Credit unions have reams of data at their fingertips. They can measure member satisfaction, website traffic, loan and account conversions, market trends, and financial performance.
But the one metric credit unions aren’t generally measuring just might be the most important one: member financial health.
Andy Bandyopadhyay, Founder and CEO of Attune, would like to change that. Hospitals measure patient outcomes; why don’t credit unions measure financial outcomes? If financial wellness isn’t improving, are credit unions really doing their job?
These are just a few of the questions that Andy addresses in this month’s episode of The Remarkable Credit Union podcast, along with our BIG question:
How can credit unions lead with financial wellness over products, and what’s in it for them?
Katie Stone:
Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Credit Union Podcast. We created our podcast to help credit union leaders think outside of the box about marketing, technology, and community impact. The Remarkable Credit Union is brought to you by Pixelspoke, a digital marketing agency that works with credit unions to create user-friendly, high-converting award-winning websites. As a B Corp and an employee-owned cooperative, we believe that business can and should be a force for good. Each episode we bring on expert guests from the credit union and broader cooperative movement for conversations about the intersection of marketing and social impact. Our goal is to challenge your preconceptions about business as usual, and provide you with actionable takeaways that you can use to grow your membership, improve the financial health of your cooperative and better serve your community. I'm Katie Stone, CEO, and a co-owner here at Pixelspoke.
Kerala Goodkin:
And I'm Kerala Goodkin, also a co-owner and the director of Marketing and Impact here at Pixelspoke. And today we are very excited to welcome a special guest, Andy Bandyopadhyay. Hope I got that last name somewhat right. He's the founder and CEO of Attune Insights, which helps credit unions measure the Financial Health Network's thin health score of their employees, their members, SEGs and their communities. He teaches at the Berkeley Haas School of Business where he challenges Silicon Valley founders to put people first and also teaches at Harvard's first ever LGBTQ+ leadership program, Leading with Pride. And a few fun facts, Andy also sings tenor and inclusive of voices, which is Toronto's premier gospel R&B choir. And before immigrating to Canada, Andy sang with the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. Welcome, Andy. We're so excited to have you.
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
Thank you. I'm excited to be here. It's fun to geek out on all things members.
Kerala Goodkin:
Absolutely. And today we're going to all be tackling together the big question, which is how can credit unions lead with financial wellness over products and what's in it for them? So we'll answer that question throughout the podcast and challenge you to provide a very succinct answer at the end. But I wanted to start by just thinking about nuts and bolts. We love this topic of financial wellness. We've had a lot of guests on the podcast who have talked about the need for credit unions to really center financial wellness, but we haven't really delved into the how. So we have some questions. Well, we'll ask you to get more in the weeds in a bit. But I just wanted to start by thinking about from your perspective, the top three things that you think credit unions should start or stop doing to more effectively advocate for their members' financial health.
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
I think the first thing is to stop assuming that education workshops and donations to charity are enough. Those activities often live in the philanthropic arm though not necessarily, but when we think, oh, financial wellness, what is that? Ah, do I have a financial education team? Cool. Do I have some content? Cool, great. I check the box. Oh, can we partner with some profits? Can we distribute some scholarships? And then that's it. And to me, that's like a hospital where you go to a hospital and say, Hey, I think you should think about the health outcomes of people who come to your hospital. And you're like, oh, well, but I have some health educators who will teach workshops on how to eat nutritiously and avoid diabetes and I give some scholarships. I think that's it, right? That's the only thing I have to do.
I don't have to worry about how long it takes people to recover from surgery or what the readmission rates are into the hospital or if we're using things that have actually been shown by the FDA to be effective. That doesn't matter, right? I just need to tell people to eat healthy and we're all good. Eat less, exercise more at the end.
In a hospital context, that sounds insane, but that's literally what we're doing in credit union land when our core products are financial products and we're saying that the only thing we need to do for our members is be like, oh, by the way, here's how you make a budget and let's put this class in high school. I think that's the first thing.
The second thing is to stop relying on feelings alone. Feelings matter. We're all human. I do not believe in this false dichotomy of emotional is unreasonable and logical is better. There are actually some very cool studies showing that when people's brains are injured in a way that they can't access their emotions, they're incapable of making decisions. There's this patient that had some sort of accident and that part of the brain went offline and he wasn't even able to make something as simple as when should my next doctor's appointment be? Because he was endlessly analyzing all the pros and cons. Well, if it's Tuesday, then that's easy to get to because I have the car available on that day, but if it's Thursday, you have more time. But if it's this...
And it was analysis paralysis, our emotions are the center of what help us make decisions so we cannot ignore them. At the same time, back to a hospital, if a hospital said, Hey, we're doing great because our patients love us, we do a survey, how satisfied are you with the hospital or how much more or less stressed are you after going to the hospital? And it's all great. And what if we're just giving a placebo to everyone and they're not actually getting better? What if their diabetes is getting worse? What if their cancer is not getting treated? What if they broke a bone and they're going to have to come back?
