing in America but around the world. This has lead to service providers in a wide assortment of industries creating apps for goods, services, and subscriptions. What this means for credit unions is the increased use of "apps" to make purchases using credit and debit cards.

Great client service is at the heart of every good business relationship, and credit unions depend as much as other companies on keeping their members satisfied.

Be it in our personal or professional lives, relationships are built on trust. Although services and products are undeniably important, the key to building any great relationship begins with your customers trusting you. People trust those they believe have their best interests at heart, and distrust those who have only their own interests in mind. Perhaps most importantly, they distrust those who pretend to be the first, but behave like the second.

More and more purchasing and other financial transactions are moving online, and whether that means working via mobile app or using a desktop computer, it’s a whole new world when it comes to credit cards. For Credit Unions (CUs) to keep pace with the bigger financial players, offering incentives is crucial for getting members to use their cards for checkout processes. The focus on the digital environment requires you to reimagine the traditional card loyalty programs, too, to ensure that the r...

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was enacted in response to the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession. Within it is a portion known as the “Durbin Amendment,” which affects how debit cards are processed. This seemingly small change to debit card processing – and interchange income – has, to say the least, been controversial.

It’s a fundamental premise of the credit union movement, and one that received plenty of attention at CUNA’s annual Governmental Affairs Conference in Washington DC this February. There was no shortage of examples of community engagement, financial literacy efforts, and chartable initiatives on both the grassroots and national levels. Make that international - I challenge anyone to listen to Derreck Kayongo’s tale of founding the Global Soap Project to save lives and advance education in Afri...

Before you start to read any further, or if you start to read at all, and, to be fair, I have to warn you that there is a significant amount of ketchup talk in this article.