Mobilizing Your Debit Card in Washington State
September 13th, 2007 Posted in Mobile Applications, Mobile Security
Washington State Employees Credit Union Pioneers Mobility in Banking
Washington State Employees Credit Union (www.WSECU.org) is a not-for-profit financial cooperative offering its members unparalleled products and services to meet all levels of financial needs. WSECU ranks among the top 100 credit unions in the United States, has over 140 thousand members throughout Washington State, and claims $1.1 billion in assets.
While its institutional profile is impressive, WSECU is catching the attention of those outside financial circles for its pioneering strides in mobile marketing. Ben Morales, CIO and senior vice president at WSECU, built a strategic research and development team to both study and implement a smart mobile marketing and messaging program positioned to leverage the mobile momentum that’s quickly building steam worldwide.
It’s a Mobile World – Case in Point
At a recent mobile banking conference, Morales solidified his belief that a paradigm shift was occurring around the mobile phone. “I was attending a conference on mobile banking when the speaker illustrated his point on the future of mobile technology,” said Morales. “He simply asked the audience to pull out their debit cards. It took 15 to 20 seconds on average for attendees to retrieve their cards from their wallets and purses. He then asked them to pull out their cell phones…it took less than 5 seconds from pocket to hand. In some cases, the phone was already resting in their hands. Their demonstrable addiction to convenience could not have been more obvious. If we — the marketers of services and products — take the time to understand human nature, we will in turn make it more convenient and efficient to use our services and products. The consumer will respond and change will happen.”
As a leading non-profit financial organization, WSECU is proud to be one of the first of its kind to offer a mobile website — www.wsecu.mobi, which provides its members with an online, secure mobile forum for managing both personal and public financial data anytime, anywhere.
Morales emphasized, “There is more online mobile-to-text messaging than there is today but we felt as an organization that we needed to carefully market our mobile capabilities and offerings in a way that didn’t put off our members, but rather educated them to what could be.”
The WSECU mobile website and mobile banking offerings are a part of the first phase for WSECU and are rapidly growing in popularity with members. However, mobility offers much more and Morales is very aware of the need to strategically move toward the mobile carrot.
“Getting short code and carrier approvals, implementing mobile messaging campaigns, and mobile bill payment programs are just around the corner for us and we are very excited about becoming a pro-mobility organization,” said Morales. “But what gets me excited is finding a partner like CellTrust that’s willing to innovate and question mobility’s potential with WSECU. The ‘what could be’ factor really heats up when you align with a technology partner who has a mobile information management and delivery vision like CellTrust.”
Right now, Morales is focused on one aspect of their short code — to engage potential WSECU members to interact when they want to, which drives back to a key strategic position of WSECU’s board of directors: to give members access anytime, anywhere to WSECU.
“We want to make sure that WSECU members can touch us from anywhere and get instant gratification,” said Morales.
There is more to mobility on the horizon for WSECU. For now, educating and making life more convenient for members is the ultimate messaging and marketing goal.
Blog back:
• Do you feel the fear and doubt wireless carriers are putting out there is currently disrupting the natural flow of how mobile-wireless should be taking off? How?
• Do you access your bank today via the mobile phone? Do you feel secure when doing so?
• What financial services are most applicable to the mobile phone?
• How do the mobile and financial industries combine forces to develop the ultimate experience using SMS and text messaging?
• How do we create a secure messaging environment leveraging SMS?
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2 Responses to “Mobilizing Your Debit Card in Washington State”
By M-AZ on Sep 14, 2007
Interesting. I need to find out more
By Jennifer on Oct 3, 2007
This is a great Idea! I hate having to call different places just to get an idea of what their rates are. WSECU has a program where you can text RATES to 97328 and they will return to you all of their daily interest rates for loans and more!