Small Dog, Big Heart

You don't have to be big to innovate.

Once again, tiny Mount Lehman Credit Union is showing that it is far and away one of the most innovative operations in BC. It’s also showing – again – that focused innovation can be done by anyone despite their size.

MLCU, a Chihuahua compared to the Labradors of BC’s Credit Union system and the even larger Big Dogs of the Canadian banking system, has for years been creating customer engagement products that routinely lead the pack.

Five years ago, developed in-house software called MemberNote to send text messages to members’ phones whenever their plastic debit cards were used.

The concept was so simple and so perfectly obvious for customer service that you wondered, as with all great ideas, why someone hadn’t thought of it before. It was so innovative that the credit union received an award from the credit union system for it.

But MLCU’s concept of engaging with members didn’t stop there. General Manager Gene Blishen has been blogging his thoughts about credit unions, banking, the Internet, and community for years. He’s also on Twitter.

Pretty advanced stuff for a banker.

More recently, the 67-year-old institution launched a social media site called The Mount Lehman Show that brought the old concept of the credit union as a co-operative into the this century in terms of relating with its community. As Blishen blogs, everyone who works at the credit union has as part of their job the responsibility of spending two hours a week communicating on the channel.

Again, not your usual bank job description. (BTW, Blishen reports that the staff is crazy about it).

And then today, MLCU staged another innovation coup. Its newest version of MemberNote, MemberNote 3 now sends members messages when almost anything happens in their accounts. Members can now get alerts on security, account activity, balances, payments, loans and mortgages coming due, investments, and general member services. Talk about continual conversations with your financial institution.

Blishen once said that to be creative and innovative is not for the weak-hearted. Mount Lehman Credit Union has proved that even if you’re small, you can still have a pretty strong heart.