Services/industries/Credit Unions

Banking & Finance1 flagship

Credit Unions

Member-acquisition marketing for credit unions — built for NCUA-aware copy review, branch-level local SEO, and the lending pipeline that funds the next year of growth. Alabama Credit Union ran a full Insight Genesis audit with us.

01industries/credit-unions.ts

our_take_on_credit_unions

Credit unions sit in an awkward middle: bigger than community banks treat them, smaller than the marketing playbooks the megabanks publish. The result is defensive, lowest-common-denominator copy reviewed by three layers of compliance — and a member-acquisition funnel that can’t compete with the fintech app already on every member’s phone. Our angle: regulated copy review built into an AI-augmented workflow, branch-level local SEO that actually ranks, and lending campaigns measured against funded loans, not form fills. We did the full audit for Alabama Credit Union and the headless rebuild for Northwest Private Lending in the adjacent category.

whats_broken_here

Common challenges.

01
NCUA + Reg Z review bottleneck — every loan-product page sits in compliance review for weeks, marketing ships nothing, fintechs eat the lunch.
02
Branch-level local search invisibility — a 12-branch credit union outranked at every location by a national bank with cleaner schema.
03
Member acquisition vs. member retention split — two different audiences, one website, no clear funnel for either.
04
Lending campaigns measured wrong — paid media reported in clicks and form fills, never in funded loans. Marketing budget defended on the wrong metric.
05
Fintech app envy — a website that feels 2014 next to the slick mobile-first onboarding members see from challengers every day.

how_we_work_in_credit_unions

Our channels applied here.

Content Engineering

Regulated copy review built into the editorial workflow — drafts are pre-formatted for NCUA disclosures, compliance approves a structured doc, marketing ships in days.

SEO / AEO

Branch-level local SEO, GBP rebuilds, schema for every loan product, and AEO formatting so answer engines cite your APR and not a national competitor's.

Paid Performance

Loan-acquisition campaigns measured against funded loans, not form fills. Member-segmented audiences for cross-sell, retention, and win-back.

Agentic Development

Loan calculators, rate-comparison tools, and the member-portal-adjacent experiences that close the fintech-envy gap.

how_an_engagement_runs

A typical engagement.

PHASE 01

Member-funnel audit

Map the existing acquisition funnel, branch-level search visibility, and compliance workflow. Identify where the leak is — usually three places at once.

weeks 1–6

PHASE 02

Local + technical foundation

Per-branch landing pages, GBP rebuilds, schema for every loan product, NCUA disclosure patterns built into templates.

weeks 7–10

PHASE 03

Acquisition push

Paid loan-acquisition campaigns measured against funded loans. Content for the loan products that actually fund the year.

weeks 11–20

PHASE 04

Retention + cross-sell

Member-segmented email flows for cross-sell, retention, and win-back. The work that compounds quietly while acquisition gets the headlines.

ongoing

what_success_looks_like

6 wk

audit_window

Alabama Credit Union's full Insight Genesis audit, fixed scope.

200+

findings_logged

Translated directly into the next year's operating plan.

Headless

lending_architecture

Northwest Private Lending's Sanity + Next.js rebuild with CRM integration.

questions_we_get

Honest answers.

How do you handle NCUA and Reg Z compliance?

Disclosure patterns are built into the page templates and the editorial workflow — APR, terms, member-eligibility language structured so compliance reviews a complete draft instead of a marketing-team approximation. We’ve done this for Alabama Credit Union and for Northwest Private Lending in the adjacent lender category.

Can you measure funded loans, not just form fills?

Yes — and we insist on it. Form fills are vanity. We instrument the path from ad click to LOS-funded loan and report the channel attribution against that. Marketing budget defended on the right number.

Will AI-drafted copy pass compliance?

The first draft, with a credit-union-specific style guide and required disclosures baked in. A practitioner edits, your compliance reviewer approves. Throughput goes up; the bar doesn't move.

Do you work with branches outside the main market?

Yes. Branch-level local SEO is its own discipline — per-branch landing pages, individual GBP optimization, and the schema that lets each branch rank in its own ZIP. We did this across the full Alabama Credit Union footprint.

Ready to put The Nine to work in Credit Unions?

next_step

~$nine init --audit

Start with an Insight Genesis audit. Six weeks. Fixed scope. A written diagnosis of where your marketing actually stands — plus a working agent prototype tailored to your business.

Start an audit→↵Book a discovery call⌘ B