Now more than ever, U.S. consumers are choosing to do their banking online. Eight out of ten Americans would rather bank digitally than in person. And almost half of consumers use only digital-banking services for their financial needs.

A credit union is a type of financial institution that is member-owned. These financial cooperatives are facing new challenges and competition from digital-first competitors. As customers demand a more engaging and relevant banking experience, the ability to leverage your data to drive customer insights and create lasting relationships is critical.

Member Experience Is Digital Experience

With an average member age of 47, credit unions face a unique challenge—appealing to younger customers. Part of the solution includes delivering the seamless and intuitive experience they expect.

The truth is member experience is digital experience. Customers should be able to do everything online that they can do in person. It should be easy to open an account, make investments, manage cards, apply for loans, and make payments from anywhere and any device. 

The new competition is digital. That includes digital-native fintechs and big techs as well as forward-thinking financial institutions. The time is now to transform or perish.

Digital Dexterity Requires Speed and Agility

Make It Fast: Automating tasks like opening an account, making credit decisions, and creating personalized offers can dramatically improve the customer experience. But they need to be fast. Behind the scenes, faster reporting, fraud detection, and incident resolution are also essential.

From an IT perspective, speed means operational excellence in all aspects, from your applications to the infrastructure supporting them. Operational excellence has many facets, but metrics, automated data collection, and real-time data analysis are the most important.

Make It Flexible: You need the agility to adapt to change quickly, whether changes in customer behavior, market conditions, regulations, or technology. Consider the following. How fast can you:

  • Act on data that comes from branches?
  • Respond to new regulations?
  • Launch a new product or service?

For IT, agility means having an infrastructure that can continuously evolve without disruption, is elastic, and has the performance needed to support AI and analytics workloads.

How Data Storage Can Change the Game

Every challenge provides an opportunity. And the right technology can make all the difference. A storage system that supports digital transformation can simplify operations, accelerate applications, empower developers, and deliver next-gen analytics. The key requirement: Provide the speed and agility credit unions need to maximize their data.

So what do credit unions need to achieve their digital transformation goals?

In today’s data-driven environment, pay-for-what-you-use and as-a-service models provide flexible, secure data management solutions. You can increase your organization’s operational agility while reducing risk. 

Evergreen™ Storage from Pure Storage® delivers seamless, rapid upgrades and expansion without disruption. You’ll never have to re-purchase hardware, re-license storage software products, or deal with increasing maintenance and support costs. All upgrades occur in place, without disruption to your business. With Pure as-a-Service™, you pay only for what you use, on-premises or in the cloud. It’s one subscription with flexible OPEX and CAPEX models.

With Pure Storage, developers can create multiple instances of a database in minutes rather than hours. This speed and agility significantly improve productivity.

Data analytics and AI power many features that enhance customer experience and improve efficiency. These include voice assistants, chatbots, and real-time risk and fraud monitoring. Pure is built from the ground up to deliver a single, scale-out storage platform that consolidates AI workloads and speeds time to insight. Pure offers high-performance, architecturally optimized, AI-ready infrastructure. 

With modern data solutions to support your digital initiatives, you can:

  • Improve performance 
  • Reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO)
  • Achieve greater agility
  • Accommodate new projects
  • Reduce downtime
  • Keep your customers happy

What’s the Next Step in Your Digital Transformation?

By failing to adopt digital-banking services, credit unions run the risk of losing existing members and not attracting new ones. Don’t waste time untangling legacy infrastructure to fit your digital needs. It’s time to make a strategic decision about your storage platform. And make it your competitive differentiator.

See how financial-services organizations use Pure technology to achieve their goals.