CommunityAmerica Credit Union has a compelling vision for the future of the banking industry. Its goal is not to grow for growth’s sake, but to help members achieve financial peace-of-mind by supporting them on every step of their journey.
Whitney Bartelli, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, explains: “We want to continue our strong growth trajectory by helping more members on a path to thrive and achieve the financial peace of mind. That means embracing an even broader range of individuals, businesses and communities with their own unique needs and definitions of what peace of mind means. Data is crucial to understand our members and personalize our services to meet their requirements.”
Ravi Peru, Chief Information Officer, adds: “We need to understand each person’s financial situation, but we don’t want to have to ask them a bunch of questions when we already have years of data about their financial history in our systems. We want to bring that data together and use it to build a better member experience.”
One of CommunityAmerica Credit Union’s top priority projects is Life Planning. The aim is to enable the organization’s wellbeing coaches to create an achievable, personalized financial plan for each member, connecting them with the best product and service offerings to help them realize their unique goals.
“Life Planning posed two main technical challenges,” says Peru. “First, we needed a data platform that could host both structured and unstructured data and analyze it with AI and machine learning. We solved that by building it ourselves.
“Second, we needed to bring together all our data, which was scattered across internal and external systems, and make it available to our analytics team. After building AI models to generate personalized recommendations, the next step was to make the information available through all our channels. When a member logs into our online channels or walks into one of our branches, we want to personalize their experience in real time. To achieve this, we targeted a high-performance API integration layer."
