Given their relatively small size and tech budgets—meaning they need to partner with tech providers, rather than build their own infrastructure—credit unions are a prime target for fintechs looking to overhaul financial institutions’ tech stacks and operations. But reaching and converting many of these CUs can be a challenge.

Fintechs serving credit unions are most likely to succeed and scale their client base when they solve for three core factors:

Relevance

While credit unions are looking to expand the range of products and services they offer their customers, expanding into cutting-edge or experimental areas like crypto risks putting the cart before the horse. Credit unions are first and foremost interested in digitizing core services like check deposits and account statements.

With that in mind, fintech partners selling product ecosystems should emphasize the core building blocks they can offer to credit unions—a foundation from which credit unions can continue innovating.

Reliability

The decision to, effectively, hand over many core functions—moving from paper to electronic statements, for example—has common-sense market fundamentals behind it, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy choice to make. Especially in a relatively crowded market, credit unions have a broad range of fintechs to tie up with, leaving the impetus on tech partners to effectively outline the benefits and mitigated risks of their products.

Tech partners helping power credit unions have to highlight the compliance and security protocols that help keep sensitive customer data safe.

Reach

Finally, digitizing their products and services lets credit unions expand their reach beyond their existing footprint. Signing up for partner ATM networks, virtual servicing, and digital onboarding means credit unions can market to customers nationally.

Savvy product partners will outline the potential use cases of their geography-expanding products, offer quantitative projections for the kinds of ROI credit unions can expect from these technologies, and publish learnings and insights to let credit unions successfully execute on tech-enabled opportunities.