Of course you want the patient experience in the hospital to be a good experience. You want people to feel supported, taken care of, that they're getting excellent care. And you absolutely should measure that. That's where things like loyalty and PS satisfaction, CSAT, other feeling metrics come in. But you would never in a hospital say, oh, well people feel good, so I guess we're good. There's a reason that healthcare is regulated and that for a treatment to be rolled out in a hospital, it has to be approved. It has to be shown to be effective. So in financial health or financial wellness, we'll often go, well, how do you feel about your money? How stressed are you about your money? How much do you feel that our credit union supports you in your financial health?
I'm not saying don't ask those things, but I'm saying it's not the same as how much more money do you have in your pocket because you're with the credit union versus outside the equivalent of a healthcare improvement in the hospital. So the last thing is start actually measuring the member's bottom line. We talk about mission and margin and credit union land all the time that there's this tension. How are we supposed to do both? We know we're supposed to, but it's a crazy economic environment. It's uncertain. Wow, what do I do?
You provide a product that's supposed to help people with their money, so just show that it helps people with their money. You have to measure the outcome. And there are a bunch of different ways to do that, which I'm sure we'll get into next, but not measuring the outcome for the member's. Bottom line is like being a hospital and going, no, well, it really doesn't matter how many people are cured after this or how many people get better. Or somebody comes in with an injury, can they walk again or not? No, I don't know. It doesn't really matter, because they feel fine. That's just crazy.
Katie Stone:
I really appreciate your medical analogy. I saw that on your website too. I just think it makes these concepts so much more concrete. And it's interesting too, because I often talk to potential clients using a similar analogy. We have credit union clients that come to us and say, "We want a website, provide us with a quote." And we talk about how it's like going to a doctor. You go to a doctor and just say, I've got a headache and I need a painkiller, and a doctor could just write you a prescription. But what a good doctor is hopefully going to do is going to say, hold on. I want to learn all about what's going on in your situation. Well, tell me about your sleep habits distressors in your life and really get to the root causes.
And that's how we approach our client relationships. It's like, wait, we really want to get to know you. And I just see a lot of parallels with your approach to really getting to the root cause of the members' financial struggles and understanding them and then individually addressing those, so I just really appreciated that metaphor a great deal.
Kerala Goodkin:
Yeah, I've done quite a few presentations at conferences and I was actually really excited to talk to you because we talk about the FinHealth Score Toolkit and I ask people in the room how many people or how many credit unions represented in the room are regularly serving their members about their financial health? Not about member service or not about how maybe one product helped them to do one thing, but their overall financial health and so few hands, if any go up. I'm just like, why isn't this baked into the credit union cake? It's a mystery to me. I feel like that segues nicely into the next question, which is financial health is a broad thing and I'm just curious how you do go about measuring it and maybe if you could just break down the process for us
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
And talk about the toolkit too. Because the toolkit's amazing and it's an underutilized resource. It's also the reason that Attune exists in the first place. We're an independent company now with the Financial Health Network as our largest shareholder and as half of our board. But we were born within the Financial Health Network as a business line precisely for this reason that we created the financial health score in the first place. In collaboration with USC, we created the toolkit, we created the Pulse, which is the annual survey of how is the nation doing, so you can benchmark. And we asked, how many of you are using this?
It's literally free, it's open source. And there are so few hands, and it's not that people hadn't tried. When you then switch the question and say, how many of you have tried to measure this internally using the toolkit, a lot of people will raise their hands and then you'll ask, well, why did you stop? And they'll say, it's too much work. It's way too much overhead. When we count the number of staff that are required, the amount of staff time that's required, the backlog of other data and survey requests that we have across programs, we just can't manage it.
So many of our clients have actually used the toolkit on their own internally to measure, but they were measuring once every three years and now they're measuring daily because the cost per assessment has gone down so dramatically when you can outsource that function. I think the first barrier to any kind of measurement of financial health or even the feelings piece or the education piece, any kind of measurement is what are the priorities already happening internally? Do you even have room to take this on and do you have the staff to do it? Do you have people with a specialized expertise to do it? That's if you're using survey data, it's survey expertise. If you're using transaction or their administrative data, it's more data science and analytics. But do you have people with that expertise? Do you have people with a financial health domain knowledge?
And then if by some miracle you have both the priority and the people with the survey expertise and the people with the domain knowledge, do you actually have the ability to afford their time on doing this? And if you count those people in their hourly rate and how much time it's going to take them, how does that compare to just buying that off the shelf? So that tension of so many credit unions and financial institutions, credit bureaus, fintechs, just across the financial services ecosystem, people were saying, I want to do this, but I just can't get it done internally on my own. There needs to be a tool. So that's why the Financial Health Network, their board approved an investment to create a technology tool in the first place to make this kind measurement easier.
I know that the question from the banter in the middle, for the second part though of how do you measure financial health? Financial health is the member's bottom line. It's the patient outcome from the hospital. They had a problem. Did they actually heal? Did they actually get better? It's not the same as your feelings. It's not the same as what. So if you're looking at outcomes, it needs to be about the entirety of the member. Our financial lives are very, very segmented. We all nostalgically imagine an era of relationship banking where there's a member and they have you as their primary financial institution. They have all their accounts with you, so do their parents and their kids and their grandkids, and it's just this fabulous LTV and low CAC and you're set for years.
