LAS VEGAS – Innovation and collaboration were the watch words at NACUSO’s Annual Conference here Tuesday, as the trade group seeks to engineer the next generation of credit union service organizations.
Tom Davis, NACUSO president and CEO, told Credit Union Journal the No. 1 issue for the industry is sustainability. “If that is the issue, what is the answer?” he asked. “Innovation, or creating more value than one’s competitors. Collaboration is important because credit unions have notoriously small scales.”
What Davis foresees is a networked business design with open communication among groups of credit unions facilitated by CUSOs. The current model, he explained, consists of a service organization in the middle with spokes radiating off connecting the owner credit unions. The problem: communication by and large is limited to the individual CUs and the CUSO, with almost no independent interaction among the credit unions.
“It is about leveraging shared resources, as opposed to everybody standing alone,” Davis said. “One credit union can ask: ‘Who needs the excess capacity I have?’ or ‘Who has something that meets my needs?’ It works both ways. This can be for just about anything, such as a credit union that needs 17 hours of collections work done.”
The beauty of this "Version 3.0" system, Davis continued, is if one network cannot meet the needs of a CU, then it can connect with other networks, and so on. He hopes to someday see networks connecting with networks, some of which might be third-party vendors. “The best way to drive value to members is to use resources,” he said.
The CU movement is merely in the early adoption stage of the growth curve toward what eventually will be CUSOs 3.0, Davis assessed. He said NACUSO is in the process of trying to get people to understand the concept and implement it.
