The Brand Promise That Stops at the Payment Portal

By: Steve Kramer, Vice President, Product at PayNearMe

Credit unions market themselves on the strength of their member relationships. For years, that claim was backed by hard data. Credit unions consistently outscored banks on customer satisfaction by wide margins, regularly landing in the mid- to high 80s while banks lagged in the 70s. That advantage has eroded. This year marks the seventh consecutive year banks have outperformed credit unions on overall satisfaction, with digital experience identified as a specific dimension where banks have pulled ahead.

Steve Kramer, Vice President, Product at PayNearMe.

For credit unions, that gap shows up most acutely when a member opens the digital payment portal, hits friction and walks away without completing the payment. Thirty days later, the credit union reports it as a delinquency. Multiply that bad experience by thousands of members, and it’s easy to understand why banks are outpacing credit unions in the area of digital experience. Brand advantage erodes one bad portal experience at a time.

Credit unions keep falling behind because their payments systems don’t make these abandoned transactions easy to track. In their reporting, the members who tried to make a payment and didn’t finish appear identical to the members who never made an attempt. For institutions that build their brand on knowing their members, this is a blind spot—and an expensive one—given auto loan delinquencies have been climbing for five consecutive years.

Credit unions often view these issues as separate operational challenges: delinquencies, call center volume, failed payments or reconciliation headaches. In reality, they are symptoms of the same underlying problem—a fragmented payment experience. This is where Payment Experience Management comes into play. By optimizing every touchpoint across members, support teams and operations, credit unions can reduce friction, improve payment completion and lower the hidden costs that erode both member satisfaction and profitability.

A better payment experience is a better digital experience, and it’s the most direct way to extend your brand promise to your payment portal. Here are three payment experience problems worth addressing:

Problem 1: Payment Abandonment

A member opens the portal intending to pay but never completes the transaction. The reasons vary, but a few common patterns stand out. Some members start a payment, get distracted and never come back. Others (26%) say not being able to use their preferred payment type makes paying their auto loans difficult; that share jumps to more than 1 in 3 for members under age 30—the demographic credit unions most need to deepen relationships with. Still others hit a login wall and give up. Almost one-third (31%) say being able to pay loans without having to log in or enter an account number would make payment easier, and 42% point to remembering logins, passwords and account numbers as their biggest pain point. Not only does a poor payment experience cause member frustration, it’s expensive in the form of collections outreach, past-due processing and staff time spent recovering what could have been a self-service payment.

A better payment experience is one way credit unions can deliver on their brand promise. In the case of abandoned payments, that means re-engagement: an automatic, timely, personalized nudge that brings members back into the payment flow with a one-tap payment link. To do this effectively, the amount due should be prefilled and preferred payment methods surfaced so members can simply tap and pay. This directly addresses a top frustration for 32% of members, who cite repeatedly entering card or bank account information as their top frustration when paying loans online.

This isn't a new idea. E-commerce platforms have long used similar tactics to recover abandoned carts, and this approach aligns with what your members want. Nearly half (47%) say a text or email reminder when a bill is due would make it easier to pay on time. Usage data also proves it works. When members receive a re-engagement message, 50% return to the payment flow. Of the total abandoned population, 7% complete the payment, which is significantly better than the 4% benchmark e-commerce platforms see with cart recovery.

Problem 2: Payment Failures

A member submits a payment, but it doesn't process. The card declined, the ACH returned or the transaction timed out. Most payment portals respond with a version of “your payment failed; please try again,” which leaves the member to guess what to do next. For many, the fallback is the contact center, and that call is expensive. Gartner estimates the cost per agent-assisted interaction at $13.50 versus $1.84 for a self-service transaction. With 19% of members already making their loan payments by phone, this expense adds up quickly.

ACH failures are also costly. When an ACH transaction is returned, what began as a $0.20 automated, self-service payment climbs to more than $20 by the time you factor in return fees, retries and staff time. Beyond the operational expense, failed payments can have real consequences for members. A member who believed they successfully made a payment may unknowingly slip into delinquency if the issue isn't identified and resolved quickly. Every failed payment is another moment where the brand promise quietly stops working at the portal, but many of these failures can be resolved before the member ever sees them. Automated business rules, for instance, can retry failed ACH transactions on optimized timing, recovering 22% of failures on the first attempt and 45% by the second.

When a failure does reach the member, your payment system should be able to automatically surface the next-best funding source for each individual member. For example, if a member's PayPal payment fails, the system can surface the debit card they used successfully last month, prefilled and ready to submit; the member taps and pays. Usage data shows this type of in-the-moment intervention turns approximately 9% of failed payments into completions, all within the self-service channel.

Problem 3: Third-Party Payments

A member can't complete a payment on their own and needs help, sometimes covering part of the amount, sometimes the entire payment. Picture a college student whose parents cover a tight month’s car payment or a member whose sibling steps in when his auto loan comes due before payday. Nearly half of Americans facing a financial shortfall (48%) say they’d ask a family member for help.

This routine, ongoing behavior currently happens entirely outside your credit union’s line of sight. These conversations typically happen by phone or text. The member forwards a portal link or shares login credentials with a parent, spouse or sibling, who then logs in as the member and submits the payment. Your credit union never sees that anyone else was involved—another expensive blind spot. This also creates exposure for your credit union. Shared credentials sit outside your institution’s security and compliance controls; plus, the actual payer is invisible in your transaction records.

Every time a member seeks help with a payment, it’s a signal that the member may be experiencing the early stages of financial distress. If you don’t have a way to track that behavior, your team can’t recognize the issue and reach out with support. There's also a mission dimension to this. “People helping people” is the founding principle of the credit union movement. When members are quietly doing exactly that—covering each other’s payments through informal channels—your credit union should be the institution enabling it, not the one missing it.

The better response is to bring that behavior into a controlled, trackable environment. With the right technology in place, you can enable your members to send a secure, single-use link to a trusted third party from inside the payment flow. No credentials exchanged, no portal access shared. The third party pays from their own account, the link expires and your credit union sees the entire transaction, including who actually completed it. For an institution built on the cooperative principle of members helping members, that's not just a feature, it’s the founding idea translated into your payment experience.

The seven-year gap with banks didn’t open up overnight, and it won’t close in one quarter. Whether it widens further is up to you. A better payment experience is the most direct, measurable place your credit union can up the ante on the brand promise you've been known for delivering since inception. Get that right and the relationship advantage that defined credit unions for decades stops eroding at the payment portal, one tap at a time.

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Steve Kramer is the Vice President, Product at PayNearMe, where he leads the product development team. With more than 25 years of payments and product experience, Steve ensures PayNearMe’s solutions lead the market by reducing consumer friction and offering the widest range of payment options and channels, all while staying focused on security and reliability, to ensure clients can lower their total cost of acceptance.