But I have a client who says there's no such thing as a PFI anymore. It's so rare to have that primary relationship with an individual, let alone a family or a generation, multiple generations of a family. So what you have instead is this super fragmented. Wait, I have one account here for this. I have one account here for that. I use this app for this other thing. I'm also doing something else here. And that means that what you can see as a credit union, if you truly say, okay, this member, no matter what their relationship is to us, whether they're an indirect member because they got a loan at a dealership that's through us, or they walked into a branch and opened an account, I want to understand what essentially the state of a patient is like a family physician would and then develop what I want to do next.
You don't have visibility into it most of the time because you don't have their full share of wallet. And then even if you have a tool that allows them to aggravate external accounts, the opt-in rates for that are pretty low. So you end up being able to see that full picture for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of your members if you're relying on the data you already have in-house. So that data is very powerful, but it's also not going to have great coverage. That setup of fragmented financial relationships across many institutions and providers is where survey data shines.
So to go, I think when we edit, this probably should be in the reverse order. All of this stuff is context for the thing, but for how do you measure financial health? Financial health is the outcome. It's, are you actually getting better after you go to the hospital? The easiest and fastest way to measure that is with the FinHealth score by the Financial Health Network. The FinHealth score is composed of eight questions that are validated against transactional data with research from USC. It's benchmarked to the nation with the financial health pulse year over year over year. And it is the easiest way for you to ask any member how they're doing overall in their financial life across the many relationships that they have with different institutions, different apps, different parts of their financial life.
It's going to be better, faster, cheaper to ask someone, how long would the cash you have last you from less than a week to six months or more versus saying, okay, I see that you have a checking account with us, but you don't have savings accounts. Do you have other savings accounts? If yes, please add them here. Do you use other credit cards? If yes, please also add those. Also, what are all of your expenses? Oh, you do all of your spending on a credit card and pay it off? Make sure you link that. Oh, the two-factor authentication isn't working. Oh, please troubleshoot. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.
Kerala Goodkin:
It sounds like my life.
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
It's so hard. So yes, surveys are not perfect, but they are highly correlated with what people actually do, and it is generally a better use of resources to do that on your own. The reason that people then say, okay, great FinHealth Score, this sounds wonderful. I want to do it. I want to use it. How do I do it? You can go access the FinHealth Score Toolkit from the Financial Health Network for free and do this internally. If you try to do this internally, you run into the problems of where is this on the prioritization? Do I have the staff expertise? Do I have the staff time? Can I afford to run this? And if the answer is no, that's okay. If it is, then by all means take the toolkit and run. But if the answer is no, that's why Attune exists to take that off your plate end to end.
Katie Stone:
So Andy, our audience here is primarily made up of credit union marketers, and you talk a bit on your website about crafting campaigns that really speak to members' needs and inspirations. Can you tell us a little bit more about what this might look like in practice?
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
Yes. Marketers are the most fun to talk to because they intrinsically get the idea that the most effective marketing you can do is in the words of the people you're marketing to. It's the oldest insight in marketing. In your market, you're getting to know the people that you serve. You're getting to know what they read, where they hang out, what they say, their own little terms of phrase, their own needs. It's exactly that with a financial health lens. So instead of saying, we have this great savings account with this great rate, is your prospect actually thinking I'm shopping for a savings account with a great rate? Maybe.
But they could also go, oh my god, can I even afford to save? How do I even know? I mean, technically I have money left over at the end of the month, but also I could have an emergency at any time.
And also, what are the pros and cons of putting it somewhere that I'm hiding from myself? I once interviewed someone who literally drove three hours, opened a different account at a different credit union and purposefully did not set up online banking so that she could stash money away from herself to know that it was truly there in an emergency. That is a completely different setup than someone who's just rate shopping. And if you're attracting someone who's rate shopping with your hero, then as soon as somebody else has a better rate, they're going to bounce. That's not a sustainable thing for you.
So the crafting of campaigns is of all the members that you have, of all of the members that you serve, I'm sure that you already have a growth strategy. We want to grow in Gen Z, or we want to grow in this other geographic area, or we want to grow in this industry segment. What are actually the financial needs of people in that segment? People who work for the government, for example, there has been an enormous amount of turnover and layoffs and whatnot in the government over the last six months. What does support look like if that is a huge part of your membership or a huge area of prospects that you're marketing to? If you are working for the government and you just lost your job or you don't know if your job is secure, what are you thinking about?
You're not thinking, can I get the highest rate on this thing? You're thinking, who's going to have my back and who can I talk to, to figure out how to navigate all this on uncertainty? What should my spending be like while I'm looking for something? Am I going to get my job back? Am I not? How do I need to change my investment strategy? Do I need to change my retirement portfolio? What do I do to cope with this shock? That's just an entirely different campaign.
So I think it's taking the good marketing practice that you already know about speaking directly to your prospects in their own words, except it's with the lens of if you were sitting at their kitchen table with them when they're talking through their finances with their partner or their kids or their roommate or by themselves for the first time going, oh my God, I'm supposed to adult now. How do I do that? What is that prospect saying? And what is the underlying need? And then center that. And the more you can use direct quotes, examples, stories from actual research and interviews like that or community experiences, the more powerful it's going to be.
