What do college students think about credit unions?
They don’t. Based on our survey at Duke University, 76% of GenZ don’t know what credit unions are.
My name is Bolun Li, a 20-year-old economics student at Duke and Founder of Zogo Finance. Two months ago, Zogo won the Next Big Idea Competition at NACUSO Conference 2019. But how did we get there?
It all happened about a year ago. I was on the phone with an investor and he asked me: “Have you considered partnering with credit unions?”
I responded: “What the heck is a credit union?”
Feeling dumb, I quickly turned to my friends to ask them about credit unions and found that these savvy smart college students also had no idea how this strange financial institution worked. So, we started reading about credit unions – how they started, who they served, and how they survived. We were completely shocked at their strong sense of community and amazing rates, with some of us commenting:
“Credit Unions seem too good to be true… Why haven’t we heard of them before?”
“We should all open our accounts at credit unions!”
That was over 6 months ago. Today, none of us have switched to a credit union. We continue to bank with large institutions and receive a whopping 0.1% on our savings accounts. We opened our first teen checking accounts with one of the big banks and have stayed there despite having no loyalty to our financial institutions. If we learned more about credit unions as a teen and opened our first account there, the story wouldbe different. Although we have no real reason to stay with these big banks, it will take a lot for us to switch. And frankly, we don’t even know what’s the process of becoming a member of a credit union.
I came to realize that there’s a huge opportunity for credit unions to win in the next five years by doing one simple thing – increase awareness.
Increase awareness so that the conversation between my friends and I are not “What the heck is a credit union?” but “credit unions literally offer over 100% better rates than banks”.
Increase awareness so that the dialog between my investor and I are not “Have you considered working with credit unions?” but “I should work with credit unions because they are the innovators in Fintech”.
Increase awareness so that my generation knows about the credit union movement and takes part in it.
Zogo is our solution to help credit unions attract GenZ. As GenZ ourselves, we know how to get it done. Visit www.zogofinance.com to see how our solution fits your organization and to schedule a demo to learn more from one of our committed onboarding specialists.
