BankThink

A Best Practice lies in the eye of the beholder–and there it too often stays unseen by anyone and everyone else. Gems hidden in back-office cubicles. Pearls invisible to anyone not on your network. Diamonds disguised as “just something we came up with.”

Ask any credit union employee what makes his or her institution different, and chances are, the answer will be “personal service,” or “We know our members by name,” or “We’ve taken care of members, their children and grandchildren for decades,” or “We’re part of the community and part of their families.”

Research firm Forrester predicts that the number of households that bank online will grow by 55% over the five-year period of 2006 to 2011. The total online banking penetration is projected to reach 76% of households by 2011.

A recent New York Times article addressed the fact that lenders–represented by the American Bankers Association, the Mortgage Bankers Association, and the Independent Community Bankers Association–have been lobbying hard to limit proposed rules that would curb certain lending practices and require greater disclosures.

It seems that just about every credit union is in one of three stages: considering, going through, or just finishing a rebranding.

With the average consumer carrying four different credit cards and a debit card, how do you get your card to become “top of wallet”? That’s a question every credit union should be asking, especially at a time when the need to boost income has never been greater and the techniques of competitor card issuers never more predatory.

In a slower economy one of the first places companies of all kinds look for cuts is the marketing budget. In service businesses it can be very difficult to tie revenue coming in directly to the “expense” of marketing, so this can feel like a very logical decision.

Many monetary incentive plans for frontline staff are too complicated and don’t work. The following incentive features will lead to incentive structures that will work:

As a prior employee of T&C FCU and a current employee of CCF FCU I find myself unsettled with the merger of T&C and USA (reported on CU Journal’s website, May 2). Since both credit unions are doing extremely well, especially given the state of the economy, I have to wonder that something like this may cause a problem in regard to our fight against the banks to maintain our tax-exempt status. Is this merger really necessary? Although the concept of the credit union doesn’t change-there are a lot of people out there who are only going to look at the dollar signs and see that these credit unions are making large profits, so why should they be able to continue with a tax-exempt status? It has always been an uphill battle in Washington to continue fighting the banks on this issue. I just hope that this type of merger doesn’t hurt credit unions in general lose that fight.

Think of it as a Growth Spurt. In last week’s issue we featured some of the voluminous amounts of information shared during Credit Union Journals’ Grow Show. In this issue you’ll find coverage of the meeting beginning on page 22. And below you’ll find just a fraction of some of what else was shared at Grow Show: