Summit Federal Credit Union: A Spring Push With Four Problems

Four distinct problems, in order of severity.

1. "Free" is not available here. Under Regulation DD's advertising rules, an account may not be described as free or no-cost if a maintenance fee can be imposed or a minimum balance must be maintained. A $9.95 fallback fee means the account is conditional, not free. Rename it - "Everyday Checking with Direct Deposit" - and disclose the fee, the direct-deposit requirement, and how to avoid the fee in the primary ad, not only in the account agreement.
2. The text messages are the biggest legal exposure. Marketing texts sent to a purchased list, with no prior express written consent, run directly into TCPA consent requirements and will generate statutory-damages exposure. Remove the channel entirely unless Summit can document consent for each number. It cannot.
3. The email lists. The 4,200 addresses belong to people who unsubscribed; emailing them violates CAN-SPAM's requirement to honor opt-outs. Some members may have opted out of all marketing rather than email only - check both. The 9,000 partner addresses are a reputational and deliverability risk even where consent is arguable; verify the co-branding agreement's permission language before a single send.
4. The testimonial. The member received $200. That material connection must be disclosed, and a paid incentive makes the testimonial atypical; using it as representative of member experience is deceptive unless the results genuinely are typical.

Escalate the texting plan to compliance and legal in writing rather than resolving it inside marketing.

The current calculation is not ROI. Average balance divided by email production cost measures neither return nor investment: balance is a liability the credit union pays interest on, and the denominator omits the $200 bonus, media, creative, branch handling, and the cost of funds.

A defensible structure:

• Incremental accounts, not total. Run the offer against a matched holdout group in one or two markets. Accounts opened in the treated group minus accounts in the holdout, scaled, is the incremental number. Without this, the campaign gets credit for members who would have joined anyway.
• Net of cannibalization. Exclude members who simply moved an existing checking account into the new one to collect $200.
• Revenue, not balance. First-year revenue is net interest income on the deposit spread plus interchange and fee income, minus the $200 bonus and servicing cost. A $2,000 average balance at a 2.5% spread is roughly $50 of annual net interest - against a $200 bonus. The bonus alone may exceed year-one revenue.
• Time horizon. Use 12 months minimum and state the attrition assumption. A 90-day retention requirement is a qualification gate, not a retention measure.

If the rebuilt figure is negative in year one and positive over three years, say exactly that. A defensible modest number protects the marketing function far better than a 340% that finance will dismember in one meeting.

The line is between incentivizing a genuine decision and engineering a number.

A 90-day requirement combined with a $200 bonus predictably produces a cohort that stays exactly 90 days and leaves. If the credit union knows this and still counts those accounts as growth, the campaign is manufacturing performance for the board rather than acquiring members. The ethical test is simple: would Summit be comfortable if the retention curve at 6, 12, and 24 months were published next to the acquisition count? If not, the design needs to change.

Practical steps:

• Lengthen the qualification to 180 days or require two qualifying direct deposits, which selects for genuine primary-account behavior.
• Report the bonus cohort separately at 6 and 12 months, with attrition shown. Do not blend it into total membership growth.
• Disclose the clawback terms plainly at account opening; a bonus that is silently reversed is a complaint generator and a UDAAP risk.
• Brief branch staff that the $200 is not to be used to talk an unqualified member into an account they do not need - incentive-driven mis-selling is where this design goes wrong in practice.

Tie the whole thing to one board metric: 12-month retained accounts per dollar spent, by cohort. That number cannot be gamed by a 90-day cliff, and it aligns marketing's interest with the credit union's.