Katie Stone:
I love that answer. We talk a lot about the power of storytelling and you just so nicely encapsulated that. I was going to ask you next, but I feel like you just answered it about credit union marketing campaigns that focus really heavily on rates and products. We love to push back on that at PixelSpoke. We of course know that it's important to feature products and rates, but we really appreciate that storytelling aspect and I think that it's a great way to think about that kitchen table conversation. I suspect you would not sit down at a kitchen table and just lead with rates. So can you expand on that a little bit? What is the right messaging and what is the right approach to really connect people to the resources they need?
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
I think it depends on the market you're trying to serve and you're going to know your market better than anybody else. So it's not for to say without any context about a given credit union, this is what you should say or how you should say it. But if you have the very common example of we want to market to Gen Z, we want to attract younger members. What are they actually saying? If you don't have a formal research budget, do you have kids who are Gen Z kids who would be willing to talk to you for a pizza? I mean, you can do this in a really lightweight way if you want, but get a couple of 18 to 25 year olds around an actual kitchen table with some actual food and say, how do you guys think about money? And just ask, what are you worried about? How are you choosing a bank or a credit union? Do they even know what a credit union is?
There are all of these things that we assume because we've been working in financial services for so long that APY so many people will be, wait, what is APY? What does that matter? I don't know. We can't stay in our own bubbles.
So I think you need some way to diagnose the need. What actually is the need of the person you're trying to reach? The FinHealth score is a huge asset there because it will tell you, this person is vulnerable, coping or healthy, and here's why. Their spending is okay, but they have no savings or their spending is okay and they're purposely not saving because they're throwing everything at paying down their enormous student loan debt and nothing else matters, so do not talk to them about emergency savings. Do not talk to them about retirement. Talk to them about we know how it feels to be completely crushed by this debt that you don't know if it will ever go away, especially with repayments about to start.
Student loan payments have been frozen for a long time. They're right about to come back and be automatically deducted, and a lot of people are about to be in for a lot of pain. So if you've ever yourself been in the shoes of how am I ever going to pay off this loan? Or if you know someone who has then speak to that emotional experience and then speak to literally actually what do you offer that will help? This goes back to the hospital. The hospital can empathize with you till the end of the day like, oh my gosh, I had diabetes. I know what this is like. It's so hard to figure out how do I navigate this? How do I afford my insulin? Et cetera, et cetera. And then you're like, okay, cool, but how are you going to help me?
And they're like, oh, well, we're here and we're going to listen. And you're like, aha. Yeah, but literally what are you actually, can I see a doctor? Do I get a prescription? Listening is the prerequisite, but it just opens the door. You then actually have to have the product that's helpful. So it's not that the product doesn't exist because obviously CFO brain will go like, what are you saying? Oh my God, we got to get the revenue in the door.
But it's that the product is the mechanism for the prospect or the member to solve a problem. They don't wake up saying, I'm going to buy a new financial product today. They wake up saying, I need to do something about my debt today. So if there's somebody with a massive student loan burden, do you have anything that helps? On the employer side, [inaudible 00:23:45] can reallocate some 401k contributions to student loan repayment. That's an easy one that makes very little cost difference to the org, but is a huge benefit for that person.
Or if somebody is drowning in credit card debt, I am sure that you have a personal loan that can be used for debt consolidation that would save them an enormous amount. So that should be there. But it's starting with who is the person and what actually is the event that leads them to say, I need to think about this now. In tech land, we often reference jobs to be done as one example framework for that what happened in the person's life that led them to have a job, but they, they're hiring you to do a job for them, so what is that job? And that job is going to have functional needs. It's going to have emotional needs, but your job is to listen to what their job is and then frame it up and say, we will help you get this done in a way that is easier or better or faster or whatever the benefit that actually is based on your experience with your current members.
Kerala Goodkin:
So many good points in there. I mean, even for me, just hearing things referenced as products was new. When I started working at PixelSpoke and was learning all the financial jargon, I was like, I never thought of a savings account as a product. I think of a product as a physical thing. So the way the average consumer member thinks about these financial products, for lack of a better word, but it's totally different. And we encounter that too, and we're like organizing navigation menus and we're like, if you call these products that's not, people aren't like, I'm going to go shop for a savings account today. So it's just a very good reminder to get back in the head of the consumer or member.
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
And if you're having trouble, then just go ask them.
Kerala Goodkin:
Yeah, they're right there.
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
There are so many ways to do that. There are super cheap ways to do that. Get a bunch of people over for pizza in your target audience. And then there are more formal ways to do that through qual and quant research. But you have to be directly in touch with the people you want to serve to understand how they think and what they say.
Kerala Goodkin:
Yeah, we even sometimes forget that from time to time at PixelSpoke, but we have a practice occasionally just interviewing our clients. We have check-ins with them about their websites, but it's like, let's take a step back and just talk about how you're doing. Especially this year, is so much going on, and every time we do that, we're like, oh yeah, this is a really good thing to do. We just got so many insights from this 30 minute conversation. So yeah. Something I did want to ask about was around financial education, financial wellness advice.
