Dear members,
Early fall is the part of the year where Coastal’s leadership looks ahead and plans out our strategy and initiatives for the following year. I’m keeping an eye on this month, too. Amidst all our long term planning, I’m eager to see one of this year’s major projects come to fruition in the next couple weeks. I’m excited to tell you more about what to expect, but first, I want to take a minute to address an incident that made national news and sent shockwaves through the entire financial services industry.
Equifax Data Breach
Last month, Equifax -one of the nation’s major credit reporting bureaus- announced that records for 145 million consumers had been compromised in a major data breach. Coastal was quick to assemble a team to assess the situation, and we’ve been working to prevent compromised data from being used to access member accounts or open fraudulent new accounts.
I address the subject in a new video series that Coastal has started producing, titled Coffee with Chuck. Each month, Joe Mecca and I sit down to talk about one or two topics that are relevant to members. I encourage you to give it a view and please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel to get notified when new videos are available.
New Website
On a much more positive note, we’re excited to be launching a brand new COASTAL24.com website within the next couple weeks. Our team has been hard at work much of this year. We put a lot of research into determining member needs, and then partnered with a top financial website provider to build a completely new site. The new COASTAL24.com puts a much stronger focus on helping members through a variety of financial scenarios by providing more tools and informational resources, while making it easy to compare and apply for new products and services online.
Here are some of the major highlights and new features:
- The new Global Menu gives you our most popular pages, links and functions, all at the very top of the page.
- An expandable Mega Menu provides quick access to all of our products and services. The Digital Banking login is also on the Mega Menu. Other than a modification to the way the login is presented, your Digital Banking experience remains unchanged.
- This menu includes a new Learn section, which features a Financial Education Center that offers 26 new interactive modules to help members boost their knowledge on a variety of financial topics. Also within the Learn section, a new Life Stages menu offers a collection of specially curated educational materials.
- A new Solution Finder, prominently located on the front page, is designed to guide members through specific scenarios by recommending articles, tools, products, and Life Stage materials to best meet their needs.
- The new Coastal Connections section features our latest blog articles, news releases and social media posts.
- Lastly, newly designed product and service pages, contain new calculators, comparison charts, related FAQs, and other relevant resources.
Keep an eye out for the announcement that the new site is live. In the meantime, I hope you share my excitement about the changes that are coming soon.
Hurricane Relief
One final note; on September 25, our board of directors approved $300,000 in grants to the National Credit Union Foundation and the World Council of Credit Unions’ Worldwide Foundation, to help provide relief to credit unions and employees affected by the three recent hurricanes. We challenged other credit unions to step up to answer those organizations’ plea for help, and I’m impressed by the response we’ve seen from our industry peers so far. It’s times like this that the credit union difference shines.
I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of credit unions.
Thank you all for helping to make that possible.
Sincerely,
Chuck Purvis
President & CEO