Next-Level Growth: How Credit Unions Can Leverage Data and AI for Personalized Products

In this episode of our Next-Level Growth series with Cornerstone Advisors, BCU’s Bhavna Guglani explores how credit unions personalize banking experiences for members by turning data into actionable intent signals. They discuss shifting from monolithic marketing to digital-first products that adapt to individual financial goals and life stages. Learn how to leverage a modern tech stack to bridge the gap between data collection and delivery, utilize AI for proactive member support, and implement a “test and learn” culture to drive sustainable growth and loyalty.

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Transcript

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (0:06):

Hello everyone. So today we’re going to be talking about a topic that’s kind of been floating around everyone’s minds recently, and that is product personalization. And this is a really important topic, especially when we think about competitive advantages. How do we make a checking account not just another checking account? And how do we really communicate these differences and the personalized aspect? You know, today, how do we better serve our members through personalized products and offers instead of casting a wide net, which I know a lot of institutions have done in the past. And I think a lot of this is, it’s not because credit unions lack data. We have a ton of data, but it’s more about how do we make this data actionable and functional to really provide these personalized products. And with us today to help us think through all of this is Bhavna Guglani, who is the Chief Digital Officer over at Baxter Credit Union. So Bhavna, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with us today. We really appreciate it. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Baxter.

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (1:09):

Liz, thank you for having me here. I’m really glad to be here after many conversations that you and I have had on how to think about personalization, how to think about actually more digital products for our members. Again, I’m Bhavna Guglani, I am the Chief Digital Officer at BCU. BCU is actually a credit union to about 30 top Fortune 500 companies including Target, UHG, Geico, HCA, and so on. We also have a community charter in Minnesota, in Illinois, and then all of Puerto Rico State. So we cover essentially all 50 states. We have membership across all 50 states. We are one of the larger domestic credit unions in the country.

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (2:17):

So tell us a little bit about your role as the Chief Digital Officer. What are some big initiatives you’ve been thinking about recently?

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (2:22):

You know, it’s fascinating and it goes back to the point I was making around the fact that we are present in all 50 states. It’s very hard to scale to a 50 state model with just the branches because we can’t. We are still a very small chartered credit union. So the focus on digital is pretty high. So how do we deliver digitally, but then also how do we build products that are digital and have higher digital acceptance becomes pretty critical for us here? You know, there are a few stats that I keep sharing at every opportunity. You know, we’re, it’s very cool, these stats are very cool because we find that about one in every five members logs into their BCU app every day. That’s a pretty staggering number. And I have gone around trying to find, hey, is there any other product where you have a similar traction, is there a similar service that has similar traction? You know, does Facebook have one in five people log in every day?

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (3:35):

Or even think about which of your branches have that kind of volume and traffic.

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (3:39):

Right? Yes, so digital often becomes the carrier of that brand responsibility as well. So when we think about digital strategy, we’re thinking delivery, we’re thinking products and we’re also thinking, are we conveying the relationship that we like to believe in or that BCU stands for through digital experiences?

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (4:06):

So let’s then let’s focus on the product aspect of those digital experiences. What role does personalization in products really play within BCU’s broader growth goals?

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (4:18):

You know, it’s kind of interesting. For a seriously long time, when we thought about member experiences and member excellence, and this is not just BCU, this is across the board, that’s how banking has always been, personalization stood for one-on-one experiences. You walk into a branch and the experience that you get is uniquely different. It’s high involvement, there’s information available, there’s empathy being conveyed, the right questions are asked so that you can be recommended the right kind of products. Digitally, there was a very monolithic experience, except for as we evolved, we started using data to show the right kind of offers. We think we know what you want. We’ve done the analysis. Here’s what we think we have for you, right?

So there are two experiments that we did very recently that I think I’d love to highlight. One of them was around asking our members. So, engaged member growth is a big metric for BCU. We wanted to focus on engaged member growth for the first 60 days. A person’s brand new to BCU, very often, the downloading of the app is their second experience with BCU, the first being opening the account, very likely again digitally. So instead of downloading the app and seeing exactly the same thing that everybody else sees, we tried two things.

One was we said we don’t know enough about this person, let’s ask them, right? So we ask two very straightforward questions. One is what are your goals and objectives, and the second is how are you feeling about your finances, so that we can get some kind of a metric around their financial well-being at that moment. And we use that data, the financial goals and objectives, to make the recommendations because we don’t know enough about them yet, right? We haven’t collected enough data from them.

So one was we just asked these questions and then the way we position those recommendations, where we say, we use words like just for you or saying based on your preferences, and we found a 10 to 12% increase in adoption of our products within first 60 days because we were using these words, we said we asked the question, then we used it for the recommendation, and we say things like “just for you” and “based on your recommendations.”

