First West Credit Union - Rebranding Notes

First West Credit Union operates four distinct brands in British Columbia:
- Island Savings (Vancouver Island)
- Envision Financial (Lower Mainland)
- Valley First (Okanagan)
- Enderby District Financial (North Okanagan, one branch)
Core is the multi-brand model, bringing community financial institutions into a larger entity.
Unified under a branded house, providing a consistent service experience across locations.
Harmonized service experience: same products, digital solutions, and service model.
Consumers have low awareness of being part of a larger organization.
Members unaware they can access services at other brand locations.
Addressing this lack of awareness is a core goal of the new brand strategy.
Public website redesign to reinforce the relationship between brands.
Goal: Improve awareness of the multi-brand model.
Challenge: Current public website design leads to brands competing against each other for SEO and digital advertising.
New website aims to fix this cannibalization issue to drive greater marketing ROI.

Low awareness of First West Credit Union as an enterprise brand.
Currently a B2B brand focused on industry trade, capital markets, investor relations, and regulatory conversations.
Future plan: Evolve First West Credit Union into a consumer-facing brand.
Changing the name of First West Credit Union to a new brand name.
Laying the foundation for the branded house story.
Potential to use the new brand in new markets or for direct work with brokers.

Decision to change the name is 99.7% finalized.
Board and leadership team aligned.
The brand has been revealed to the organization at the Leader Summit.
Name change requires a member vote (regulatory requirement).
Vote scheduled for late November/early December.
Proceeding with the project as if the vote will be successful.
New public website launch in April/May 2026 will be the first major reveal of the new brand.

The new name for First West Credit Union is True Cooperative Credit Union.
Limitations on naming due to provincial vs. federally regulated entity status.
Process underway to become a federally regulated entity, allowing the name True Cooperative Credit Union or True Cooperative Bank.
True Cooperative name was selected after extensive research and testing.
Storytelling: Emphasizing that we are a collective of financial cooperatives.
Reinforcing the multi-brand model in content and messaging.
New debit cards will highlight the multi-brand model.

Visual identities of the brands have been updated to show common elements (logos, fonts, colors).
Brand guidelines have been created to ensure consistency.
Color palettes and templates are interchangeable across brands.
Goal is not to have a distinct color-coded website design for each regional brand.
Examples of mock-ups demonstrate how the multi-brand model will be presented on the public website.

Internal mockups have been created to visualize the multi-brand model on the public website.
Emulating brands like The Gap in showing relationships between brands.
Single URL hierarchy (truecooperative.ca) to reinforce that the regional brands are part of a larger network.
Bringing the True Cooperative brand front and center in headers.
Showing different brands together and calling out the parent brand in the footer.
Goal: Reinforce the brand strategy and increase awareness of the multi-brand model.

Showing all branch locations across all brands in the app.
Introducing the parent brand (True Cooperative) in a way that's unobtrusive but effective.

Differentiation play, not a cost leadership play.
Focus on financial advice and people who make a difference.
Deep, authentic connections with members.
Helping members who are ignored by big banks.
Sweet spot: Small to medium-sized communities in British Columbia.
People and connections combined with financial advice and financial well-being.
Younger consumers are a growing segment.
Advice based on the size of dreams, not the size of the bank account.
Financial well-being is a core brand value.
Goal: Members, employees, and communities are better off financially because of the organization.

Using Environics Analytics to develop personas based on third-party datasets.
Information on media preferences, psychographics, and socioeconomic trends.
Retail personas are the primary focus for the website.
11 personas, focusing on a few key ones:
- Eric: Young urbanite starting his career, looking to plan seriously.
- Fatima: Multicultural young family in Surrey, invested in their financial future.

Top converting LOBs today: Term deposits and mortgages.
Focusing on younger demographics, so needs are more sophisticated.
Prioritizing everyday banking and everything that wraps around it.
- Checking and savings products
- High interest savings accounts
- Third-party products (credit card products)
- Qtrade platform
Small business banking is also a core growth focus area.
Wealth: Retail wealth (mutual funds, direct DIY investment platforms, term deposits, savings accounts, TFSAs).
Prioritizing journeys in UX to focus on everyday banking and financial planning and advice.

Room for improvement in the way accounts are originated online.
Digital operating model historically a second consideration set.
Need to optimize the flow so that it's easy for consumers to see all of the ways that they can go deeper with their everyday banking experience quickly.

Geographies are quite different.
Need to present content differently based on the personas that are organized by geography.
- Dave: Leveraged in suburbia. Exists a from a concentration perspective in the valley a little bit more than some of the other regions.
Imagery and personalization can make members feel more local.

Competitors don't understand our multi-brand model.
Doing the multi-brand model more for the members than the competitors.
Helping us in the b to b space as well because we wanna attract more merger partners.
We have the size, the sophistication, the resources of a of a medium sized financial institution, but we do make a lot of local decision making, like a local community credit union.
Want them seeing some of the big.

Small business banking is a real opportunity.
Marketing engine (public website) needs to support small business banking.
Not able to tell effective stories about small business banking and retail banking right now.

Current state is not what we're aiming for.
Multi-brand model is inherently more complex, and there's inherent inefficiency execute on it.
About 94% of the people who end up on our site do so from branded search.
Not driving organic new users to our content at all right now.
The SEO opportunities of this new site.
Opportunity to successfully position the big and the small.
Looking at this multi brand strategy, we need to craft that specific paths and Mhmm. Equity for each of those independently as well.

Wealthsimple does a really good job of delivering financial well-being content and financial confidence content and linking it through to the solutions that they have.
Our competitors, not other credit unions.
We've really gotta be looking at, you know, the bigger players in this space because that's where we're we're that's where we're trying to have them lose business to us.