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Articles by Erin Raese
The fraud your members feel—and the cloud that has to catch it
A member calls your contact center on a Tuesday evening. There's a charge on her debit card from a city she's never been to. She noticed it twenty minutes ago. She wants it resolved. What happens next is where credit unions either keep members or lose them. Not the fraud itself. Members understand fraud happens. What they don't forgive is a slow notification, a confusing dispute process, three people telling them three different things, and two days of silence before anyone owns the resolution.
Your members see the app. Your examiner sees what’s under it.
A credit union’s digital roadmap looks ambitious on a slide. Mobile account opening. Real-time loan decisioning. AI-assisted member service. The timeline is set. The budget has been approved. The problem is underneath the slide, in the infrastructure that has to carry it—systems added one by one over a decade, placed wherever was convenient, never designed to work together at the scale the roadmap assumes. In 2026, that infrastructure is under a new kind of pressure.
Digital adoption is accelerating across credit unions - but are the systems underneath ready?
Credit unions are getting more assertive about digital transformation. They’re integrating mobile card apps, rolling out new digital tools and behaving like early adopters rather than cautious followers. In fact, the 2025 Credit Union Innovation Readiness Index shows an 8.5% jump in early tech adoption among the smallest CUs: an acceleration that would have been hard to imagine just a year ago.
5 signs your C-suite doesn’t understand customer loyalty
Loyalty programs can be powerful assets for driving revenue and fostering deeper customer relationship—but only if the C-suite understands their true value. When executive leaders are aligned with loyalty initiatives, it means more support, investment, and success. However, if there’s a disconnect with the C-suite, it can result in missed opportunities, ineffective strategies, and ultimately, a failure to maximize the impact of loyalty initiatives on overall business goals.
Loyalty program KPIs: 6 metrics your CFO cares about
0 shares Listen to article Loyalty programs are powerful tools for driving revenue and customer retention. However, their true value lies in their ability to deliver tangible financial results. By focusing on key performance indicators (KPIs) that directly impact the bottom line, loyalty managers can effectively communicate their program’s impact to the C-suite to win the necessary funding and ongoing support.
Table of Contents - NRF 2024
Customization and Personalization with YETI: How to Get Creative with Your Post-Purchase Experience
The State of the Retail Industry 2024
How to Bring Customer Experiences to Life in 2024 By Erin Raese, SVP of Growth & Strategy, Annex Cloud Insider Intelligence reports that 88 percent of shoppers feel the experience a brand provides is just as important as its product. Personalized interactions are a must for retailers that want to win the hearts, minds and wallets of consumers in 2024.
Council Post: 3 Ways To Double Down On Your Customers Today
Erin Raese is SVP of Growth at Annex Cloud. Organizations today are facing far more challenges than just a few years ago, including supply chain challenges, inflation and possible recession. In addition, marketing teams have been hit with heavier data security laws, wreaking havoc on our acquisition efforts. Our management teams are pulling back budget and moving much more cautiously. When times get tough, it's time to double down on your customers.
Building long-lasting relationships with customers
Today, loyalty is a two-way value exchange with customers. Loyalty programmes create a commitment to this – when a customer joins one and agrees to share their data, organisations, in return, promise to be a good steward of this data by delivering personalised and relevant experiences. It’s important for organisations to protect customer data in this way, not only to ensure compliance with regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation, but also to show respect to customers.
Shopping lessons learned from 2016
In 2016, consumer retail shopping unveiled several trends that brands will want to consider as they plan their strategies for the rest of 2017, particularly for the important fourth-quarter holiday shopping season. It’s important to devise and test some strategies earlier in the year, when there is still time to make any necessary revisions before the holiday shopping starts. Below are five 2016 shopping trends to build on for 2017.
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