The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the importance of Central 1’s guidance and expertise to credit unions, helping them to navigate a challenging financial environment and providing much-valued Treasury expertise and education.

With the rollout of a new initiative, the Treasury Knowledge Centre, C1 Treasury continues to be a trusted partner, bringing together Treasury-related market insights and educational resources to help clients put knowledge into practice and maximize performance and profitability.

THE IDEA

The idea for a Treasury Knowledge Centre came about in 2019, when C1 Treasury conducted research with CU clients to understand their experience engaging with Treasury products and services. A key insight from this research was a strong need for easily accessible knowledge and training about Treasury.

In 2021, Michael Kerdachi, VP, Treasury Services and Solutions and Pauline Tu, Senior Manager, Treasury Product Marketing, decided to pursue the idea. Having seen Treasury from all sides of the CU system, Michael recognized that Treasury as a strategic function was a gap for many CUs. And Pauline, having led strategy and development of other client sites at Central 1, knew what would be involved and how to go about putting a business case together and pulling in the right resources to take the idea forward.

COLLABORATIVE AND CUSTOMER CENTRIC

While Michael and Pauline were the champions of the initiative, this project was a cross-organization, collaborative effort involving the whole Treasury team with support from Research, Client Communications, and Market

Staying true to C1’s commitment to being client centric, the project put customers at the heart of the design process, leveraging existing audience research and client personas, and conducting further research to better understand Treasury-specific  challenges, and gain client input into the design and content direction.

THE INNOVATION PROCESS

Getting to the rollout involved a four-phase process:
Discovery + Analysis → Define + Build → Implement → Operate

Crucial to process was the Discovery + Analysis phase, which involved validating the idea and defining the scope. Pauline engaged trusted vendor, Spatial Research + Design to support with this work. Spatial’s human centred design thinking process allowed Treasury to articulate the problem, define the vision and understand current state context, capabilities and content assets.

As part of the process, Spatial developed ‘design concepts’ to bring the idea into a more tangible form, then created an interactive prototype that was used to test and get input from CU clients. Concepts were intended to be a starting point and based on feedback from testing, Spatial provided detailed recommendations for how to take this forward to a ‘minimum viable product’, essentially, what was realistic to achieve and still offer true value to a client.

Concepts were then taken forward to the Design and Build phase, done internally by C1 Marketing and a developer. The build also included content strategy and planning. While the site design and templates were being built, Pauline and team worked to source, coordinate, create and rework content assets to populate the site. A key content element was an infographic to illustrate the key functions of Treasury in a way that could be shared and understood easily. Spatial created this infographic with the help from Michael and the team.

Implementation involved testing the site and loading content and ensuring the right resources are in place to operate the site and maintain content as the site goes live.

THE RESULT

Treasury is excited to announce the launch of the Treasure Knowledge Centre to and is confident it will be a great resource for developing Treasury expertise and facilitating collaboration across its client base.