Grow Financial Credit Union Integrates Apple Pay

Is Apple Pay really the way to pull younger customers into traditional banks and credit unions? That might seem to be a no-brainer. Millennials — born between 1980 and 2000 — are twice as likely to say they’ll use a mobile wallet within the next year as older consumers, by a 32 percent to 16 percent margin. Apple Pay may seem like an obvious hook for banks trying to lure those notoriously unbanked kids.

But that may be thinking about the problem backwards.

Consider Grow Financial Federal Credit Union, a $2-billion institution in Tampa, Florida, that just announced it now has Apple Pay live for its customers’ credit and debit cards.

“Providing Apple Pay keeps us on the leading edge of technology adaptation, which is important as we continue to penetrate the youth markets,” Grow Financial CEO Bob Fisher told Mobile Commerce Daily. “More of our members are using mobile technology than ever before. We are here to serve their needs and provide the tools they want to use in their personal financial lives.”

That’s fairly generic Apple Pay talk, but it doesn’t explain why millennials should open a checking account in a brick-and-mortar branch of a 60-year-old credit union. In fact, a report out in January from BBVA Compass found that online banking and mobile apps simply aren’t enough to attract the digital-first under-35 crowd. (BBVA itself bought online bank Simple a year ago in hopes of capturing more millennial customers.)

Grow Financial, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be simply bolting Apple Pay onto the front of a humorless granite facade. This is a 27-branch financial institution that kept a giant “virtual money machine” — a cross between an ATM and a video wall — in its downtown branch for a year and a half before moving the installation to a shopping mall. No one had to be a credit-union member to play the machine, which offered a chance to win $25 toward a checking account, $100 toward an auto loan or $300 toward a mortgage loan.

The credit union was also the first financial institution in Florida to roll out video teller windows in drive-thru ATMs that let customers show their driver’s licenses to an actual (though remote) human teller if they don’t have their debit card to start the ATM session.

With the kind of thinking that’s behind rolling out technology like that, Apple Pay sounds less like a way to “penetrate the youth markets” and more like a logical extension of what Grow Financial is already doing to snag millennials.