When Vantage Credit Union was hit with unforeseen expenses a few years back, the Missouri-based credit union had to detour its budget allocated to developing mobile banking apps.

“We had to scrap some projects,” Eric Acree, executive vice president of Vantage Credit Union, tells Bank Innovation.

Nonetheless, the credit union felt it still needed to develop something beyond a mobile-friendly website and found another way to innovate – Twitter. In September 2009, the credit union made a mark in banking innovation when it debuted tweetMyMoney, a service that allows people to access account information and make transfers via Twitter.

Now, two and half years later, Vantage Credit Union tells Bank Innovation it has — finally — allocated budget for mobile banking apps and expects to go live with the apps for iPhone and Android this summer. Vantage Credit Union will be using an outside mobile developer for the project, though Acree would not identify the service provider.

“We’re in the process of negotiating with the vendor,” Acree says. “We’re just going through the legal steps. We are almost there.”

Though Acree also remained vague on the mobile banking features the credit union will deploy, Acree says it will be “full service.”

“The idea is to try to put as much functionality in the first release as we can,” Acree says.

And though the app will be nothing “above and beyond what others have done,” he says, it will match existing functionality in the market. Plus, the credit union plans to differentiate itself from other institutions in future versions of its mobile banking apps. To date, Acree says it’s too early yet to know how that might be executed.

After deploying its mobile efforts, Vantage Credit Union plans to makeover its website, too. Vantage has more than $650 million in assets and greater than 100,000 members. 

Acree doesn’t see anything out of order in launching one of the first Twitter banking services followed by producing a mobile banking platform months later.

Of the decision to develop a Twitter app, he says, “We felt we needed to do something.”