One hundred million daily active users. Hundreds of millions of dollars being spent inside the platform every month. And almost zero credit unions anywhere to be found.
Brett Wooden, software strategist at Buildable Technologies, and Blake Woods, SVP of strategic transformation at orsa credit union, joined Sarah Snell Cooke of The Credit Union Connection to talk about something that sounds wild until it suddenly makes complete sense: they built a fully functioning credit union branch inside Roblox. Virtual tellers, a greeter NPC, a community room, a vault with gold bars, a drive-thru ATM, and a dealership where members can buy a car after getting a loan. All of it modeled after orsa’s actual physical branches.
Brett’s pitch has been a decade in the making. He first tried to sell a kids financial education game to a credit union in 2009 when the iPad launched. Got rejected. Tried again in 2013 and made it to the finals of a COOP Think Prize. Got rejected again. Then his kids got obsessed with Roblox, and he noticed there was no credit union anywhere on the platform but plenty of other retail brands. One las pitch.
This time, orsa’s research and innovation CUSO, Room 39A, gave it a perfect score in their demo day, the only perfect score they had ever given. Blake said yes, and they started building.
The numbers Blake’s team found in their own data made the decision easy. Orsa members were already spending tens of thousands of dollars on Roblox every month with their debit and credit cards, and that spend had grown 300% between February and July of last year alone. Roblox is not just a game. It is the third place for an entire generation, the digital equivalent of the mall or the park where young people go to hang out, socialize, and yes, work virtual jobs at Boba Cafes and Maple Hospitals. The credit union is just claiming its spot in that world before someone else does it for them, and not necessarily in a flattering way.
What comes through in the demo Brett walks through is how much thought has gone into making the experience genuinely fun rather than educational in the boring brochure sense. Kids can get a soda, slip on a spill in the bathroom, follow a greeter NPC (that’s nonplaying character for boomers) to open an account, or work as a teller. When they get a loan, they can actually go to the dealership and drive the car away. The vault has gold bars. The community room is designed to host live events and influencers. Blake mentioned they may end up using it for new employee training too, because the branch looks that much like the real thing.
“This is where people are. We need to claim our space while we have the opportunity.” — Blake Woods
When Facebook and Twitter first launched, a handful of credit unions got in early, Blake recalled, and it eventually became table stakes across the industry. Roblox is the next social media for credit unions to grab onto to reach younger members. Right now, the space is unclaimed. Credit unions can either build their brand there with intentionality – or wait until someone else defines them.
NOTE: This AI’s transcription skills suggest it should explore other career paths.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Hey everyone, Sarah Snell Cooke here, your host at The Credit Union Connection. Where do your members hang out? Unlike most credit union leaders, your future members are probably hanging out on Roblox, a platform with more than 100 million daily active users that most credit union executives have never logged into. I am joined by Brett Wooden, a software strategist from Buildable Technologies, and Blake Woods, SVP of strategic transformation at Orsa Credit Union. Together they have built a fully functioning credit union branch inside of Roblox. We are talking virtual tellers, greeters, community rooms, all modeled after Orsa’s actual physical branches. This is a strategic member acquisition play for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, meeting them where they actually are. Players can even get jobs and work at this virtual branch. If you have been wondering how to reach the next generation before the fintechs do, this could be it.
Welcome everybody. I am joined live today by Brett Wooden.
Brett Wooden
Hello everybody.
Sarah Snell Cooke
And Blake Woods. I think we coordinated those last names a little.
Blake Woods
Same initials too. And our Roblox usernames are almost identical.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Which is a great segue, although I will get into your titles first. Brett is at Buildable Technologies as software strategist for financial institutions, and Blake comes to us from Orsa Credit Union, formerly Community Financial Credit Union, as SVP of strategic transformation. Brett, go ahead and give a deeper intro for yourself and your company, then we will go to Blake.
Brett Wooden
Buildable has been around for about 25 years doing custom software development. Two years ago I joined Buildable, got into the financial institution space, and got a team together building really cool things, everything from AI to websites and now games. The partnership with Blake grew out of our work with Room 39A. We take their research, prototype ideas, build things, and test them in the market. That is why we are really excited to talk about this today.
Sarah Snell Cooke
And Blake, go for it.
