CORONADO ISLAND, Calif. — Successful, growing credit unions all have one thing in common: a committed focus to being just that: successful, growing credit unions.
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That was the message from consultant Rory Rowland, who recently did a study of some of the top credit unions in the country to figure out what made them tick.
Rowland, a former CU CEO himself, did a study of some of the fastest-growing credit unions to determine what makes them tick and what characteristics they had in common, and then distilled that to strategies, advice and tips for other credit unions to emulate. Among his findings:
- Narrow your focus. Don't just say "I want to grow"—figure out what type of growth you want to go after: assets, loans, membership, etc.
- Different CUs grow differently. For example, 90% of the successful, fastest-growing CUs were community charters; 75% had a sales and service culture, 60% had relationship pricing. Only 10% were SEG-based credit unions, and the only way SEG credit unions grew was via merger.
- To grow you have to train your people to help you grown, and those training sessions should be frequent—even weekly. "Once a week, on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, open an hour later so you can hold a training session," Rowland suggested.
- Those training sessions need to have these three components: heroes, stories and demonstrations. Translation: members of the staff who have success stories they can share that help demonstrate the sales and service you want everyone to model.
- The top growers were all good at something, not everything.
- Make your member application a loan application. How? Just ask then to sign authorization to run a credit bureau check, and you're good to go.
- Automate loan decisioning as much as possible.
- Ask for the business—early and often. The best time to go after a member's business is when he or she first signs up. Thereafter, every third time you have contact with a member, remind that member he or she has been pre-approved for a loan (something you are able to do because you've turned your member application into a loan application).
- Ask for the business—proactively. "Get a Sertech list of who has a loan with a competitor and call them," Rowland advised. "Don't mail them, you have to call them. Ask, 'can we do some research to see if we can help you save some money?'" One credit union, he said, calls members on their birthdays to ask how the CU can save them money.
- Make your "continue button" a "submit" button. For online applications, get the name, address, phone number and the amount of money they're looking to borrow, then have a "continue" button that actually triggers the program to save just that information. That way if they don't get through the entire application, you have the most pertinent info (how much they need to borrow) and a way to contact them.
- Have a "closing specialist." No more allowing tellers to close out accounts. When a member wishes to close an account, have them work with a "closing specialist." For one thing, the closing specialist can find out right away why the member is leaving and potentially can address that reason and even keep the member from closing the account.
- Call closed accounts to see if you can try to win their business back.