I think where I have struggled a lot, especially in reviewing blog content and other financial education resources that a lot of credit unions offer on their website, there's a lot of good stuff in there. Some of it is a one size fits all approach and it really doesn't apply to the most financially vulnerable populations. And one example... Well, first of all, I was shocked to find out when I learned about ALICE, the asset limited income constrained and employed. So these are people ALICE describes the... And I'm sure you know this, Andy, but for our listeners, in case you haven't heard of ALICE, it's a demographic of people who are working, but they're just still struggling to make ends meet and to pay the bills.
And when I saw that data from my county, which is Multnomah County where Portland, Oregon is, and then added that to the percentage of people living below the poverty line, it's almost like one in two people in my county are having trouble paying their bills. So you tell them, oh, you should really have this three month emergency savings account. You should be putting money away every month. That's not only unhelpful, but it's condescending. And if someone gave me that advice when I wasn't in the position to do it, I would not be happy. I guess my question here is just how can credit unions use the data they glean from these financial health surveys to really tailor their financial advice better to the populations that they're serving?
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
Yeah, the first thing is if somebody is not paying their bills on time, then shut up about everything else. It is extremely difficult to be in that position. A lot of us have been there. I had probably in retrospect, what would've been classified as an ALICE family growing up. My dad kept changing PhD programs, so he was a PhD student and adjunct professor, extremely educated, made very little. And then my mom did two years of medical school, passed her boards and then quit and then became unable to work. And then after they got divorced, she was on social security disability. He was paying child support on that income. And we're in this 600 square foot apartment in suburban Houston between my parents, literally three master's degrees, and we don't know if we can pay rent or if our lights are going to get shut off.
So it would've been extremely frustrating and was extremely frustrating for 12-year-old me who took over the Bank of America account to sort this stuff out because my mom couldn't. I read the stuff about have six months of savings and I was managing this account for me and my mom and my brother, and it was like six months, are you kidding me? Even three months. I'm just trying to make it to the end of the month. I'm trying to have us not buy food at the gas station because it's more expensive. I'm wanting us to actually go like, okay, we can't afford a Costco membership, but do we know anybody who has one? How do we save things around the edges?
So the first thing about financial education by itself is you're exactly right. If it's not tailored or personalized, it can be outright insulting. And it's this misconception that, oh, if people were more educated, if they knew what to do, then everything would be fine. In three master's degrees between two adults, they knew what to do. They're extremely well-read, they're extremely smart. But there are always things that are outside of your control.
So you need to not just focus on what know, which is the education piece or what people feel, which is the wellness and wellbeing piece, but what people can actually do, which is the financial health and outcome piece. And if somebody is not able to pay their bills on time, the first thing that has to happen is what support do they need to be able to pay their bills on time? When you take a FinHealth Score assessment through Attune, we show you your score at the end as a member and then a list of focus areas. And if somebody answers anything other than all bills on time, we say forget about everything else. Your first priority is all bills on time. And there are actually a lot of things that credit unions and employers can do to help.
So for example, many people are eligible for various government benefits at different levels. Obviously that's about to get a lot harder, but there are many, many, many support programs at the federal, state and county levels. Like when I lived in the Bay Area, there's a program where the city and County of SF will pay your electric bill if you can't. But one of the big problems is that one, all these programs are super fragmented. There's not a central directory that says, here's who I am, here's where I work, here's how much I make, what am I eligible for?
And then the second is that one of the ways that policymakers have made it more and more difficult to access these benefits is they've made the application programs or application processes very long.
So even when they're digitized, but especially when they were on paper, it would be like you missed signature 12 on page 17 of 47, and so we're denying you for this benefit. It was extremely frustrating. So it's not just that people can't easily find out what they're eligible for, they also often can't navigate the form burden that any of us would have a really hard time navigating no matter how financially stable you are. So there are a couple of really cool programs now that actually connect people with the benefits they're eligible for and help them fill out the forms. I don't have the names right now, but I'll send them afterwards and we can put them in the show notes. But that's an example of the kind of intervention where if you see that there's this segment of your members who are not paying bills on time, literally don't send them anything else.
Your only job is to figure out what is preventing them from paying all of their bills on time and how can I help? And the levers you have are pretty much increasing income, reducing expenses, smoothing out timing to increase income. The first place to look is benefits that they literally are already eligible for but have not claimed because it's too difficult. And then in the long term it's upskilling and getting a different job, et cetera.
And then on the cost side, it's what are you paying for that you could get in a different way? So as an example for how income is not the same as financial health, you could have a 22-year-old making $20,000 a year with a six-month emergency fund, and that sounds crazy, but if they're living at home with their parents and they have no expenses and they're saving their entire salary, then their expenses are in the hundreds of dollars a month and all of a sudden they've got more of an emergency fund than the vast majority of Americans by time.
But you put that same person making $20,000 a year and now all of a sudden they're living on their own in a high cost area. They may or may not have children to care for or elder parents to care for, and it's a completely different story. So it's looking at systematically what exists to remove those barriers. And from a coaching counseling standpoint, that often means getting creative about using non-financial resources to substitute for financial needs. So can you move somewhere rent-free or very, very subsidized? Could you barter child care for rent with a friend?
