At American Heritage FCU, Data and Innovation Go Hand in Hand
By John San Filippo
Philadelphia-based American Heritage Federal Credit Union ($4.8 billion in assets; 312,000 members) won the 2024 Tekkie Award for Innovation based on the credit union’s unique approach to data. Finopotamus spoke with Senior Vice President for Data and Innovation Adrian Rodriguez and Vice President for Data and Innovation Breana Wolfert about their efforts to transform the credit union.
Prior to joining American Heritage FCU in 2023, Rodriguez was the director of information systems and technology at Rutgers Cancer Institute in New Jersey. His position at the credit union was created based on senior management’s recognition that data and innovation must be inextricably connected for the credit union to achieve its goals.
“As my position was being developed and I was coming on board, we realized that anything that's innovation related will really depend a lot on what we find from the data and how we engage with all the business units to ensure that we're meeting those business needs in the business goals,” explained Rodriguez. “We're not huge, so we can't have a separate data team, separate innovation team that needs to be constantly coordinating and discussing what our approaches are going to be. We decided to gain those efficiencies by having a consolidated group that breaks the silos and is able to engage with the business to drive forward for innovation.”
“It was our CEO who decided to make this dedicated business unit in our org chart,” added Wolfert who has been with the credit union for seven years but was promoted to her current position when Rodriguez came onboard. “He did that in August of last year. I was moved over into that realm and then we brought Adrian in from another industry. The two of us are leading the charge here.”
She added, “These two initiatives are cyclical. The data informs the need to innovate. And then once you've done your version of innovation, you need to report on your successes. It's completely cyclical that they have this dependency on one another.”
Innovation Is not Invention
“The way Adrian and I see it is, innovation is not invention,” noted Wolfert. “We're not Steve Jobs out here trying to invent the next big thing. Sometimes innovation is just seeing opportunity for improvement – something we just don't have at all that we're lacking. And the data is going to tell us that story. The innovation side of our job is the means of activating the things we've come to learn from the insights through the data.”
“I came out of the academic healthcare arena,” added Rodriquez. “At the Cancer Institute I implemented very similar systems and did the same thing of taking a legacy IT department and converting it to a team that could deliver data and innovative solutions.” He noted that while the data is different both healthcare and financial services are highly regulated and require a similar approach to data.
“The concepts are largely the same,” he said. “Having me and Breana partner together has been an immense multiplier because with her business knowledge of the credit union itself, along with what I bring in terms of processes and techniques, it's already starting to pay off dividends.”
Enter Datava
As the plan came together, the question of resources came up. “To kick off this data initiative, if we tried doing everything in-house, there were at least a dozen different roles that we would need to bring on board,” explained Rodriguez, “and those were expensive roles.”
Wolfert had worked with Wheat Ridge, Colo.-based data analytics firm Datava in the past, as well as in a limited capacity at American Heritage, and encouraged Rodriguez to consider a broader partnership.
“We flew out to see Datava and talk with them onsite,” said Rodriguez. “Even though I didn't have that relationship with them upfront, after sitting there talking with them, hearing their vision and seeing what skillsets that they brought to the table, it became a no-brainer to forge a relationship.”
“If you just look at the list of modules Datava has listed out on its website, we're using all but two of them,” added Wolfert. “But we also have modules that are not cataloged because the level of customization we've added to our instance.”
It’s not just the Datava products that bring value to the credit union; it’s also the people behind the products. “They have that technical talent that's really expensive for us to keep in-house,” said Wolfert. “Even just from a loyalty perspective, the turnover and things like that, it would be a lot for us to try to do what we're doing exclusively internally. Datava is an extension of us.”
A Bright Future
Asked about any successes achieved to date, Wolfert instead chose to look to the future. “I think I'm more excited about the ones we haven't done yet, to be honest, because a lot of what we've done, as critical as it is, I really consider them stepping stones to where we are now,” she told Finopotamus. “And where we are now is where we planned to be. We've done some really awesome stuff like our onboarding efforts. We've put a lot of focus into new member onboarding from a workflow standpoint and from a reporting standpoint to get a better understanding of the design developed for this dedicated department whose job it is exclusively to onboard members.”
For his part, Rodriguez feels that using data to drive innovation will get easier as the industry’s approach to data matures. “I think in the future we will be seeing more of a push to data standards across all financial services, where, you know, just like in healthcare where we had the HL7 data standards so that all of these different integration partners can integrate and the data means the same thing to everyone.”
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