LA PORTE, Texas – Beacon FCU is the first Texas credit union to complete the Hispanic Opportunity Navigator, an assessment tool developed by Coopera Consulting that reportedly will provide the credit union with greater insight into serving a segment of the population that is disproportionately underserved.
The system is designed to measure a credit union’s progress in Hispanic outreach, the company said. Through extensive research and analysis, Coopera Consulting has identified three stages a credit union goes through on its path to successfully bridging the gap between credit unions and the Hispanic community:
• Discovery – in this stage the credit union may not know where to start, but it does have a growth mentality and a will to succeed.
• Emerging – in this stage the credit union has put in place a vast majority of the groundwork and foundation-building steps that help the credit union adapt to the market instead of waiting for the market to adapt to the credit union.
• Best practice – in this stage the credit union has captured more than its proportional market share of Hispanic members and is widely considered a preferred financial institution within the local Hispanic community.
Coopera, a unit of the Iowa CU League, has signed with the Texas CU League to market the system to Texas credit unions.
