Key Growth Strategies to Elevate Your Credit Unions's 2025 Budget Planning‍

Excited for the 2025 budget planning? It can be both thrilling and challenging to identify strategies that can not only elevate member satisfaction but can also boost credit union growth and make a positive difference to your topline and bottomline. Drawing from our extensive experience collaborating with Credit Union leaders, we have curated some strategic recommendations. These strategies have been successfully implemented by progressive CU teams and stand as excellent additions to your 2025 growth plan.

1. Instant Funding for New Deposit Accounts

Did you know that 25 to 40% of checking accounts are closed within the first year? The rate of account activation is strongly correlated with the initial funding of new accounts. Unfortunately, legacy systems often provided members with ZERO capability for ‘self-service digital funding’. Some newer technologies have achieved a 30% success rate using ACH transfers. However, our customers are seeing Instant Deposit rates of 70% to 100% on all approved deposit accounts by giving members a choice between Debit, ACH, and Internal GL to GL Transfers (Internal Transfer option being very popular on CD fundings). What better strategy to foster growth at your credit union?‍

2. On-Demand Offers in Your Online Banking for Members

Consider that 70% of your members routinely access your online banking at least once every month. Imagine the growth potential for your CU if you could integrate a simple “My Offers” widget directly into your Online Banking interface to deliver personalized, on-demand offers through both online and mobile banking platforms. Even better, our Credit Union and Bank customers are able to do these offers “on-demand”, and without needing up-front investment into building offers in bulk.

Read - Service Credit Union Achieves 200% Growth and True Digital Transformation with CreditSnap

3. Embrace Instant Account Onboarding, with Automatic Share Savings Creation

Can your Loan and Deposit systems automatically integrate new accounts into your Core system? When a Loan or Deposit account necessitates a new Share Savings account, how many button clicks does it take? It might surprise you to learn that 95% of approximately 10,000 Credit Unions and Banks in the country cannot perform this task. The good news is that not only is this now possible, but it’s also a highly affordable growth strategy for credit unions.

Credit Union Growth Strategies for the Annual Budget

4. PreQualification vs. Pre Screening to Drive Growth Without Huge Upfront Costs

Lastly, as part of your credit union growth strategy, we recommend you to move away from outdated and expensive pre-screening methods by adopting a cost-efficient pre-qualification system. Perform a soft credit pull on-demand and deliver targeted offers in less than 2 minutes. This approach not only engages members who are actively looking for services but also significantly cuts down on upfront costs.

As you finalize your 2025 budget, consider these growth strategies that have already proven successful in other progressive Credit Unions. Integrating solutions like Instant Funding for new deposit accounts, On-Demand Offers in your online banking, and efficient account onboarding processes not only addresses your members' immediate needs but also future proofs growth for your credit union. We’ll be glad to bring you up-to-speed on the above-mentioned ideas. You can witness the transformative impact of our solutions by seamlessly scheduling a conversation at your convenience.