As I mentioned in my previous post, the first idea I’d like to explore is one I presented at the 2008 Symposium. The idea is to conceptualize a Hyperlocal Credit Union – not “hyper-” in the sense of “very” or “super”, as is commonly used to describe such concepts as hyperlocal media, but “hyper-” in the sense commonly used in computer science to describe links or connections (think “hyperlink” or “hypertext”, the “h” in “http”). Each time a member makes a purchase he is part of an interaction, however brief, between himself and a merchant. The goal of Hyperlocal CU is to turn this interaction into something more than a line on a transaction register.

If you’d like to see an overview of the idea, you can check out the slides and video from my presentation. The screenshots you’ll see in the slides are just rough mockups created to communicate a vision, but hopefully you’ll get a sense of the direction.

Over the next few posts I’m going to explore specific aspects of the Hyperlocal Credit Union and hope you’ll be willing to provide feedback on the validity of the idea and your thoughts on how we can expand it. Also – if you know of a credit union or financial institution that’s already doing something similar, please tell us about it in the comments.

We’ll start with reviews then move on to rewards programs, “delayed gratification”, and whatever else we come up with. After we’ve discussed an idea we’ll incorporate it into a prototype.

Reviews

Companies providing local business reviews such as Yelp, Google Maps, and Angie’s List have demonstrated the value and power of user-generated reviews in shaping purchasing decisions. While I’m no expert in this area, it seems as though the biggest challenge for companies like this is the small percentage of purchasers who will take the time to visit their website, find the business they want to review, and leave a comment (possibly requiring the user to create an account and log in). In addition, there’s no mechanism to guarantee the reviewer actually ate at the restaurant or bought a car from the dealer—it’s a system requiring a certain level of trust between readers and reviewers and is one reason why Yelp has focused on social-networking features in order to establish reviewer reputation.

Credit unions already have a mechanism for providing members a list of the businesses they’ve interacted with (eliminating the need to search for them) and validating that the transaction actually took place. By offering something as simple as a 5-star review choice along with a comment box as part of the transaction list in online banking, credit unions could make the review process painless for their members and drastically increase the number of people submitting reviews. These reviews could then be shared with other members or integrated with existing services like Yelp or Google Maps. For example, in exchange for access to reviews from non-members the credit union could offer Yelp “verified” reviews backed by actual purchases. Of course members would be able to opt-in/-out of this service and could control the amount of information they’re willing to share with other members.

Member View

In addition to the value provided to members, a high volume of reviews (micro-reviews?) would provide local merchants the ability to gauge the quality of their service in real time and work towards continuous improvement.

Merchant Dashboard

How does this fit in with the credit union mission? What better way to promote thrift than to help members make better purchasing decisions and get the most for their money? It would also create opportunities to increase business accounts among local merchants.

Your thoughts?

Could this idea work and is it worthwhile? What opportunities and challenges do you foresee? Let me know in the comments.

For those of you who are interested in the status of our open source CMS project, I just posted an update on the Trabian site.

The brief summary is that we haven’t changed our minds about open sourcing the CMS but found an existing open source CMS platform that we want to leverage for our sites instead of having it all built from scratch. We’re currently customizing and extending that platform to provide greater functionality for CU sites and will then open source those extensions.

Check out the Trabian post for more details.

Thanks everyone for your patience!