Boucoup: Family Banking for the Future of Credit Unions

By John San Filippo

While credit unions continue to lament over aging memberships and the difficulty in attracting younger members, there seems to be little recognition of the relationship between these two groups. Specifically, credit unions often ignore the fact these older members and younger prospective members belong to the same families — children and parents, children and grandparents. This means that these older members are in a powerful position to influence the financial growth and financial decisions of these younger prospective members. One company, BankingON, has figured out how to leverage this valuable relationship between these two groups.

From Silicon Valley to Family Banking

Alexey Krasnoriadtsev

For 18 years, Alexey Krasnoriadtsev was immersed in the fast-paced, high-stakes world of Silicon Valley. His career began as an engineer building mobile apps in the dawn of the smartphone revolution. His early work included creating the first video apps for Android for major media outlets like TMZ and the Discovery Channel. He also worked with Motorola on their first Android phone and helped Barnes & Noble build the software for its e-reader, the Nook. Later, he collaborated with Dell to create a photo library that would pull pictures from various social media and cloud platforms.

Despite this professional success and the substantial income that came with it, Krasnoriadtsev found himself unfulfilled. He had a “big change of heart” and began looking for “more purposeful things.” The opportunity arrived around 2015 when a credit union in Silicon Valley was struggling with a new digital banking platform.

“A lot of their members were progressive engineers, technologists of Silicon Valley, but that software was very old school,” Krasnoriadtsev told Finopotamus. “It didn't look anything like the newest iPhones – what people are expected. They got thousands of one-star reviews on the App Store.” The credit union’s CEO turned to Krasnoriadtsev for help.

Within six months, Krasnoriadtsev and his team launched a new version of the app, which quickly turned those one-star reviews into five-star reviews. This success led to referrals from other credit unions, and Krasnoriadtsev eventually closed his consulting firm to open BankingON, a product-focused company.

The Birth of a New Concept

After running BankingON for eight years, Krasnoriadtsev, a father of four, noticed a significant gap in the market. He realized that credit unions didn’t have a good solution for families, as the banking experience remained “very individualistic.” While fintechs like Greenlight were gaining popularity, he felt they were “stealing the future of the credit union as a movement.” He decided to build a platform that would cater directly to the needs of both credit unions and families. That platform became Boucoup.

Boucoup’s platform is a white-label solution. Unlike most of its competitors, Boucoup is not a separate service but is deeply integrated with the credit union’s core system. It achieves this integration using an application programming interface (API) provided by Janusea (recently acquired by Kinective). “Janusea’s API gives us connectivity into 15 different core systems,” said Krasnoriadtsev. This integration is crucial because it means all deposits and accounts remain under the credit union’s full control.

The Power of “Learning by Doing”

Krasnoriadtsev believes that financial literacy isn’t about rote learning but about “practice” and “learning by doing.” The Boucoup app, which is COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) compliant, provides a safe, real-world environment for kids to learn.

“As a parent, I see what my daughter sees,” explained Krasnoriadtsev. “She sees her spending account, she can swipe to see her savings account, and then, of course, her own transactions. All of that is on the credit union’s core.”

The Boucoup platform even offers a lending feature, where a parent can create a loan with an interest rate and late fees. Krasnoriadtsev used this feature to teach his daughter about how loans and amortization work after a prior attempt at a theoretical explanation failed. The experience taught her the discipline of paying on time and the feeling of having a monthly payment.

In addition to practical tools, Boucoup offers “Money Shorts,” short-form videos designed to be engaging and “not preachy, not teachy.” These videos provide financial tips in a style familiar to users of Snapchat and TikTok, focusing on topics like how to avoid being embarrassed when a debit card is declined. Credit unions can also add their own content.

“If you can engage local people, it can even feel local, which is important to many credit unions,” said Krasnoriadtsev. “I'm excited about this feature, because credit unions can upload their own content and customize the way they speak and engage their members through the short-format video.”

Solving the Credit Union’s Membership Problem

Krasnoriadtsev argues that the old playbook of waiting for teenagers to get their first job and come into a branch is “broken.” By that age, young adults have already been lured away by any number of fintechs. Boucoup gives credit unions a way to win over these families earlier in the life cycle. The platform creates a “frictionless” experience for young people.

“The beauty of Boucoup is when a child grows up, they can peel off their account. They remain a member at the credit union, and their account doesn't change, their debit card doesn't change, their direct deposit doesn't change,” explained Krasnoriadtsev. “This is huge, because if an 18-year-old has to jump through hoops and reapply for membership, at that point, they can more easily download Chime.”

According to Krasnoriadtsev, the platform also makes parents “sticky” members. “For a long time, credit unions thought that bill pay is what makes our checking account sticky,” he noted. “I don't know who's still using bill pay, like maybe 30% of folks. it's slowly diminishing in its stickiness. But if you have your kids on this, would you switch? Would you switch yourself and your kids and everything? No. You're going to stay.”

Currently, Boucoup has one credit union live on the platform, with three more in implementation and two in contract negotiations. Krasnoriadtsev will present at upcoming conferences, including FinovateFall (of which Finopotamus is an official media sponsor) and Future Branches.