Blake Woods
I am Blake Woods from Orsa Credit Union. We like to do things a little differently. We like to be first to market, and Room 39A, the CUSO Brett mentioned, is what positions us to do that. It is our research and insights CUSO. We believe we found a pretty great opportunity to engage the next generation on Roblox, the environment they use every day. We have got some stats around that and are really proud to bring this partnership to market with Brett.
Sarah Snell Cooke
So our audience now knows we are going to talk about a credit union branch on Roblox. Brett, where did this idea come from?
Brett Wooden
This idea actually goes back to around 2009 when the iPad came out. I had presented to a credit union about creating a kids financial education game in the app store. The app stores were very new back then and I got rejected pretty solidly. Then around 2013 I created another iteration of a game and made it to the top of the COOP Think Prize. Same result. Gaming and credit unions just did not seem to click. Then fast forward to last year. My kids are obsessed with Roblox. That is all they do with their friends. They play these simulator games like Maple Hospital and Boba Cafe where they make boba tea and hang out. And I thought, there is no credit union here. Why should we not do this? One more time, I pitched the idea. I got on with Blake and his team and it is just amazing how open to ideas they are. They are very forward-thinking. We said let’s make this happen, started meetings, did discovery, and now we are at the phase of actually building the games inside a real Orsa Credit Union branch. They literally gave us the architecture of their branch and we built it in Roblox. It is the coolest thing.
Sarah Snell Cooke
It is not just kids either. My kids are in their early 20s and still play occasionally. Blake, why did you say yes? Why was this appealing to you?
Blake Woods
There are decisions I regret in life but this is not one of them. And I will break some news here, Sarah. Brett’s idea is the only perfect score demo day pitch we have ever had. We do these pitches out to market looking for a specific improvement. We have had a school program active in over 50 schools across the state of Michigan since the early 1990s, and what we were trying to do was breathe some new life into it. So we put out a call saying if you have an idea of how we could better engage young people, we want to hear it. Brett answered that call on his third try and we are so glad he did. It really complemented a couple of things in our strategy: our commitment to youth and schools, and our ability to bring new and novel ideas to market. We want our members to know us as the credit union that does that. We want people with great ideas like Brett to think of Orsa Credit Union first. Our CUSO Room 39A did some insights work and the numbers bore it out. We could see tens of thousands of dollars being spent on Roblox with Orsa debit and credit cards every single month. We knew we had players within our membership. And we saw a refreshed way to reach young people, take the fear out of banking, give them the experience of working at a credit union, and deliver education in a way that is not stale. Not just a PDF, which you see across the industry. It was a perfect alignment, and Brett and his team have been a dream to work with.
Sarah Snell Cooke
You mentioned doing research on how this might pan out. What kind of data were you looking at?
Blake Woods
The thing that really knocked me off my seat, being new to this world, was 100 plus million daily active users spending hours on the platform. That really reframed this for me. I was thinking about it as a video game, but Roblox is really the third place for this next generation. Whereas the three of us might have gone to the mall or the park to hang out with friends, a lot of young people are going on Roblox to work in a virtual cafe and socially interact. That stat alone was a huge reframe. We also looked at our own member data. We could see the number of transactions and dollars being spent on Roblox and it really started ramping up in February of last year. We had about 300% growth in Roblox spend between February and July. Roblox has been around for a long time but it has hit this cultural phenomenon stage where big brands like Wendy’s and IKEA are putting their own presence on it. What we look to do in Room 39A is find those first mover opportunities, places where banks and credit unions have not thought to be, and go there first.
Sarah Snell Cooke
It sounds like a no-brainer, especially with credit unions wanting younger people both as members and employees. Brett, what kinds of outcomes do you expect?
Brett Wooden
We have really immersed ourselves in Roblox. Our dev team, our UX and UI designers, we have done a lot of field research and observations. What we are anticipating is a genuinely new way for credit unions to connect with kids, not going into classrooms to present, but meeting them inside a world they already live in. We have a Roblox influencer on our development team with over a million followers who just rates games. That has kept us honest. Kids are brutal in their feedback, which keeps me up at night a little, but it also keeps us honest. What has been exciting is how the outside perspective of our development team, people who did not grow up in the credit union industry, keeps pushing us to think differently. They ask things like: why does a greeter go here? What does a teller actually do? Do you even need tellers anymore? It is not your traditional build some curriculum and put together a PowerPoint. It is a completely different kind of thinking.
