Member indifference does not happen all at once. More often, it builds through small moments of friction that make an experience feel harder than it should.
At Grow Financial Federal Credit Union (Grow) in Tampa, Florida, leaders have spent the past several years rethinking what it takes to keep members engaged in a market where they are no longer comparing their credit union to the one down the street. They are comparing every digital banking interaction to experiences delivered by brands like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple.
Grow serves more than 200,000 members across the Tampa Bay region and beyond, but its strategy is not rooted in scale for scale’s sake. It is rooted in relevance.
“The biggest threat isn’t technology,” said Jared Barr, chief experience officer at Grow Financial Federal Credit Union. “It’s member indifference.”
That framing shifts the conversation away from feature chasing and toward a more difficult question: how can credit unions design their digital banking experience to retain members and keep them engaged?
At many financial institutions, risk and innovation are still treated as competing priorities. At Grow Financial, they’re part of the same conversation.
On a recent FIsionaries™ episode, Jared Barr shared that his role spans both risk and technology, with a focus on improving the experience for members and team members alike. That’s especially clear in onboarding and account opening.
The goal is to ask for as little information as possible when someone opens a new account or goes through a loan decision, while still giving the credit union what it needs to make sound risk decisions. That means not asking for information the institution already has or can obtain elsewhere. In some cases, Grow can even prefill details using something as simple as a cell phone number.
At Grow, those decisions are discussed openly across leadership through forums and quarterly leadership meetings, to decide what’s truly necessary, what can be simplified, and how the process will actually feel to the member. The question isn’t only whether something introduces risk. It’s also whether the credit union is treating people like people, or starting from the assumption that they may be committing fraud.
That alignment seems to be helping Grow move faster on broader experience initiatives, including its updated onboarding approach. With risk, digital, and operations working toward the same goal, the conversation becomes less about one team holding another back and more about improving the journey together.
Barr describes Grow’s “friction flywheel” as an ongoing process of defining, finding, and removing friction wherever it shows up in the member or employee experience.
“The idea is that the job is never done,” he said. “We have to make it very clear to everyone what we view as friction or a poor experience. Then we constantly look for those opportunities and build the teams and partnerships to remove them.”
In practice, that can mean cutting duplicate data entry, trimming unnecessary authentication steps, or fixing handoffs that send someone to a branch for something that could have been handled digitally.
It also shapes Grow’s approach to onboarding: ask for less, prefill what can be prefilled, and use trusted data sources so convenience and risk can work together, rather than creating points of friction.
One of the more compelling ideas from Barr’s conversation is his rejection of a common industry assumption: that the digital banking experience is somehow less human than in-person service. In many ways, that is the opportunity behind Anticipatory Banking, using digital channels to make service feel more timely, relevant, and responsive before a member has to ask.
That thinking came to life in Grow’s card experience. Barr shared an example of a member who experienced fraud and might have been left waiting days for a replacement card or forced to travel to a branch for instant issuance. Instead, Grow issued a new card digitally, allowing the member to add it to a digital wallet from their mobile banking application (app) and get back to using it almost immediately afterwards.
That kind of response can change how a member sees the institution. In a stressful moment, speed, and convenience matter.
Grow’s strategy also depends on using data more intentionally. Barr’s point is not that financial institutions need more data for its own sake, but that they need better visibility into operational and behavioral data through tools like Operational Data & Insights to improve service and the digital banking experience.
Just as important, Grow is treating feedback as an operating input. Barr noted that the credit union has dedicated a full-time team member to reading and responding to net promoter score (NPS) survey comments consistently. The emphasis is not on reporting the score alone, but on listening to what members are saying and letting that feedback shape the roadmap.
That is a useful reminder for any credit union chasing user experience improvement: metrics matter, but only if they lead to action.
At Grow, “everyone is a front-line team member.” In practice, that means no one gets to operate as if member experience belongs to somebody else. The expectation is that every team, in every role, understands how their work connects back to the member.
That mindset is reinforced by purpose. Grow’s slogan, “we serve people, not profit,” is meant to help employees connect what they are doing to a member’s outcome and to the credit union’s broader mission.
Barr made clear that Grow is not in a pause-and-celebrate phase. He said the credit union has spent the last 12 months on its most ambitious digital roadmap yet, with a steady stream of enhancements and feature additions already underway.
His focus now is less on looking back than on what comes next. That means continuing to push forward with partners, continuing to move faster, and making sure Grow is just as ready internally as the partners they’re working with to accelerate innovation.
Barr’s comments also offer a few useful lessons for other credit unions:
- Start by bringing the right teams together early. When risk, digital, and operations are aligned from the beginning, decisions tend to move more smoothly.
- It also helps to approach partner relationships as a shared effort. The strongest results happen when both sides are ready to move with urgency and stay aligned on what success looks like.
- Be willing to revisit long-standing processes as expectations and needs change. The institutions making the most progress are often the ones that stay open to new possibilities and follow through on implementation.
This article is based on a conversation between Jim Marous and Jared Barr on the FIsionaries™ Podcast. Hear the full discussion in the Grow Financial episode.
