“How can someone feel unknown by the institution that holds their mortgage, their paycheck and their future?”
That question hovers like a quiet alarm throughout this conversation between Sarah Snell Cooke and Scott Earwood, Head of the Community Banking Division at White Clay. Scott doesn’t just talk about credit unions, he challenges them. Armed with real research and years of experience, he points to a startling truth: 61% of people say they’ve never had a personal relationship with their primary financial institution. The conversation explores what it means to “feel seen” in an increasingly digital world, and whether credit unions, often touted as the most human of financial institutions, are truly delivering on that promise.
This is not a a finger-wagging session. It is a candid, often surprising discussion about institutional blind spots, missed opportunities and the kinds of data-driven insights that could transform member relationships. By the time Scott describes how a member with a $7,500 balance could actually have $20 million in total exposure across multiple business accounts, and go completely unrecognized in a branch, you’ll start to understand just how deep this disconnect can run.
Scott doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but he makes one thing clear: collecting data is not enough. “Until you do something with the data, you don’t make any money. You don’t make a difference,” he says. And that’s the pivot point, how to translate scattered insights into meaningful, human-centered action. As credit unions broaden their field of membership and explore commercial lending, the need to really understand their members grow more urgent. Especially in an era when trust can be lost to the convenience of a mobile app, or even a chatbot.
It’s not just about building smarter dashboards or issuing more debit cards. It’s about knowing when a direct deposit changes, and realizing that might signal a new job and a chance to build a relationship. It’s about catching a member before they Google for financial advice or ask ChatGPT what to do with their 401(k). And it’s about using technology not to replace human connection, but to elevate it.
This interview doesn’t just deliver insight; it might change the way you think about your credit union. And that’s exactly why you should watch.
Disclosure: Transcript below is automatically generated
Sarah Cooke
Welcome everybody. I am Sarah Snell Cooke, your host here at The Credit Union Connection. I’m here today with this wonderful gentleman, Scott Earwood, welcome.
Scott Earwood
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it absolutely.
Sarah Cooke
And Scott is the Head of Community Banking Division for White Clay, which is a FinTech that guides financial institutions grants and banks to build deeper and more profitable relationships. Which, of course, who doesn’t want that? Scott, you want to go a little more into detail on yourself and the company?
Scott Earwood
Sure, yeah, White Clay, we’ve been around for about 19 years. We started in the large regional space. Our founder did a lot of this work at bank one back in the day, before it became Chase and Bank of America. And then we were helping other regional banks with the same types of kind of configured software to help drive this. And then so I’ve been here about 12 years, and about five years ago, I was like, Hey, I think we could help the community banking space, in the credit union space. And so I’m a thief. I stole the greatest hits from the large banks and created a sort of a standardized platform for the smaller banks and credit unions to follow. And then, and then we’ve made some other alterations, of course, to help credit unions a little bit more. But yeah, that’s our goal. Is we want to bring together data, add some intelligence to it, but then actually drive action. Because your data is wonderful, but until you do something with the data, you don’t make any money. You don’t make a difference. And so that’s really our focus, is create some transparency and then cause action so that we can drive a better return for both the member and the credit union, right?
Sarah Cooke
Exactly So, and I’m curious to know, what are you’d mentioned there a few little differences that you’re the what you do for credit unions versus banks? What are those?
Scott Earwood
Yeah, so obviously, the hardest one for me has been the nomenclature. You know, I’ve worked in banks for a decade of being in my career too. So that’s been a little bit of a challenge. But a big part is, you know, I would say everybody wants to help right? Both areas want to help people. Credit unions just a little bit more focused on that, a little bit more forward on that and want to, you know, for instance, our credit union doesn’t the ones we work with. They don’t care about seeing a ray rock or like an efficiency metric. They want to, they want to see revenue, but they don’t care as much about efficiency, and it’s sort of a foreign concept to a lot of the reps and a lot of the people inside the credit union. And then the other big one, and we’ll probably talk about this on today, is the thing that I had to get used to as well, is that the number of members really matters, and so we have a history of creating relationships, right? So if you’re going to be a relationship bank or relationship credit union, you actually need to be able to see and know those relationships, and those often come in the forms of multiple entities or multiple members are in the relationship, and when you know. So if I think, for instance, like my wife and I, we both are a member. Well, I don’t think about it her money or my money. I think about it as our money. And I may have a HELOC and but it’s in my member number. You don’t want the credit union asking her about a HELOC, right? And yet, the systems are kind of set up because that member number matters so much, not wanting to kind of and most of our banks, we bring all that together, and so their number of clients is much lower than what’s tax entities on the system. Whereas credit unions, we we’ve been trying to figure out ways to get around that, to let them have the best of both worlds, right? So know, the members number is still important, right? It’s on the call reports. It’s on everything it. It’s really, really important. But in reality, the number of relationships, and if you think about it in terms of the way the member thinks about it, it, it’s probably bigger than it might be bigger than just what’s in that share or what’s in that member’s account, especially now that credit unions have gotten into commercial world more often, right? I mean, I’ve got an example where a member is a $7,500 balance, $250,000 HELOC. That’s his relationship under his tax entity, right under his social well, he owns nine businesses, and they’ve Lent 20 million to him, and he has $7 million in deposits. But if he walks into a branch and they look him up by his name or his social, you just see 70 502 50, and you’re not going to necessarily treat. Him any differently, but the way he’s thinking about his money at the institution versus the way the institution is can be very different.