Blake Woods
I would just say my hope is that what Brett and I are building becomes table stakes for any credit union, in the same way that when social media first launched, a few credit unions got into Facebook and Twitter early and now you see it across the industry. That is where I think Roblox is heading. It is just a channel you need to have a presence on. And what I love about it compared to social media is the ability to put your creativity, your brand, and your products inside the experience. Allow young people to familiarize themselves with who you are and change the perception. When we do focus groups in schools across Michigan and ask young people where they bank, they say Cash App or Venmo. They are not thinking of a credit union as their primary financial institution. With Roblox we can help reframe credit unions from something traditional and restricted to something that is part of their community and building in the spaces where they live.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Brett, show us what this looks like.
Brett Wooden
So this is Roblox Studio, where our developers design and build the game. This is my avatar. You can design your avatar and we are building a whole marketplace of Orsa gear including a mascot bear that can follow you around. This is the design of the Orsa branch. We will go into the community room, which is where games like Fortnite do concerts and live events. We created a community room where you can host live events, bring in influencers, maybe even celebrities someday. We can invite kids in for virtual events. I will grab a soda here. So this is an NPC, a non-player character. A lot of what we are building right now is the scripting and dialogue. I walk up to this greeter and it says welcome, how can I help you today? I say I would like to open an account and the NPC leads me over to the MSR space where we will have member service reps to open accounts and loans. Over here we have cash recyclers where you interact with tellers and they have games built in. The greeter is also responsible for keeping the branch clean. Go into the bathroom and you can see there is a spill on the floor. You can slip on it. The greeter’s job is to make sure it gets cleaned up. Kids can drink from the drinking fountain, get a coffee or soda. Outside we are building an environment where when members get a loan for a house or a car, there is a dealership where they can go get the car. We are building drive-thru ATMs. The popular games on Roblox right now are simulator games, just like Blake said, Boba Cafe, Maple Hospital. We are taking the credit union industry and putting it inside that same format. Once Orsa’s game launches, we are going to open it up for other credit unions to build their own branch within this environment.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Blake, what are your thoughts seeing all of this?
Blake Woods It is tremendous. The branch looks like a carbon copy of our new branches in Detroit and West Bloomfield in Michigan. The attention to detail from Brett’s team was just amazing. Honestly we will probably use it for new employee training because it looks that much like the real thing. What took me by surprise in a great way was that it was not just a branch but a whole world. People can go into the branch and then go interact with this larger environment that Brett’s team built. And the vault inside, with gold bars and fancy paintings, it plays into the playfulness of it. That balance between real life and fantasy is exactly what makes it fun and interesting to young people. I think Brett’s team has achieved that.
Sarah Snell Cooke
We always try to be so serious in financial institutions because we want people to trust us with their money, which is absolutely right. But this is a different era of trust. Final thoughts, gentlemen. Blake, we will start with you.
Blake Woods
I am really thankful for Brett’s partnership on this. I want to encourage your listeners: if you have great ideas like Brett did, please bring them to Room 39A. We would love to launch whatever your ten-year-long idea has been. And we hope that you sign up and build a space on Roblox as well. Think about the stats I shared. This is where people are. I do not just want to say young people. This is where people are. We need to claim our space on it because the danger is that someone else could create a credit union world on Roblox that would not be friendly or would not position us the way we want to be. Let’s claim that space while we have the opportunity.
Brett Wooden
Blake and his team at Orsa Credit Union, thank you for believing in my idea. I cannot thank you enough. And to the credit unions still weighing the gaming question: go into your records and think of all the debit and credit cards hooked to these environments. It is not just Roblox. It is the Apple App Store, Google Play. There are hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars being spent in these environments. It is time for us to go into these environments and engage with these individuals. I am really excited for when this game launches. It is a game so it is going to continue to evolve with events and updates. We are excited to bring this to the credit union industry and create a ride for everybody.
Sarah Snell Cooke
The game is really the strategic solution for a lot of different things. Appreciate your time today, gentlemen. Thank you for the expertise and the fun you are bringing to credit unions.
Brett Wooden
Thank you, Sarah. We will be doing a live demo at GAC, so we hope folks will come find us there.
Sarah Snell Cooke
We will be looking forward to it. Thank you.