Latest / KMUD News / Vocality Merges with Community First Credit Union, Bringing Digital Upgrades - and Member Frustrations

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Vocality Merges with Community First Credit Union, Bringing Digital Upgrades - and Member Frustrations · KMUD News

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Today, the merger from Vocality Community Credit Union to Community First Credit Union has gone live. The merger was to make accessing digital banking easier. During this merger, members of Ocality Community Credit Union need to set up a new digital account with CFCU in order to regain access to their account. Andy Dickhutt, the chief marketing officer at Community First Credit Union here at the Garberville location, had this to say about its new updates.
• 0:30
  Speaker B: Well, a lot of big benefits, especially for the Vocality members up there who are now new Community first members. Because we are a large organization. Some of the big things advantages that they're going to get is an expanded branch network. Vocality previously had two branches. Now they have access to 12 branches and we have branches all over the North Bay stretching all the way from as far down south as Nevada and Nashville, all the way up to Fort Bragg and of course now Garberville and everything in between. We're located in Santa Rosa, we have several branches there as well. So one of the biggest benefits is an expanded branch network. We also have a really fantastic digital banking platform. It's really state of the art, has all the features and conveniences and more that county members will need to conduct their banking digitally. So they're getting a great new access to digital banking services.
• 1:35
  Speaker A: There are new expansions and resources members can use that they've never had before. The CEO of Community First Credit Union, Scott Johnson, had this to say.
• 1:46
  Speaker C: This is a bigger organization, just more choices and more convenience. Andy covered the digital banking part, so I'm not going to elaborate on that, but we've already had hundreds of members today, first day of go live register for digital banking. And just as an example, one of the things that we have at Community first, if your loan is in good standing and we allow you to skip a certain number of loan payments per year, as long as your loan is in good standing, we've already had a couple of members very first day take advantage of that. So if you need a little extra cash that month and you'd like to skip a payment, you can do that digitally. You can come into the branch and do that. One of the other things that I would mention, which I think is going to be a really nice pickup for the ex focality members, is our early pay program. And early pay, if you have a direct deposit with the credit union, as long as the originator of that direct deposit sends us the information early, and sometimes it could be up to two days early, we'll go ahead and we'll post that two days early. In the advance of the effective date so that you have access to the.
• 2:46
  Speaker B: Cash a little bit faster.
• 2:47
  Speaker C: Which I think is going to be a great, a great pickup for the ex locality members who are now community first members.
• 2:55
  Speaker A: With the launch of this new merger, both Dickhut and Johnson said they experienced minor issues on their end and most of the traffic was due to signups for the new digital banking.
• 3:06
  Speaker B: Well the commotion really hurt. It was just a busy branch which is a good thing. As I mentioned today was really this Monday. The second was the first day of full open branches and full access to their new accounts. So yeah, you had a lot of new CFCU members that came into the branch wanting to get information about their new accounts, wanting to sign up for digital banking and of course they can do all that themselves at home as well. But of course that's what the branches exactly are for, for us to support members and help them if they have any, any issues. So like anything, you know, there's some, you know, some members might have some difficulties maybe registering for digital banking. That's probably 90% of it that we've discovered and that's exactly. We have experts, subject matter experts for digital banking on staff at both the Garberville branch location and the Ukiah branch location to help members through those types of issues. And mostly it's stuff as you might imagine, resetting passwords, getting them access into digital banking. But that's been the lion's share of what we heard and we're getting all those, all those new members taken care.
• 4:28
  Speaker A: However, some members who didn't want to be recorded for the interview mentioned experiencing long wait times, confusion, loss of access to their accounts and even a member's merge of two separate accounts. One community member noted that during the transfer the member's identification got lost in the system which resulted in not getting access to their funds. If you are experiencing issues you can visit your nearest branch or visit comfirst.org vocality that is C O M F I r-t.org vocality for full details and helpful resources. Reporting for KMUD, I'm Jordan Panjalian.