Business View Magazine | January 2021

305 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JANUARY 2021 staff at its Webster locations. Many members from the Polish community are still active. He quips, “With my name Lussier, which is French, I was the first non-Polish board member and the first non-Polish CEO of the credit union in its history, and I’m still here today, so it’s kind of funny how that worked.” The pandemic has affected many financial institutions negatively but despite the industry being hard hit, and some banks closing more than 30 locations in the area, Webster First has stayed strong because they keep on top of their analytics. Before COVID-19 struck Webster First already had the information it needed to get through without too much disruption to its services for members. The credit union invested in technology early and has a wide array of online and remote banking options. Through their data analytics, they discovered that they did an average of 14.5 million transactions in 2018-19. Out of those transactions, 12.8 million were done electronically through ACH, electronic, remote deposits, online access, and ACH deposits. WEBSTER F I RST FEDERAL CREDI T UNION That’s roughly 90 percent of the credit union’s transactions done electronically, with only 10 percent done at the branch locations.” Lussier broke that down further and found that 30 percent of those transactions done at the bank were through drive-up window, so only seven percent of their total transactions were done inside the branch. He explains, “We did some analysis on that, prior to COVID-19, only because we were looking at our funds to be invested into technology to keep abreast of the fin-tech companies that are our competition. So as we looked at those demographics in review, when we closed our branches for COVID-19 it was only affecting seven percent of our customers, so it’s an interesting way to look at it. When we said we’re going to close the branch’s lobby, and if it was really important and you needed to get in you could still do that through an appointment, what we found basically was that we are into December – this is nine months later – and I am yet to get a complaint from a member regarding our COVID-19 situation.”