1st Nivo Credit Union Online Forum (March 2020)

On Wednesday the 11th of March 2020, we had our first Nivo Credit Union Online forum. We were really happy to have had some amazing people from South Manchester, Metro Moneywise, and Pennine Community Credit Union share what they’ve used Nivo for, how it’s helped them, and how they could best use it more. It was a session of sharing insights, use cases, and potential future developments with the group followed by an open forum for any questions. Feel free to read the summary below or scroll all the way to the bottom and listen to it instead. 

 

Highlights from South Manchester Credit Union-  Sheegnah (CEO) and Beck (Marketing Placement student) (Nivo since 2018)

Growth of Loan book: They started using Nivo in May 2018, and since then Nivo has been one of the key drivers that helped with increasing their loan book by 29% in Y1 and 25% in Y2. About 90-95% of their members use Nivo to borrow from them, with the other 5-10% being outliers who prefer to operate with paper. 

 

Attracting a new demographic: Previously, their average borrower was “Michelle” and 39 years old. Through Nivo, they’ve been able to attract a new and younger demographic. Now, their average borrower’s consist of more men in their 20s who are working. 

 

Efficiently Paperless: Before Nivo, they were using eco-sign (an eSigning product) that they'd send out via email. It helped to improve loan applications; however, with Nivo eSigning they’ve been able to smooth their journey for both the staff and members. Nivo has reduced the need to go in and out of different platforms (email), as everything can be done through the Nivohub (for the staff) and App (for the member). They noted that it made a big difference to the way members perceived them.

 

Key Quote: When we first started using Nivo, one of our members came in and stood in front of the credit union and announced to everyone “I can’t believe you got something this good for us” 

 

Getting started with Bots: Beck, having been with the credit union for the past 8 months, has helped drive the use of bots. Getting started with bots, they would get their regular paper forms and converted them into Nivo forms. From there, they would treemap (important) their whole loan application and joiner processes to effectively create their Nivo bots. 

 

Benefits of Bots: Some members used to only be able to fill in an application and move to the next step when there was a member of staff being able to communicate with them via Nivo. Occasionally, you would have a user who would only message during out of hours, so it would take a while for that member to go through the whole application. With bots, members can now complete an entire application without the need for a staff member being behind the scenes guiding them through an application. For the staff, sending out applications are also so much easier as it just takes a few clicks to send out an application. Once comfortable with bots, they started using them for withdrawal requests and instant member transfers making the process a lot smoother. 

 

Highlights from Metro Moneywise Credit Union - Ciara (CEO) (Nivo since August 2019)

 

Surprising member uptake: With their average borrower's age being 54 and with 50% of members being over 50, they were very surprised to see how quickly many of that adapted to using Nivo.

 

Managing growth: This year, one of their biggest developments was being able to grow their loan book by 30-35%. They mentioned that they wouldn’t have been able to cope with their high growth without nivo. From a purely paper, post, and email-based loan application process that took 1 week, Nivo has turned it into a 1-day process.  

 

Power of Open Banking: One of their most transformative use cases for Nivo is Open banking. They used to have documents sent to them via post, and occasionally they would receive poorly formatted statements that weren't useable. With Open Banking, the transactions that are connected are legitimate. Yet again, they were surprised that many of their members were willing to use open banking and share their bank information with us for loan applications. 

 

Automated Bots: They've been using bots at an organic pace and would ask themselves “what do we need” and “what can we see nivo helping.” Through that, they started to use bots for a lot of different uses like direct debit mandates or changing bank details. This has helped save time as now they can send out a bot with just a few clicks. 

 

Testing New products: Their latest development has been testing out a new loan product via a Nivo bot. On March 9, they sent out to few members an email with a bot journey for a new loan product and in just a few hours they were able to get 10 completed applications just though that bot. Ciara mentioned, "It’s amazing for us that we get to test and streamline processes.”

 

Active Feedback: They send out feedback bots after every loan application and at the end of the day they look at the feedback forms. In the beginning, they used to be worried that their feedback wouldn’t be good because they were becoming more digital with Nivo. But, actually, on a daily basis, they get live, in the moment feedback about nivo and which has been really good. (For a copy of the feedback bot click here: Feedback Bot)

 

Highlights from Pennine Community Credit Union - David Harris (Marketing Manager) (Nivo since October 2019)

Loan applications: With two members of staff using nivo at any given time. Since October, they have processed about 2,000 applications. The highest number of applications that they were able to process in a single day was 57 applications. 

 

As compared to the figures from October to February a year ago, there were 1,052 loans completed. In the same period this year, they've completed 5,395 loan applications. David mentioned, "Without the ability Nivo has given us to streamline loans, I don’t think we would have been able to handle that amount of growth."

 

Likes about Nivo: "We love how everything is in one place with Nivo. It has reduced the amount of back and forth the time needed like when using emails. We love how at the very beginning we created all the bots we needed and have had everything in place for when we want to start using them."

 

Tip: They've created a stock of sentences to save time and standard sentences to help streamline loans. 

If you want to join our next session or have a member of staff that would like to contribute to the discussion, please send an email to [e-mail]. We would love to have more of our credit union's share their experiences!