In 2023, Florida Credit Union processed 282,000 payments, totaling more than $138.7 million, marking a 30.2% increase over 2022.

This success story was originally published in 2022. We’ve added the above video recapping the latest 2023 statistics to provide additional insights and updates.

Background

Florida Credit Union was established as a state-chartered credit union for teachers in 1954. Florida Credit Union is currently one of the leading credit unions in North and Central Florida and serves over 48 counties across the state. As a member-focused credit union, they strive to exceed, not just meet, the financial needs of each and every member.

Florida Credit Union established a very diverse mix of members and has grown rapidly to over $1.7 billion in assets. They have more than 131,000 members and over 116,000 loans. With this accelerated growth, Florida Credit Union quickly realized that they needed to ensure their digital payments strategy met and exceeded the expanded needs of their members. One of the strategic areas of growth has been their indirect loan portfolio, which today supports member needs both now, and into the future.

Outgrowing Their Previous Platforms

Florida Credit Union’s incumbent payments platforms supported the member volume and growth, but as the number of loans continued to increase, they realized areas of friction were introduced within the member experience. While their loans were on the incumbent payments platform, their online and mobile banking was a separate platform, requiring members to login a second time to make a loan payment. Mortgage payments were on an additional platform, requiring yet another login. Additionally, once loan payments were completed by the member, they wouldn’t post for a day or two, causing confusion for members, and resulting in increased call center demand. They realized they needed more flexibility to streamline, simplify, and continue to improve their member experience. Florida Credit Union addressed this issue by choosing to rapidly deploy one comprehensive payments platform for all loan payments: the Alacriti platform.

Selecting a New Payments Provider

Florida Credit Union was looking for major enhancements to their existing loan payments platform, as well as real-time integration with their core, so if a member made a payment it would post instantly to the core rather than taking a day or two.

In addition, Florida Credit Union wanted immediate real-time integration so the credit union would be able to pull data in and display that information to their members in real-time. With the credit union’s previous solution, they were using batch files that were updated once a day in the evening. When a loan payment was changed during the course of the day, it would have to wait to be refreshed until the next day. With Alacriti’s real-time core integration, changes to the members account are immediately reflected.

Real-time core integration wasn’t the only enhancement on Florida Credit Union’s payments wish list. They were also looking for integration with some of the other products and services that they offer their members, namely their online and mobile banking platforms. Florida Credit Union needed a solution with single sign-on so members would have a seamless experience across online and mobile banking, and mortgage payments. Orbipay EBPP provided everything that Florida Credit Union was looking for in a new platform.

Customizations

Florida Credit Union also needed some customizations to improve disaster recovery and their members’ experience. The credit union runs two different data centers, and they required a seamless transition between them, which had to be integrated with the Orbipay Platform. Additionally, custom site menu items were needed to allow users to easily transition between loan products. Alacriti was able to include these key requirements into the original project timeline.

How Alacriti’s Orbipay EBPP Helped

The Orbipay payments solution was initially rolled out to employees. There was positive feedback from the friends and family pilot, including feedback that Orbipay EBPP is “intuitive and extremely easy to use”. Employees were most impressed with being able to pay all the loans in one place. They particularly liked the integration with their digital banking platform because that was often a pain point for getting a member from one system into another. They also appreciated that credits happened on the same day. With real-time integration, a member can pay with a card and it updates the core immediately. ACH payments are posted and cleared at the end of the night with no delay. Employees and members liked being able to make updates to the system and seeing those updates immediately.

The adoption process for members has been very smooth. Matthew Teoli, VP of Delivery Channels at Florida Credit Union shared, “We’re not seeing a whole lot of member calls with questions about how to use the new system, which is a very good sign that the implementation went well.”

Florida Credit Union wanted their members to have a simplified user experience, providing them with a single access point to select different member loans—including mortgages. This simplified member experience was a huge area of success. Now, members can navigate much faster from loan to loan. As a result of switching to Orbipay EBPP, total payment volume increased by over 20%.

Teoli also valued the level of support from the Alacriti team. “I considered this to be a very successful launch. I consider all parties involved to be easy to work with. The implementation team on the Alacriti side was fantastic to work with and it was very easy to get things done. I felt they were very responsive in returning things back over to us.”

Looking Toward the Future

Florida Credit Union continues to work on further enhancing the member experience with the Alacriti platform. As an example, they are looking to allow members to make payments to their escrow accounts, as well as allowing for payment specifically to the principal after the standard payment has been submitted. It’s not enough to just have a principal option available. It’s important to make sure that people have made their regular payment first, and then make a payment against the principal.

Teoli also shared his appreciation for the customer support, configurability and Alacriti’s willingness to support Florida Credit Union’s customizations. “I appreciate the fact that Alacriti was willing to say, well, it doesn’t work that way today, but let’s look at that and let’s see if that’s something we can do.”

Conclusion

The partnership between Alacriti and Florida Credit Union is collaborative and strong. “One of the things that we have always looked for in our strategic partnerships is not only for them to allow us to bring ideas to them, but that they are investing in R&D and driving their own business’ innovation. That’s very important to our board and executive leadership team. For example, Alacriti’s Unified Money Movement Services. I am very excited to see how that comes together,” said Teoli.

In 2023, through Orbipay EBPP Alabama Credit Union processed significantly more payments. The credit union processed 185,000 payments, totaling more than $95 million—an achievement that effectively doubled its capacity compared to 2022. Additionally, the average value of transactions increased by 10% on a year-over-year basis. It also witnessed a 66% increase in the volume of skip-a-pay transactions during the same period. Furthermore, it generated $488,000 in fees, which offset some of the cost of the partnership.

