CO-OP Financial Services Blog: Insight Vault

“Usage Analytics” is a rather technical term that simply means knowing how your members currently use their cards. For years, broad statistics like “60 percent of our checking account holders have cards and 50 percent use them” was about as far down as we were able to drill. We knew that there were lots of accounts still without cards and those that had them had a high percentage of people that were not using them. The benefits of increasing card activation and use and the associated income gains created by that usage demanded some action to motivate a change. The Usage Analytics program from CO-OP Financial Services is called CO-OP Revelation and it’s a tool the credit union can use to motivate change in cardholder behavior.

A card transaction generates a lot of information in addition to the transfer of funds messages. In the fraction of a second it takes to verify the card and transaction, we learn how much money is spent, the merchant or ATM location name, the time of purchase, the day of the purchase, whether it was a cash withdraw or a direct purchase, whether it was PIN or signature validation, and the general merchant category. On an individual transaction basis, this data helps to resolve individual card-holder issues if there is a problem with a transaction. But, taking the information and analyzing it in the scale of the entire cardbase reveals a lot more.

Employing Usage Analytics, we learn about our member’s favorite merchants which in turn helps determine what premiums are most motivating, whether we are trying to promote greater card usage or the adoption of a new non-card product or service. We now know the percentage of transactions that are happening in signature debit, PIN debit and ATMs. This enables us to easily track change as we market to our members month by month. And, we can more easily compare our card performance against our peers to determine how much potential might be out there that we are missing.

CO-OP Revelation can be upgraded to become even more powerful by linking the usage data with individual cardholder records. The system allows us to define certain behavioral characteristics. For example, we can identify the behavior “low signature card use.” We discover that 20 percent of our cardbase is only using the card five times per month for signature purchase when our stats show that the average monthly use is 13 times. We can then tie the usage data to the cardholder record generating a complete list of names and contact information for the entire 20 percent that falls into that behavior category. Now we know who we need to reach and we know the behavior. With this information, we focus the message to the behavior while narrowing the number of members we need to reach with that message; a more effective campaign at a reduced cost! This is precisely what makes CO-OP Revelation Usage Analytics Plus, the enhanced version, worth the investment. More specific knowledge means a better understanding of cardholders and more intelligent and economical marketing planning and execution.

CO-OP Revelation lends itself to more than increased marketing effectiveness. Any usage behavior can be identified and tracked. Fraud trend identification and resolution has been a discovered benefit of the program and is used actively by the CO-OP Card Member Security Group and several large clients. The greatest win from gaining familiarity with the program is the uses the credit union dreams up for itself. CO-OP Revelation is a programmable tool. We provide useful outputs immediately so that you can put it to work right away but it does not stop there. CO-OP Financial Services offers the learning tools to make CO-OP Revelation an integral part of knowing your membership more deeply. As competition increases and providing the appropriate services becomes more imperative, knowing matters.