Sarah Cooke
And you skipped ahead in my list of questions here, but good. So yeah, the still, so you guys did this research found that roughly two thirds of financial institution users don’t feel seen or known by their fi, by the primary fi. It’s a little better for the community banks and credit unions. 63% still, still not great, good majority. So are we defining feeling seen the same way our members are customers, in other cases, are are we? Are we measuring feeling seen the same way that members do?
Scott Earwood
No, I can go from there. right, like, how do you still provide humanity in a digital banking world? That’s an important one. But then also, you know, they’re going to use most members are going to use other institutions. And how do you have that connection to have the conversation about their finances? And the other part is, you know, we know that roughly only 50 to or 40 to 60% of your members are actually primary transacting members with you anyways. And so because of that, your lifetime value drops. They’re dealing with other people. And then, therefore you don’t even have they don’t think of you as their primary institution. They, you know, I always say that, you know, if I ask you where you bank, you’re going to say where your primary account is right. You’re probably not going to rattle off the you know, you’re not going to rattle off AmEx and Venmo and all the things you might use or and with credit unions now that more people can become members, do I just have some money parked there to get a better to get a better return on my deposits or a better car loan rate, but my primary account, I’m not moving from you know, XYZ place, and so I think part of it’s understanding what that member is. But then also back to the relationship piece. Do we know the full relationship? And what historically has happened is your reps or people in your branch that know the member well they do, or even the commercial side, the commercial banker knows them. But it’s not institutional knowledge. There’s no data behind the scenes to help connect so when your rep retires right or your or your banker moves to another institution. Does that knowledge leave with them? And then, therefore, I think that erosion has also caused more and more members to not feel seen or heard by their institution, because I would always go talk to sue and Sue. Now retired, and now nobody knows that I do this or that and that, that’s a challenge.
Sarah Cooke
Mm, hmm, absolutely, that’s interesting. Because, I mean, first of all, we’ve got the slew of baby boomers who are retiring, or at least are getting close to it, not to mention some of the older Gen Xers are probably starting to reach there. Not that anybody pays attention to us. But yeah, I think, you know, having that warehouse, I mean, I didn’t really think of it that way, but having that institutional knowledge in the data so you don’t need sue to be the one to always serve that member, there’s still, like, something showing you or the. Was the at the counter or showing the, I guess, the mobile app, even, you know, it can, you can say, Okay, this person’s Carlos, three years old. Let’s offer a refi, you know, something along those lines. So, yeah, I think data is so important, and I think it’s also interesting too, because credit unions, kind of COVID Kicked every business in the rear, as far as like, getting upping their digital game. But for all the talk about data analytics and the last decade and now we’ve got AI to sort through the data analytics, it just seems like nobody is doing very well at it, though.
