Why Credit Unions Must Embrace the FinTech Ecosystem: Plane Saver Credit Union’s Chief Operating Officer, Gurminder Bhagrath

At FFNews, we recently spoke with Gurminder Bhagrath, the Chief Operating Officer for Plane Saver Credit Union, to learn more about how FinTech partnerships are disrupting the way modern credit unions work.

In a financial world moving at the pace of digital innovation, Gurminder pushes against the dated “build vs buy” mindset and believes it is critical for institutions to take an ecosystem approach to FinTech adoption. Plane Saver adopted a plug-and-play mindset, and reduced decision time on loans from days to seconds and significantly scaled their loan book from £15 million to an excess of £60 million by smartly integrating with aggregators and third-party providers.

Fundamentally, however, the overall change to the institution was not just speed and efficiency but also, resilience, flexibility and shared progress. Gurminder also highlights how they can avoid a single point of failure, reduce IT costs, and engage collaboratively with development for the broader credit union ecosystem. For Plane Saver, any developments that arise through collaboration with a third party will be made freely available to peers to share development without unnecessarily weakening their position.

In a world with growing competitive forces and the cost of living crisis, this was an important conversation and a good reminder that collaboration is not just a good business practice: it is a necessity.