By Lisa Freeman, Managing Editor
SANTIAGO, Chile—Credit unions in the U.S. pride themselves on their community involvement, but here, sometimes the credit union IS the community, and for miles around, at that.
“It’s amazing to me that [COOPEUCH CU] was founded in 1967, and it’s 370,000 members, 73 branches and $1.2 billion dollars,” said Catherine Roberts, CEO of Community Choice in Michigan. “We’re $450 million, and much of that is through mergers, and we’re 70 years old.”
Add to that the fact that Chilean credit unions are not allowed to offer share drafts and have monthly minimum savings requirements, and the growth this credit union has enjoyed is all the more astonishing.
Roberts is one of seven women from Canada and the U.S. credit union movements traveling through Peru and Chile as part of the World Council of Credit Union’s Women Leadership and CU Engagement program. In partnership with WOCCU, CU Journal has been following their trek every day this week.
The key to the impressive organic growth of Chile’s largest credit union—which just happens to have a woman at its helm—appears to be the way the credit union is an integral thread in the fabric of the lives of its members and the community at large, Roberts suggested. “Their scholarship program is phenomenal—they’re offering full scholarships, and they’re producing doctors and engineers. They get involved in the libraries, because that’s a common meeting place for anything and everything here, and they’re gaining members along the way,” she related. “They identify a school and then for three years they dedicate money and effort to bringing a credit union to the school, and at the end of three years, they walk away, and the school has its own credit union.”
So, they’re growing the movement as a whole, as well as their own membership. But the membership growth and business development efforts are noteworthy, as well.
“I thought it was interesting the way they have 500 business development people to go out and identify SEGs they can work with,” said Winona Nava, CEO of Guadalupe CU in New Mexico. “They publish a magazine twice a year, but it’s not just about the credit union and finances, they have other stuff in there, too, like health issues and other topics, because the credit union here isn’t just about the credit unions, it’s the community.”
It’s a philosophy, she said, but the lessons she’s learning also have a practical turn. “We survey our staff about staff satisfaction, and we survey our members for member satisfaction, but here they survey the frontline staff about what members are telling them,” she commented. “Sometimes we think we don’t need to do something formal, that our tellers will just share with us what they are hearing, but I think sometimes we need to do a better job of asking them, of giving them the opportunity to express themselves.”
Next stop: some of the outlying branches to see how COOPEUCH ties its more far-flung branches into its main operations in Santiago.