Scott Earwood
Yes and no. And I say that is, I think plenty of people are doing well in little verticals or in spaces. Nobody definitely has it figured out across the board. I wish we did too. We don’t. So, you know, I think that’s such a broad and they’re, you’re, especially the credit union world, they’re, they’ve, most of them that I talk to are expanding their walls and expanding their membership and expanding who can join, and so they’re in households in areas they were never in before. And how do they still do that? And how that you know? And you know again, is it, is it just going to be car loans that drive it now, or is it going to be other things? And so using the data to segment customers into different segments, and knowing where you’re making your money, where you’re winning, where you’re losing, where you know where we need to make decisions. You know a credit union client, we were talking with them, and they’re like, We need to get more debit cards in people’s hands. And so we pulled up really quickly on our dashboard and said, Actually, let me we’ll look into that well. And so we sorted a page that showed active debit card usage. And their debit card usage was pretty good at first overall, it was like 60% 65% which isn’t bad. However, when we filtered the member list by transacting members, they were at 90% so their issue wasn’t they needed to, and this is where data can drive some of these things and start to be a little smarter. Of your strategy is they didn’t need to just hand out more debit cards, right? They needed to get more members to actually be primary members, like, instead of, I’d sometimes call them members versus users, right? And we don’t need users that just use it for a credit for, like a credit card, or for a car loan, or for, you know, a better rate on their on their savings account. We need them to be active members, and understanding who those are can help drive some of that strategy, and then it can help them feel seen. And you can start to cater to certain demographics and not even like meaning black or white, or male or female or something else like that, but like demographics of types of behaviors, you know, people who value these types of financial things, and so that’s, that’s what we try to get into. And I think credit unions starting to and I’ve seen plenty of credit unions jump into data, sometimes haphazardly, sometimes with all with good intentions. And then I’ve even seen plenty that are starting to realize they have to partner, right? And so for AI and things like that, they don’t want to fall behind. And so they’re starting I see, I see, in some cases, some smaller credit unions. You know, when I say smaller, I think a billion to 5 billion. I realize that’s big for some credit unions too, but I see them starting to partner with other places to do AI and to take because they and it’s all around and it’s such a great thing, they want to take care of their members. And I think they understand the downstream effects of taking care of their members, that their communities are stronger that, and that’s the great part about it. I would just like to help them evolve a little bit. And that understanding that if you make decisions just by your gut, all the times, you’re sometimes going to give away a lot more revenue than you mean to, and that’s going to prevent you from being able to help even more members down the road, especially in the commercial world, especially in commercial lending, right? Of, how do you price that appropriately? How do you price for risk and all those things and that that’s a it’s a new world for most credit unions, or at least a lot of them that I’m talking to, they’re really getting into it. You know, you have a few car loans fail, or you have a few HELOCs fail it. It adds up to maybe a million dollars. You can lose way more than that on one deal in the car. Virtual space, and that can really hamstring your ability to do other things to help other members.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, definitely. I can see that the so and you touched on this a bit earlier. Again, I’m gonna go back to the research that you had, but you know, 61% say they’ve never had a personal relationship with their primary institution, and that it just seems how, like how. And so I can’t imagine that anything is more personal than your income, your home, your mortgage. You know, you’re like, these are things that are very personal to people. And so it just, I don’t know, it’s shocking that nobody, that people feel they don’t have a personal relationship.
Scott Earwood
Yeah, I think, I think it’s the personal part that drives that. Like, you know, I know, when I was a banker, like it was, I was amazed. I quickly learned, because I was young, right? Like that, I became a branch manager for a bank at like 22 like, three months into joining a bank, and I was like, I don’t know what I’m doing. They’re like, It’s okay, just go sell products and so I quickly learned that people are emotional about their money, and that’s okay, right? Completely understandable, but they just want someone to hear them, especially when something goes wrong, and even if it’s the credit union’s fault or the bank’s fault because a mistake was made, it’s your chance to be a hero. And I think with the turnover and slash, you think back 20 years ago, you called in, a lot of people called in to get there to get their balance right. They couldn’t get they couldn’t get it on their phone, they couldn’t deposit a check. So anytime you got a check, you had to go into this like there was just that more personal information. So I think some of this is just the natural digital or digitization of it, and I think that’s the challenge that credit unions and banks both will have going forward is, how do you get how do you make them feel comfortable that when they’re not going to come in for daily operational things anymore, that’s that ship has sailed, that’s gone right? Nope. I mean, however, how do you provide a place where they trust you as a place they can come talk about their finances, right? And especially in this world, where are you going to go talk to your institution, or are you going to ask chat GPT, right? Right? And so I think that’s the that’s and I think the way that we can help, meaning the whole industry can help with that is knowing more about them, finding more trying to be intentional during onboarding, even with digital customers, of finding ways to learn more about them so that we can meet them kind of how they are and where they are. Because, you know, as it currently still is, you gotta come to our location, right? You gotta, come during, you gotta come talk to us during our hours, right? Like in how eventually, I think the industry is going to have to evolve to more zoom meetings, potentially. And I think COVID helped a lot with that, right? Everybody’s gotten a lot more comfortable. But I think a lot, a big chunk of it is products. We’ve pushed products, and we’ve created we’ve created convenience in forsaking some of the connectedness. And so one things we talk about here, and by no means do we have it figured out, but we want to try to help make it better. Is again, how do you I think I said earlier, but providing digital experience, but with humanity, right, still having a connection, and I think that’s going to be sort of a big frontier, because the studies say now that the and I get all the generations confused, I apologize, but the youngest, actually generations now, actually enjoy the interaction and want to come into branches some you know, whereas I don’t want to come into a branch unless something’s gone really wrong, right? Either, I’ve got a check big enough that I can’t deposit it on the app.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, I was on the board of my credit union. The people in the front line didn’t know who. Front Line didn’t know who I was other than I think, I think that’s when we say, feel seen. I think that’s part of it, right? And there’s just more information than there ever was before.
