Tom’s team wanted members with an auto loan elsewhere to see how much they could save.
“There are over 1,000 lenders in the city of Atlanta alone,” Tom says. “How am I going to get someone to consider us versus these 999 other lenders that have much bigger budgets than me?”
In September, ACU’s marketing team put a message in its mobile banking app for members with a car loan at another lender.
They were a vendor, and now we’re partners. They genuinely care about my business. They are good people, and the solution works.
He’s spent around 30 years in financial marketing, nearly 15 of them at ACU, and he thinks the goal of being a member’s primary financial institution no longer exists. “We need to be there when the member needs us,” he says.
A car loan isn’t like picking out a shirt, Tom adds, and people take their time over one. So he thinks about how ACU’s channels can work together to keep the credit union top of mind when a member needs a loan or a deposit account, and how to stack them for the best return. “It’s almost like Legos in my head,” he says, “of how to put them together.”
Frank Napoli runs creative, Ken Galloway runs the marketing technology, and Tom runs the strategy.
“I always call this the three-pointed triangle,” he says, because the three of them work closely together.
He’s learned to really listen to his teammates. “They keep me grounded and say, okay, come back, Tom, let’s think about this,” he says. “And then I’m like, okay, what do you think?”
So when Pulsate started building its new Campaign capabilities, ACU signed up as one of its first design partners. “We have a lot of brainpower behind that on what we could do,” Tom says. His team tried the new capabilities before they were finished, working closely with Shalana Goodin, ACU’s customer success manager at Pulsate, and Mihai Sampaleanu, Pulsate’s CTO. Tom even wanted to set up the first campaign himself, so he’d know the process.
“We all agreed that we were going to fail fast,” he says of those early days. “The whole point of this was to walk and stumble and pick ourselves up.” They knew about 90% of what they were doing, and the last 10% was a little foggy. “And I think we got through that 10%.”
Shalana says she really appreciates the scrappiness of Tom’s team, and how willing they are “to just jump in and try new things.”
Tom’s first idea was paperless statements, “a very easy thing to do,” and a saving for members too, because a printed statement costs them $3.95 a month. The invitation went out only through ACU’s Mobile App, with no email alongside it.
Tom, Ken, Shalana, and Mihai had talked through how to report the results four times or so when the answer came to Tom on a walk with his wife. “I can get IT to pull the numbers,” he remembers thinking. So he called ACU’s IT department and asked, “Hey, can you pull me eStatement enrollments by month for 2026 to date?” They said yes.
“Within five minutes, I had the report,” he says, “and I was like, holy cow, look at these results.”
By his count, enrollments rose from 651 in July to 1,387 in August, a 113% increase.
“I think we knocked it out of the park with that,” Tom says, and ACU now plans to run the paperless invitation at the end of every quarter. “I can just set it up, and it’ll roll.”
With Studio, Tom’s team chooses who hears about an offer, what the Messages say, and when they arrive. Each Data Sync update brings in newly qualified members, and anyone who has enrolled moves on. Shalana and Mihai still check in on how it’s going, and as Tom puts it, they’ll “keep my feet to the fire.”
The paperless result “spawned other ideas,” Tom says.
ACU knew which members had a car loan with another lender, so Tom went to Ken. “What if we just put up a simple refinance message,” he asked, “because we can save our members an average of $540 a year by funding with us versus another financial institution on an auto loan?”
The first message invited those members to talk with ACU’s team about refinancing, and later ones linked to the application.
ACU hasn't measured how much of the $1.7M came from its messages; Tom describes the link as a correlation.
Since ACU started using Studio, Tom says, Pulsate is “always top of mind now,” and whenever the triangle plans something new, the conversation turns to, “Can I get the data for Pulsate?” He also wants more members to use the ACU Mobile App. ACU’s digital banking runs on Candescent, so he deployed a simple banner in online banking, through Candescent’s Promotion Suite, inviting every member to download the mobile app.
Associated Credit Union is a $2.5 billion financial institution serving more than 172,000 members at 18 locations in Atlanta, Augusta, Carrollton, and Dawsonville.
$6.8M+ auto loans in 90 days
+28% eStatement enrollments in 30 days, year over year
+270% card applications in August 2025 vs August 2024
