Caroline Willard, CO-OP FS
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—CO-OP Financial Services announced it will be offering $9.1 million to its member credit unions to help subsidize costs related to converting to EMV cards in advance of the liability shift deadline of Oct. 1.
The announcement was made during CO-OP’s annual meeting here as part of its THINK 15 Conference.
CO-OP’s Caroline Willard, EVP-markets and strategies, shared the news with attendees at the meeting as part of a presentation covering nine big ideas/themes around which CO-OP is focused.
Among those nine:
- The EMV shift/subsidy to CUs.
- Branding. CO-OP is rolling out the advertising theme, “Empowering People, Amplifying Dreams,” as well as continuing its ongoing focus on the Miracle Match program, which raises funds for Children’s Miracle Network. The Empowering People, Amplifying Dreams campaign will feature musician/singer Daria Musk, who has appeared at prior THINK conferences, and whose story will be part of a larger effort to highlight all kinds of people who are pursuing their dreams with the help of credit unions.
- Real-Time Payments. CO-OP is preparing to roll out a new solution, “RealPay by CO-OP,” which will offer real-time payments.
- Credit. Work in this area, said Willard, will also involve its partnership with The Members Group.
- Mobile. “We have taken a lot of feedback from all of you about listening to members, and in mobile what you are looking for is ala carte functionality that you can plug into a mobile platform.” To that end, said Willard, CO-OP is rolling out new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
- Digital Wallets. “The big wake-up call has been Apple Pay. That’s been a big program for us.”
- CO-OP Member Center. This company, acquired from CUNA Mutual, continues to grow, said Willard. “We will support your members calling in, for instance, if they are having trouble provisioning a card in Apple Pay.”
- ATMs. This channel is being “rejuvenated” with new signage and getting a refreshening.
- CO-OP Shared Branch. “We continue to focus on not only adding new locations, but also adding to the branch transformation and building the branch of the future,” said Willard.
Willard also covered CO-OP’s recent acquisitions of New York-based Covera, and efforts to provide additional services to its 248 client CUs, as well as Canada-based Everlink, the latter an effort to create a North American payments network offering. “We are thrilled to be the first CUSO to expand beyond the borders in a really big way,” said Willard.
Among other news shared by Willard:
The company has hit a big milestone and now has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. “People are all interested in engaging with credit unions,” said Willard.
It has reimagined its THINK Prize. “With that in mind we began to look at ways we could expand the mission of the Think Prize, and this year it’s in the form of a challenge,” said Willard. “The challenge was a means of benefiting local communities and to be something credit unions and our partners could rally around. So it’s open to people all over the world, CU employees, CU members and the population at large. We added one other goal: we wanted collaboration to be at the heart of the process for creating and refining ideas.”
CO-OP has partnered with OpenIDEO on the project. Open IDEO is an open innovation platform that allows people to tackle problems through sponsored challenges, such as CO-OP’s.