How Northgate Credit Union doubled digital savings sign-ups

Northgate Credit Union is a fictional community lender used on this site for illustration. The figures below are invented to show how a case study is structured and do not describe any real institution.

The problem

Northgate had a loyal membership, competitive savings rates and a branch network that its older members valued. What it did not have was growth. Membership had been flat for five years, the average member age was rising, and exit surveys showed that younger members who left were going to app-based banks that offered a faster sign-up and a clearer view of what they were earning.

The credit union's own digital sign-up took an average of eleven minutes, required members to choose between six savings products with similar names, and displayed interest rates in a table that had been designed for a printed leaflet.

What they did

Northgate's leadership took the view that the problem was presentation rather than product. Its rates were competitive; its members did not know it, and prospective members could not find out without effort.

The six savings products were consolidated into two: an instant-access account and a notice account, each with a single rate. The change required notifying existing members and migrating balances, which took three months and was handled with a letter, a call for members over seventy and a rate guarantee so that no one ended up worse off.

The sign-up flow was rebuilt to ask only for what the law required, in the order that made sense to an applicant. Identity verification used a document scan with a branch visit as the fallback. Address and employment fields were prefilled where possible from the identity document.

The rates page was rewritten in plain language: what the rate was, what a thousand in the account would earn in a year, how it compared with the average of the five largest banks, and when the rate had last changed. The comparison was updated monthly and sourced.

Finally, the credit union made its membership eligibility explicit on the first screen, since research had shown that many prospective members assumed they did not qualify.

Results

In the year after relaunch, digital savings account openings rose by 104 per cent compared with the previous year. The share of new members under 35 rose from 22 per cent to 38 per cent. The average time to open an account fell from eleven minutes to four.

Balances migrated from the retired products were retained at 97 per cent, and complaints related to the migration were fewer than the board had budgeted for. The credit union also saw a small increase in openings by existing members who had previously held savings elsewhere.

What others can take from it

A competitive product hidden behind a confusing choice is not competitive. Reducing six products to two removed the decision that had been stopping people.

Show the money. The single most-read element on the new page was the line saying what a thousand would earn in a year.

Say who is eligible. Ambiguity about membership had been turning away people who qualified.

Treat migration as a service event, not a technical one. The call to older members cost time and was the reason the change did not become a complaint story.