BECU is the largest community credit union in North America, with over $25 Billion in assets and 60 financial center locations. Guided by the philosophy of “people helping people”, BECU operates as a member-owned, not-for-profit cooperative. With only two traditional financial centers with actual tellers, BECU relies heavily on its remotely operated, full-service ATMs as the main touch-points for their base of over 1.2 million members. This reliance is highlighted by the fact that a large percentage of their 250+ ATM fleet averages over 12,000 transactions every month, providing a wealth of transaction intelligence.
As BECU believes in providing their members with the best experience possible, they continuously focus on delivering 24/7 service availability, mitigating risk of fraud, finding ways to lower the cost of banking, and understanding member usage behavior across all self-service touch points.
“Understanding the member experience is of paramount importance to BECU. INETCO’s real-time transaction monitoring and analytics solution effectively shrinks our member transaction intelligence gathering and analysis time from weeks down to minutes — which allows us to make decisions based on timely and comprehensive cardholder analytics.” SHIRLEY TAYLOR, DIGITAL PRODUCT MANAGER, PRODUCT MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT AT BECU
Challenges
BECU recognized that expanding services, increasingly sophisticated ATMs and a growing number of member self-service options were resulting in an exponential growth in transaction intelligence volumes. As BECU continuously strives to provide their members with the best experience possible, they realized gaining real-time visibility into transaction data was key to:
- Meeting the ATM service needs and performance expectations of their members
- Protecting against ATM cash-outs and other payment fraud attacks
- Enabling operational agility and greater efficiency
In the face of these challenges, BECU turned to real-time transaction intelligence specialists, INETCO, who provided a hosted, Cloud-based transaction monitoring and analytics solution that could meet emerging requirements such as:
- Gaining end-to-end visibility to make sure that all member and non-member transactions at the ATM are completing as expected
- Providing actionable real-time insights to improve the member experience
- Centralizing and feeding trusted data to applications of choice, such as a cash management solution
- Reducing the time and resources needed to collect, normalize and report on member data
- Detecting suspicious activity, ATM cash-outs and multi-vector attacks before major damage is done
Solution: INETCO Insight for Payment Performance Monitoring, Payment Fraud Detection and Payment Analytics
BECU first partnered with INETCO to implement INETCO Insight for real-time performance monitoring of their ATM network in 2014. They expanded usage to include on-demand ATM transaction intelligence analytics and a cash management data feed in 2015. BECU migrated from their in-house servers and application management to the INETCO Insight Cloud hosted solution in 2020. They also expanded their rules-based alerts and machine learning capabilities to detect ATM cash-outs and other transaction-level payment fraud attacks in milliseconds.
Working with INETCO, BECU now runs a Cloud-based, real-time transaction monitoring and analytics stack that helps:
- Optimize transaction intelligence gathering and analytics across the entire ATM fleet
- Speed up detection of faults, connectivity issues, ATM cash-outs and suspicious card activity
- Drive ATM channel profitability, speed up reporting cycles and deliver the best member experience possible
- Utilize trusted, actionable transaction intelligence for cash management and ATM placement
Results
INETCO Insight is helping BECU to:
- Deliver an exceptional member experience through a deepened understanding of ATM usage and improved responsiveness — Achieved a 78.9% ATM Net Promoter Score and a 9.28 ATM satisfaction score in 2019
- Reduce cash replenishment costs — Striving for 80% cash utilization at each ATM
- Make better ATM placement and lease renewal decisions — up to 88% faster
- Detect suspicious card activity, ATM cash-outs and multi-vector attacks — Before major damage is done
- Ensure BECU’s infrastructure is efficient and easily scalable — Implement a Cloud-based solution to reduce cost-to-serve and maximize operational agility
BECU continues to cultivate a data-driven culture that extends to multiple teams including ATM operations, channel, fraud and cash management. The Credit Union has increased member-value through an enhanced understanding of the member experience, and improved profitability through optimized placement of ATM devices, targeted service delivery offerings, and the real-time screening of every transaction from both a performance and fraud perspective — all from one platform.