You, I'm sure, have already thought of this. I know the people when I was living in these situations, I already thought of these things, but credit unions necessarily haven't. So I'm saying this not to educate the people who are paying bills on time because they know this better than anyone. They are their own expert. But more for credit union staff who haven't thought about it, you can help with that stuff. And then for smoothing things out, sometimes it's how do we make sure that your bills line up with your paydays so that you're not having to pay something really expensive two days before your paycheck, so can we as the credit union call on your behalf and make it do the following day instead? So there are things like that. And then if you're just forgetful, setting up some calendar system, some reminders. But the standard financial health advice doesn't work not just because of the proportion of vulnerable people, but also because we're living in a very different world than 30, 40 years ago in terms of the costs versus income.
My parents when they were, God bless both students, they had me, they were 23 and 26 at Texas A&M, and they were working part-time while being students. And I was like, wait, did you seriously plan to have a kid when you were in school? And they were like, we weren't trying, but we weren't not trying. And I couldn't imagine when I was a graduate student funding having a child, but their rent was super cheap and their tuition was super cheap and my child care on campus was super cheap. So you could literally have two part-time students working part-time minimum wage jobs, supporting a kid in college station in the eighties, and the math worked, but we can't use advice that was made for back then with the economy as it is now.
Kerala Goodkin:
I tell my parents that a lot. But no, so much rang true for me there. I remember when my ex-husband was in school and I was supporting the whole family on a non-profit income and I was eligible. We were all eligible for state subsidized healthcare, but I just didn't know. No one told me the information wasn't out there. When I finally learned I could, I remember trying to sign us up for it and being on the phone for... I was on hold for six hours. I had to take a day off of work.
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
And then you had to lose that income. Well, if you're salaried, you didn't, but imagine you're hourly and then When You have to be on the phone for six hours, you've just lost an enormous chunk of your income. And that's a time burden that we don't ask of people who are salaried in white collar jobs. So any partnerships or tools and programs that directly address that, that's the KO thing that makes a really meaningful difference.
Katie Stone:
Well, speaking of a meaningful difference, last year the human rights campaign released its LGBTQ+ financial wellness report, which outlined how LGBTQ+ people have traditionally been left out of the financial health conversation and how many folks in the community really are facing unique financial challenges as a result. So as someone who is part of this community, I'd love to hear more where do you see unmet needs and how do you think credit unions can do a better job of advocating for LGBTQ+ community and their financial health?
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
I think the first thing is listening to your own community members in your own credit union among your own staff, in your own communities. This is going to be very different state by state, county by county. I'll send some resources to put in the show notes, but as personal example, I immigrated to Canada. I moved here specifically for my personal safety based on the environment that's in the states right now. I am not confident that my passport, which says male, all of my documentation says male. I have changed literally everything. I'm not confident that it would actually be accepted at the border where I had to come back for a conference or I turned down teaching at Harvard this year because I was not comfortable crossing the border because there are laws now, not theoretical laws, not bills proposed in state congresses, but fully passed active laws on the books in several states that would arrest me if I were to use the men's restroom.
I'm just a dude with a beard. But the law in Florida, as one example says that I should be using the women's. The minute that I walk into the women's, people freak the fuck out and say, oh my God, you don't belong there. I don't look like it. Right? But then it's a damned if you do and damned if you don't. If I follow the law, it is extremely uncomfortable for everyone. If I don't follow the law, I risk arrest. And if I say I'm going to avoid this altogether by never going to the bathroom outside of my hotel or my house, then I get a UTI because health outcomes, that's not helpful. So that's one.
A second set of laws that are already on the books is there are a number of places that have outlawed the medical care that I receive every day as a 36-year-old man. I know there've been a lot of articles about children's care, but there are many states where I literally could not fill a prescription that I have had for decades with my doctor because of state laws. There are state laws on the books that would refuse me entrance to a hospital because I'm trans, even if it was for a broken ankle. There are state laws on the books that say My US passport as a US citizen is not a piece of valid ID because it is a lie to have a male gender marker versus a female one. And as a consequence, if in state law that is not valid ID, then I cannot use that ID to open a bank account. I cannot use that ID to get anything notarized. I cannot use that ID to board a flight. I can't use it for any of the things that we would normally do.
So I bring that up as a financial health practitioner, not to make it about my story, but to say that the ability to exist in a public space to say when you're in the airport and you have to pee to go and then leave, the ability to use your ID to board a flight, the ability to open an account, the ability to talk to your doctor and get the care that you need, those are universal things. And there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people across the country losing these things right now.
And the financial impact above and beyond the very alarming stats in the HRC report is one, you lose access to medication. It can literally be life-threatening. So a lot more people are going to die and their families afford the funeral. Have they even done estate planning? Who's going to pay for that? If you cannot get your medication, are you going to try to move to a state where it's still legal and can you even afford to? Are you going to just break the law and hope that no one notices? There's not a clear and easy answer for what credit Union should do in this time. But I think as with how we were talking about marketing in the first place, it all starts with understanding needs. It starts with actually getting out of the headlines.