Scott Earwood
So where they would come and talk to you about a problem before they Google it, they look up it on Chad GBT, right? They do one of those things now, and so our ability to service them has really gone up, as far as without us being involved. But that’s also kind of bit us in the butt, right? Of we don’t have those personal touch points. Points and as much. And so I think we’ve got to, as an industry, come up with ways to have more of those. And so data can help that, because if we can know that something’s different or something happened, and by the way, if you’re the primary transacting bank or credit union for that, their transactions will tell you the story of what’s going on their life. Oh, yeah, right. And your members already think you know it, right? Like, you know, I’m sure when you’re back at the credit like, they’d come in be like, one. I mean, I know you saw that. I wrote a check for this. I was like, yeah, sorry, I wasn’t monitoring your account, right? And so, but I think pretty soon we can start to build out things that say, oh, their direct deposit changed. Let’s call and congratulate them on a new job. Or let’s talk to them about a 401 K rollover. Or they’re six months out from a from a renewing their car, or some, you know, they’ve, they’ve started shipping money every month to this place. Did they get a new loan? There’s lots of things that are the data can help us create meaningful and valuable interactions. That’s the other part. Is, I think where first places, both banks and credit unions, started with this is, well, we gotta reach out to our members more. But we were just like, it was like, check a check box, and it was a list. And here’s the seven people. We got a call today and we looked at it as valuable. I don’t know that the members did right, and finding that intersection is going to be an important part of raising that number.
Sarah Cooke
And the other thing that your research found was that of all financial institution users, half would leave their primary financial institution for personalized financial guidance. And one of the things I read recently, earlier this week, was research that, you know, Gen Z is the most likely to use advanced digital financial planning tools, and so you know when you and the ones that are least likely to get switched on are actually credit unions, according to your research, too 40 more, so below the average. But you know, that is the kind of thing that I think you were talking about, where credit unions knowing somebody’s data, if you can see all their data because they’ve aggregated it all into your app or whatever for you, and you dig right into everything, doesn’t matter if it’s held in house or not.
Scott Earwood
No, that’s exactly right. And, and, to be fair, I mean, it’s, you know, we do some of that. We don’t do all that. We don’t have it figured out. And there’s other ways to do it. And I think there’s, I’m excited to see what the industry comes up with over the next few years, because, and the other part, too, is, I think the reason maybe we’ve there’s been tons of change. However, other than COVID, there hasn’t really been an event in the past, what, 17 years now, almost right? The last real, like, loss event was back in oh eight recession type, like, I’m interested to see what happens after the next one, right? Because then what? When times are a little tougher, that tends to drive more change, but from a user or member perspective, as well as from an institutional perspective. And so that, to me, is going to be fascinating, and it’s going to be, how do we how do we evolve this? How do we take advantage of it, right? We’ve got more capabilities now than ever, but too many times the capabilities are this is a cool idea, rather than this is a business reason, or this, and it is a business reason. It is truly a business reason, meaning the credit union came up with it most of the time, of what’s going to help them more so than what’s helping the member and us, and that’s credit unions are a little better than that. And I think that’s why that number reflects that then banks. But right we I mean, when you’re developing the next program at your credit union, you’re like, This is going to help members, but how many times you go talk to members about it, right? Right? How many times are they, are they part of the process here, or they don’t have to be completely right? But, and how many times are we doing things with the right intention, but don’t have the data to back it up, to know, is this really what we should be doing? And I think that intersection is where the future of making that number go up is.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah. Now this has been great discussion. I love the data. Everything that has data tied to it. You can measure it. You can make it a strategic. Goal, that kind of thing. And so, yeah, but I always allow my guests the final thoughts here as we wrap up. What would you like to leave our credit union audience with?
Scott Earwood
Well, I would say that it’s I’m excited about the future of what’s going on. I think the you know, the credit unions are evolving, right? Things are they’re expanding, and I think I’m excited to see where they take it, because, again, I see some adoption that even some smaller banks aren’t, aren’t adopting as fast as some of the credit unions are, at least from my whatever limited view that might be. And so I’m excited to see that, but then I’m also, you know where, who’s going to come up with that next way of truly connecting, right? And I think that lives at the intersection of data and customer service, or member service, and some innovation. And I’m excited. I think the next I think if we talk again in 10 years, you know, it’s we’re going to see something that parallels the change that you know, online bill pay and digital banking did, right like as far as how people interact with banks. And I hope it goes well. I think it will
Sarah Cooke
Well. Thank you so much for your time and insight. I appreciate it. Scott.
Scott Earwood
Awesome. Thank you. Sarah, good day.