This success story was originally published in 2022. We’ve added the above video recapping the latest 2023 statistics to provide additional insights and updates.

Background

Alabama Credit Union was founded in 1956 to serve The University of Alabama. They have grown to serve other groups and now have 34 locations across Alabama and North Florida and 151,000 members. Alabama Credit Union has $1.9 billion in assets and 53,639 active loans. They are known for personal service, low-cost loans, and above-average dividends on deposits.

Needing a Change

The ability to make payments with Amazon Alexa by voice and full integration with their core provider were top features of Orbipay EBPP that interested Alabama Credit Union. “A big factor that set Alacriti apart was a relationship with our core that allowed us to do a live integration. We didn’t have to do a posting file every day. That was a big differentiator that no one else had,” said Dustin Kizer, Alabama Credit Union Digital Services Director.

Alabama Credit Union’s previous EBPP solution had a very high fee structure, and there was no core integration. Also, although it had an online solution, Alabama Credit Union never fully launched it to their members because it required complete enrollment, requiring the user to create a separate login from their online banking. Recovering those logins was a burden to their members and their call center, so they shut it down. Members were only able to pay by phone. Payments were manually credited to each loan by the phone agent in order to provide immediate credit for the member and for the payment to reflect in online banking the same day. However, Alabama Credit Union would have to settle it on the backend a couple of days later. Because of this, a lot of errors were made. It was an inefficient process that they
were able to streamline with Alacriti with the live core integration

Orbipay EBPP Benefits

Alabama Credit Union also appreciated the customization capabilities and flexibility they received from the Alacriti team whenever they had an issue and needed customization. For example, Alabama Credit Union wanted to queue any failed
payment postings into a live dashboard for agents. This allowed for same day corrections for payments that needed overrides or had excessive late fees to collect. “It was very interesting that Alacriti was able to build something like that from scratch pretty quickly, which is also an example of the adaptability that we appreciate,” said Kizer.

Alabama Credit Union is happy with the level of support they receive. They hear from their customer success manager frequently, and she knows what’s on their roadmap for the next two years and makes sure things are done.

A favorite with Alabama Credit Union employees is the payment center portal. Agents posted errors, and overpayments have dramatically decreased. After a payment was made with the old system, a team member would then have to go
to the core and manually give a member provisional credit. Then three days later, the accounting team would have to reconcile. Additionally, in the past, call center agents would have to do two steps on the phone with the member. Now they just click one button, saving time and effort. The system remembers payments, so there is no longer a need to retype a card number every time—members simply confirm the CVV.

Members can make payments on their own, and guest pay is a huge benefit because payers don’t have to create a login just to make a payment. “For the members, the overall ease of use with guest pay is by far a favorite. They don’t want to have to create a login. They just want to go to the website, make a payment and leave. It also opens the door for people helping our members to make a payment on their behalf without getting access to their account or seeing confidential information. So it really solved a lot of problems,” shared Kizer. For Alabama Credit Union staff, “The biggest benefit for us was the adaptability. This was the first live integration with our core.”

Results

A very important result for Alabama Credit Union was the lift in productivity in the call center. They immediately started seeing benefits with payment processing with the launch of enrolled web and guest web. They saved 86 man-hours a week across their 50 agents.

In addition, they were able to process significantly more payments with Orbipay EBPP. In 2021, they processed 45,000 payments worth over $18 million, which was four times the amount they were able to handle in the past. They earned $169,000
in fees, which helped offset some of the cost of the partnership.

An unexpected outcome was that their first payment delinquency in indirect loans dropped dramatically. After implementing Orbipay EBPP, they realized that many of their indirect members struggled to make the first payment due to the complexity of the experience with their old system.

Members really enjoy the benefits of core integration. In the past, members would get frustrated that they would log in and didn’t see their payment, despite Alabama Credit Union advertising a cut-off time in which members could expect to see their payment post. This was another reason they went to phone payments. As a result of not seeing the payments immediately, a lot of people would call and cancel payments. It was a huge improvement for members to have a seamless experience and be able to utilize the single sign-on enrolled web. They can make a payment, and when they click on their account, they see it’s already in their history. The immediate gratification made a big difference in the member experience.

Alabama Credit Union launched skip-a-pay in August 2021, a feature that allows members to skip a payment for a fee. Previously, they only offered skip-a-pay around the holiday, and it was an entirely manual process. A member would visit a branch and sign a form, and the loan officer would make the due date change and collect the fee from their checking account. 2021 was the first year where members could use their debit card and skip-a-payment regardless of the time of year in their mobile banking experience. Alabama Credit Union was able to process under 1,200 skip-apay requests, earning $39,000 in additional fee income

Looking Toward the Future

In 2022, Alabama Credit Union has strategic communications planned with Pay by Text, a feature that allows members to make payments via SMS text messages. The goal is to ensure that their outbound communication is actionable whenever
a member receives a text message, allowing them to make a payment or ask a question. The solution makes the payment through Pay by Text or initiates a Glia interaction where Alabama Credit Union can help the member answer a question. The partnership solution between Alacriti and Glia enables financial institutions to leverage Alacriti’s payments-focused AI chatbot, Ella, within Glia’s digital Customer Service platform to help members navigate the digital payments experience. The solution allows the member to continue the same conversation over all channels without having to repeat themselves or re-enter information. Reps can also cobrowse and guide members through their session. “For 2022, we said, let’s make surethat we have a unified messaging platform for every way that members can do business with us,” said Kizer. They expect even more relief in their call center, which receives a spike in calls when balance alert texts deploy.