Like forget the news for a second. Forget everything you read. Just go talk to a human being in your community. Talk to a person that you personally know. So many people will say, oh my gosh, I've never met a trans person. We're about 1% of the population, which is about the proportion of redheads. So if you've met a redhead, I'm sure that you've met a trans person. They just may not have been out to you. If you've ever met me at a conference and you somehow didn't know I'm five foot one, which is often a giveaway, but you definitely have. I think that's the most immediate thing, which is whoever is in front of you, whatever their background, whatever their income, whatever their family set up, do you have safe housing? Do you have access to the medical care that you need? Do you have the legal documents that you need? And do you have contingency plans for if something goes sideways with your healthcare or with your status?
We could have had exactly this conversation about immigration status too. I'm speaking to the LGBTQ part one because of personal experience and because of the HRC report. But the questions of do you have a place to live? Can you pay your bills on time? Do you have access to the care and the insurance that you need? And do you have contingency plans for where you will go if these things are gone? Those are good financial health planning questions anyway for literally everyone. And that's what the FinHealth score is designed to do. How do you spend, how do you save? How do you borrow, how do you plan? And the plan is for the good stuff. What happens if I win the lottery or when I get my first job out of school, this is the color I want to paint my wall or whatever it is. But it's also for what if my partner dies? That's why we have life insurance. What if one of us becomes disabled? That's why disability insurance matters.
I think it's just that, the unmet needs that are specific to your community are going to be very quickly responsive to changing legislation in your community. And the only way to know what is most important where you are is to sit with actual human beings where you are locally and ask them.
Katie Stone:
Well, Andy, I just want to personally thank you for sharing your story. And I am the parent of a transgender youth, and our family struggles with many of the same things that you brought up today. We had to renew my daughter's passport recently. We've traveled to states where very similarly, she could have been in trouble for using the wrong bathroom. But much like you, I thought, I think that we're putting her at more risk by using the gender assigned up birth bathroom. And anyway, I just really appreciate your authenticity and openness and sharing your story. And it means a lot to me personally.
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
Absolutely.
Kerala Goodkin:
Yeah, absolutely. Plus one, and like what you alluded to, Andy, it just makes me think about if your credit union sees you as, I don't know, a millennial savings account holder that might be in the market for a mortgage product like that is just so different from really knowing your story and understanding what some of those unmet needs might be.
And yeah, I mean that ties into the next question. Just you wrote this wonderful article and see you inside about measuring mission and margin speaks to us definitely because PixelSpoke is a certified B Corp, which is a lot about mission alongside margin and an employee and cooperative. And I think I could just see, I know credit union leaders are probably feeling some pressure right now. We're living in a time of extreme economic volatility, lots of uncertainty out there and just, I'm sure there's a pressure. We just got to focus on the bottom line. We got to get member growth up, we got to increase our asset size. And I think the measuring the mission can feel like a, oh, that's a nice to have squishy thing when things get better. I'm just curious what you would say to credit union leaders who are just really wanting to focus on the bottom line perhaps at the expense of measuring mission.
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
The first thing is that we all have to focus on the bottom line to some extent. It's a part of running a sustainable organization, whether you are a for-profit or a nonprofit, whether you are a household or an organization, of course that's required. The core idea though, behind financial health, if we put it in a really, really crass terms, is when you make people richer, they like you better and make you richer.
Kerala Goodkin:
I like that.
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
When you make people richer, they give you more money. So why would you not do that? Financial health is literally the mechanism for you to grow, for you to improve your bottom line, for you to improve your prospect conversions, for you to improve cross-sell, for you to improve, upsell. Of course, it's how you do it. But in the example of, okay, millennial with a savings account, thinking about a mortgage, if my credit union had approached me about that three, four years ago when I was just putting together my immigration application for Canada and being like, it's actually the opposite of a mortgage. I'm literally about to move to another country and it's a long process and it's very expensive and I'm really scared. And am I going to click on that? No.
So when you don't do financial health, you're just doing ineffective marketing. There's a purely business way to look at this too, if you want. Obviously not where I go first from background and personality and whatnot, but even I am from Texas. I do come from a very business-minded conservative family. And the first rule of business is you need to make more than you spend, which is the same for a household. And if you as a business, as a credit union are telling me, buy your product, then I, as the person who is rightly concerned about my own bottom line should say, credit union, why should I use your product? How are you actually going to help me improve my bottom line? And the credit union needs an answer for that.
Katie Stone:
Yeah, great points. All right, let's switch things up a little bit and close out with some rapid fire questions. So first off, Andy, what's something you could eat for a week straight?
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
My husband is now in culinary school and just got us a pizza oven. So Raj's Pizza every day.
Katie Stone:
Very nice. And if you could travel back in time, what period would you go to?
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
I would go to the space race in the sixties around Apollo, the Apollo program. I grew up mostly in Houston, walking distance from NASA with literal rocket scientists and astronauts, Touring the Johnson Space Center, and actually seeing what it was like to try to put a man on the moon and troubleshoot all that stuff would be very cool.