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (7:04):

And I might be jumping ahead a little bit here, but one of my questions for you and I think one of the places where a lot of credit unions struggle is not just the data collection, because like I said, we have a bunch of data on our members, but how, what was the process like to making that data more actionable for you? Like, is the team using a CRM, a data warehouse? What kind of tools are you using to make those personalized offers?

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (7:29):

You know, technically, those things have been around for quite a bit of time, right? So, I think most credit unions, BCU included, we’ve had a fairly good tech stack. We’re a Microsoft shop, we use the Azure Data Cloud, we also leverage a lot of Salesforce’s kind of tools in the CRM, in the Marketing Cloud space, in order to ensure that we’re collecting the data, then using the data and communicating through those channels.

However, there is still a lot of information that is, you know, it’s patchy. There are third-party solutions where you don’t get that data back, when you get that data back, the governance is not in place in a way that you can interpret that data very quickly. It takes a lot of time to consume third-party data, clean it, and make it usable for BCU.

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (8:36):

It’s not an easy undertaking whatsoever.

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (8:38):

Absolutely. So, I think that, having said that, the technology has been less of a problem. It has often been the last mile of delivery and then refeeding that data back to make improvements that has been harder for us. We’re still trying to work on it. We’ve been saying that hey, we’re going to build what we’re calling the intent signals. How do we get, how do we interpret the data that’s coming in as the intent signal, and then how do we route it back? So there’s some gap in connectivity there.

Having said that, I think that the data has been less of a problem, it’s the ability to use it, ability to interpret it, ability to, you know, take, for example, transactions and say, hey, what is it telling me? And then testing things out so that you know whether you were right or not.

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (9:42):

Are you using any third-party data for making any of those personalized offers?

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (9:45):

You know, a little bit, right? So, a little bit. Like, credit bureau data is always used, that is third-party data. We’ve leveraged it for years. We don’t use any digital behavior data yet from third-parties into digital banking.

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (10:06):

And one thing I’m really curious about is when BCU thinks about personalization of products, does the team focus on targeting folks based off of their life stages, their where they are possibly with their finances? Is it about, hey, we see you have a large balance in your checking account, let’s move that over to a CD or what are some of the goals that BCU has?

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (10:32):

Yeah, you know, so far, our marketing could have been monolithic when it comes to behaviors. It was more related to portfolio or profiles. We understand, you know, where you are in your kind of lending cycle with us, and therefore there are certain products that are getting pitched to you. There are certain indicators around, you know, use a machine learning model, figure out propensity, target with propensity. Whether that propensity takes into account factors like age and so on, yes, but we don’t necessarily do it very pointedly.

But I think that we’re coming to a point where we’re saying that our membership is less monolithic now in a way that we need to address each of those kind of segments very separately and very distinctly. I wish we would do a better job at that, you know.

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (11:36):

I don’t think you’re alone at that either. It’s a constant, it’s a constant journey. So, what I’m really interested, too, is for all the work that BCU has done around product, has it led to any product redesign of, you know, not just how maybe we should market or talk about our products, but, oh, maybe we’re missing a couple key features or services or maybe we need to introduce a new type of product? Has it led you to realizing that there are any gaps in your product set?

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (12:05):

You know, that’s a super interesting question because we’re in the middle of actually one of those. It’s, you know, one of the gaps that we have been finding that we have a very strong checking account product, which is kind of rate driven. But we’re also finding that there may be an opportunity for a for-fee or rewards checking. We still haven’t finalized what that might look like. We’re still doing more kind of focus groups and user testing to be sure what features that would be like.

But I think that there’s an opportunity in our membership for a rewards or a for-fee checking, which could have benefits that may not necessarily be exactly about, you know, the interest rates or what we think are traditional bank-driven solutions, but they could be something that increases value for our members, which is towards financial well-being, which could be towards more bang for your buck kind of rewards.

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (13:27):

So my next question for you is more about the marketing side of it. So how do you communicate with the membership about these personalized products and offers? Does the marketing team engage with a lot of social media, or targeted emails, or push notifications within the mobile app? How do you communicate or, you know, walking into a branch and your frontline staff are trained to communicate like, oh, hey, what about this product for you? What does that look like? How do you communicate with your members?

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (13:59):

Till almost a year, a year and a half ago, it was fairly traditional. You have physical mailers, you have emails, you have banners if somebody walks into the branch, you also have digital storefront, place when you log in, and you always see some kind of an offer being available to you. Over the last one, one and a half years, push notifications and even texting has become big. People would rather engage over text than, you know, call, for example. Really texting has become a fair channel.

And interestingly, this is less offering products, this is more from the perspective of us actually bringing in value for our members when they need certain products, is that actually thanks to AI, and how easy it’s become to engage with people on phone at different times. Outbound calling has actually started increasing thanks to some AI-driven initiatives at BCU.

