This week, Haluk Demirkan, Ph.D. (Endowed Professor, Assistant Dean of Analytics Innovation and Director of Milgard Center for Business Analytics & Master of Science in Business Analytics program at UW Tacoma) shared his thoughts and vision on how credit unions can build and sustain successful partnerships with education and industry partners during the first Filene Research Event of 2021. The title of the virtual conference was Building an Analytics Ecosystem to Create Credit Union Value.
The Milgard Center for Business Analytics at UW Tacoma has had the privilege to partner with Sound Credit Union on data analytics collaborations for the past several years. As such, Haluk was invited to join Ryan Zilker (SVP, Chief Marketing Officer – Sound Credit Union) in a fireside chat format and the title of their presentation was “The Power of Partnerships: Case Studies for Building Credit Unions’ Analytics Capabilities”.
Sound Credit Union’s journey in analytics started in 2014 when Haluk served as a faculty advisor to Don Clark (MBA ’14 – UW Tacoma Milgard School of Business) on an independent study project during the last two quarters of Don’s MBA degree program (Don Clark is now President & CEO of Sound Credit Union). Don’s project, titled “Business Transformation through Big Data and Analytics for Sound Credit Union,” focused on the next generation of business intelligence (BI) and analytics for Sound Credit Union. Sound Credit Union was seeking a way to approve small business loans faster, with the goal to make relevant offers to specific members using aggregated data.
The success of this initial project with Don proved to be a springboard for continued value co-creation between Sound Credit Union and UW Tacoma thereafter. Sound Credit Union has since partnered with graduate student teams in the UW Tacoma Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) program on Applied Projects. Students in the MSBA program work on a real-life data analytics applied project in partnership with regional and national organizations during the course of their 12-month degree program.
In AY 19-20, Sound Credit Union partnered with an MSBA graduate student team to perform a comprehensive analysis of Sound Credit Union’s checking account structure to determine what features were most attractive to Millennials and Generation Z. The idea behind this goal was to help sound Credit Union expand its footprint into this important demographic.
And during this current Academic Year 20-21, an MSBA graduate student team is collaborating with Sound Credit Union to create and leverage a new branch location and performance model. The goal is to help Sound Credit Union identify optimum locations as they continue to expand their brick & mortar presence in the region. The results and recommendations from this collaboration will be presented during the upcoming virtual Applied Project Showcase in June 2021.
Both Haluk and myself in the Milgard Center for Business Analytics firmly believe in the power of partnerships between academia and industry. You can learn more about the nearly 60 collaborations between the Milgard Center for Business Analytics and industry in a recent blog post here.
If you have a challenging problem to solve or are seeking data-driven insights to advance your business, please contact me (helsem@uw.edu) to learn more about how we can partner to co-create mutual value together.