Katie Stone:
Oh, that's awesome. And finally, what's your favorite ice cream flavor?
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
Coffee.
Katie Stone:
Okay.
Kerala Goodkin:
A good one. Always a safe one. Great. Let's do our final take. So just as a reminder, our big question today was how can credit unions lead with financial wellness over products and what's in it for them? And I'm going to challenge you in just a couple sentences to summarize your thoughts on this question.
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
All right, for credit unions to lead with financial health over products, what's in it for them is it's more effective marketing, it's more effective product. That's the make people richer, they will give you more money part. But in more concrete and less glib terms, credit unions can first measure the actual needs of the audiences they're trying to serve. That means where are they genuinely financially, objectively today, how do they feel about it and what do they know about it? That's the health, the wellbeing, and the education. Second, credit unions can align all of their offerings, their products, their services, their content with those actual needs. So if you know someone is not paying their bills on time, then don't talk to them about anything else. Just find among the product services content you already offer, the things that are related to resolving the genuine barriers they have to paying bills on time and share those.
It's more effective marketing. You'll have better utilization. It'll be a better outcome for the member and then a better outcome for you because you want the bills that they have to you to get paid on time, right? You don't want them to become delinquent on their loans.
Then third, measure your impact over time. We all have lots of ideas about how to help people with their finances because we have to manage our own finances and it's really easy to say, well, it worked for me so it should work for them. But every person is different, every family is different, every situation is different. So when we launch something and expect it to work, we have to actually check that it does. For what's in it for the credit union in terms of specifics, what people see when they do this work, first is better employee productivity and retention. Because when your employees are less stressed about their finances and their bottom line is better, they show up to work more, they show up more energized and engaged, and then they're able to help members better because asking somebody to fix a member financial problem when they themselves are really struggling is super hard.
The second thing that credit unions see is better member cross-sell and LTV, because when you're tailoring your campaigns to how people would actually talk about what they need around the kitchen table, it feels like, oh my god, they wrote it for me. And your click-through rates are going to be higher, your uptake rates are going to higher, your revenue is going to be higher. The third one is more efficient internal analytics and planning. So if you're trying to coordinate all this stuff internally and it's too, too hard, you literally can hire someone to just take the analytics portion off your plate. Just like you often hire an external company for loyalty or something else, like Michelle Bledorn is a huge mentor of mine and I'm like, oh my god, Michelle, if a tune could one day be the MLG for financial health, that would be such an honor. So that.
And then the last thing is it's strategic differentiation beyond rates. The person you're trying to reach, sitting at their kitchen table, doing their finances is literally not saying, I'm going to research a new financial product with the best rate that is robot see you or bank or speak. And when you are actually able to show this is how we've solved your problem, it's better for them, it's better for you.
Kerala Goodkin:
Wonderful advice all around. I think it really comes down to credit unions need to throw more pizza parties and maybe your husband can cook for them. Maybe there's a business opportunity there. But thank you so much, Andy. I feel like I've just been on quite a journey and learned a lot and I'm just bursting with takeaways and insights. So really appreciate your time with us.
Andy Bandyopadhyay:
Thank you both. It's been an honor and I hope we get to do work together one day.
Kerala Goodkin:
Well, that was quite a rich conversation. It's going to be challenging to think of just three key takeaways, but let's start first with this concept of moving beyond traditional financial education and charitable donations. Andy really stressed that financial wellness has to go far beyond just offering workshops or making donations. And there's nothing wrong with these. They have their place, but let's think about how credit unions can integrate financial health into their core products and services. And this has actually been a recurring theme on this podcast, the concept of centering financial wellness and everything a credit union does, not just offering financial education as one service of many. And along with that, how are we measuring member financial outcomes? A lot of credit unions aren't, I think most credit unions aren't a lot are measuring member satisfaction, and that's important. But I appreciated Andy's emphasis on not relying on member satisfaction as a sole indicator of success.
We really need to be measuring members' financial bottom line. Are they increasing their savings? Are they reducing their debt? I really appreciated the analogy to a hospital that provides, say health educators, but totally ignores patient outcomes, really highlights the need for credit unions to measure actual financial improvement. And lastly, for our credit union marketers out there, I appreciated the advice to craft campaigns based on members real-life financial needs. Andy was really encouraging marketers to listen to their members to think about the actual problems they're trying to solve.
So instead of just leading with products and rates, we've all been there, done that. Let's think about campaigns that speak to the emotional and functional needs behind financial struggles, like overwhelming student loan debt or fear of job insecurity. I have certainly struggled with both of those myself. I think this empathetic, outcome-oriented messaging really helps credit unions move beyond transactional relationships and helps attract members who are seeking genuine financial support.
Well, thanks for joining us today for another great episode. The Remarkable Credit Union is brought to you by PixelSpoke, a digital marketing agency that works with credit unions to create user-friendly, high-converting, award-winning websites. As a B Corp and employee-owned cooperative, we believe that business can and should be force for good. You can learn more and check out our work at Pixelspoke.coop. That's PixelSpoke, all one word, dot, C-O-O-P. Until the next time, I wish you the best of luck in making your credit union remarkable.