Yeah, you know, it’s fascinating. I’ll give you an example, some of our membership actually, you know, during the hurricane season last year was in a situation where we knew that they would need certain products, they needed access to an ATM that had to be moved from where it was. And we were able to leverage AI-driven and AI-powered calling, where the engagement didn’t need to have a person, but there was actually a conversation that could happen, so we could call a lot more people and inform them about the solutions that were available through BCU and where the new ATM location was because we were able to chat. So it was fascinating how we were able to use new technology to kind of use our old existing processes.

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (16:05):

I think that’s a great example of, you know, actually understanding your members like where do they live? Could they be impacted by this hurricane? And then how do we use these new technologies to really engage with them to not just potentially upsell them a product but really assist them in a time that could be really critical in their life.

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (16:23):

Yes, yes, and you know, being in the right place at the right time is not just about selling, it’s also about the relationship that we’re building.

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (16:33):

So as you were going through this, I mean, we’ve talked quite a bit about technology. Were there any other technology gaps that you realized, you know, we’re on this product personalization journey at BCU where you realize like, oh, like we don’t have this tool, we don’t have that access to this data, we don’t have these dashboards built. So walk us through what that kind of technology journey looked like to enable you to be able to offer these personalized products and services and really understand your membership.

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (17:02):

Yeah, you know, you take every step forward, thinking that hey, this will take you that step forward and then you find that it leads to more and bigger opportunities. So, I think that in general, BCU and most lenders, right, we all feel that we’re in a good spot when it comes to being able to figure out or do propensity scoring for the products that a person like me needs.

However, we continue to keep finding opportunities of capturing behavioral data of our members, which we can use and we are always finding gaps and saying, oh, there are signals or intent signals here that we didn’t consume that if we consumed it would improve how our members’ propensity shows up.

The other, I think, and it’s a pretty big opportunity, I think is that, there is an opportunity for making on this channel-less or channel-agnostic, the best of banks. You could walk into your branch and talk to somebody and it’s very unlikely that they’ll know that the product that was being pitched to you digitally is what they will pitch or they’ll know what was being pitched, right? So there is, but the member is the same. So if you think member first, you’re saying, hey, the member should be able to get pitched the same product in all channels if we think we know what’s best for them.

So I think that there’s a pretty big opportunity in making products a little more available, more channel-lessly or kind of being more channel-agnostic with them. And I think the other big thing is, can’t forget products themselves. Are there changes to the products themselves that we can make based on the data that we’re collecting from members?

Is there an opportunity, and you know, some of the things that we think about are, and we look out in our data are BNPL kind of products. Would it help for our members to post-fact look at their transaction and say, oh, can I now break this into four payments instead of at the time that they were buying? Because often times they do like using the BCU credit or the debit card. Yes. Right? So is that something that’ll be of value to our members?

Is there value to our members? They all receive money faster, right? So, for BCU, because we’re an employee-based credit union, most of our members who especially have direct deposits, receive early pay. However, are there opportunities for us in figuring out or building solutions that give them early wage access as well?

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (20:21):

Yeah, so it seems like you guys have a lot on your future outlook and for opportunities for the next couple. You guys are going to be busy.

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (20:29):

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You know, at the end of the day, as long as we’re member-first, and as long as we’re driving member excellence, I think we’ll be in a good spot.

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (20:43):

So, one of my last questions for you is, when you’re thinking about your peer credit unions out there, what piece of advice would you give them if they’re a little bit more on that infancy stage around product personalization? How would you suggest that either they get started, things that they should be looking out for? What would you tell them?

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (21:02):

You know, I think that this may come more from my fintech background than just the fact that, you know, I am at a credit union, and I think that is the test and learn and the experimentation. Starting small, building a culture of test and learn, can actually be a very good way to make progress. Sometimes putting all the eggs in one basket and betting on one solution can be tricky and risky.

So, yeah right? So, it’s easier to start doing smaller experiments on smaller kind of segments and seeing what works and then scale it up. So, in implementing that at BCU in my team in digital, we’ve started seeing a lot of success with it.

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (21:57):

I think that’s great. I think it’s important. I mean, my mind just kept going back to the risk piece, because like you said, if you put all your eggs in one basket, before when you’re really starting on this journey, you might not know what’s best. You don’t have all the data yet. You haven’t understood your membership yet. So you don’t want to just jump in on these projects. You really want to take the time to test and learn and develop, and, you know, fast is slow and slow is fast, if you’ve heard that phrase, yeah, take your time.

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (22:26):

You can change your tracks so often if you’re just testing and learning as you go along.

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (22:33):

Well, Bhavna, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with me today. We really appreciate it. Any final words of advice? Anything I should have asked you?

Bhavna Guglani, BCU (22:42):

No, I think this is fantastic. This is great to share what we’re doing here and the fun that we’re having in building stuff that’s member-first and for the BCU members.

Elizabeth Gujral, Cornerstone Advisors (22:56):

Thank you so much. Well, I’ll talk to you later. Bye-bye.