Excerpts from CUES “Options for Apps”
CU leaders navigating the mobile banking highway can forge ahead with vendor products or take bold turns into innovative territory.
As mobile adoption continues and mobile banking becomes a must-have service for many credit unions, leaders face a choice: They can sign up for vendor apps that can be implemented quickly and affordably and stop there. Or they can spend the time and money to push into innovative territory and reach for apps that distinctly differentiate them.
Mobile Enhancers
Between mobile app vendors and one-off innovations lies a new layer of mobile app enhancers like CU Mobile Apps. “We can work with any mobile banking vendor, explains Rick Hargis, managing general partner for Member Service Solutions, a one-third owner—with the Illinois CU League and technical developer Metova—of CU Mobile Apps, Naperville, Ill. “We just take the banking data and repackage it for a robust mobile banking experience for the member.”
To make it affordable, CU Mobile Apps charges a flat $250 a month for CUs with fewer than 5,000 members for a standard package, $370 for a premium package, reports Tom Gray, another managing general partner. Mobile deposits are an add-on, and there’s an interchange fee for person-to-person payments, he notes. Contracts are for a standard three years.
Some CUs don’t have the resources to build mobile apps on their own, and traditional mobile vendors are not helping them differentiate, Eads argues. That situation has opened the door for new tech boutiques like Mobile Strategy Partners to innovate around the mobile banking inertia. “It’s our job to help CUs innovate around the edges, to rely on vendors but to get more than their vendors are selling them,” he says.
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