CONNECT Credit Union relaunched their image as connectfinancial late in 2005.
This relaunch was to reposition the financial organisation at the personal side of banking, lending, advice, and planning. The new brand was not only a significant upgrade to the ageing CONNECT image, it was a shift from product delivery i.e. personal loan or car loan to the life event of buying your first car. The 'life event' focus allows connectfinancial to be of more value to their customers by looking at peripheral financial planning and concerns relating to events such as buying a house, looking for house insurance, factoring in the additional costs related to purchasing a property etc.
The original connect website was built on the autopublish platform and the new site extended upon this infrastructure. In fact the CONNECT site had gone through two significant upgrades on this platform over the previous 5 years that Future Medium had supported it.
The shift to connectfinancial provided a welcome opportunity to remodel the presentation side of the CMS powered site and web applications. With a move to a full Java site v's the former Perl incarnations the site development was able to utilise much of the new framework that had been developed over the last few years by Future Medium's R&D team.
The connectfinancial site features:
- an interface to an internet banking facility provided by Swift;
- a large number of data collection systems, some of which integrate with business systems at connect;
- a range of calculators and web tools;
- next generation search engine optimisation techniques;
- a thorougly tested navigation model;
- suggestive '404' error pages (that recommend a page based on the users incorrect page request)
- close integration of branding values and messages (in conjuction with coo' ee Advertising Agency); and
- a new image repository system within autopublish
