We Florida Financial has a potential field of membership across 46 counties, but one credit union official says the institution believes there is still plenty of fresh growth potential close to home, for now.
“We are concentrated on Southeast Florida,” said Sandra Spence, VP of advertising and public relations at the Margate, Fla.-based credit union. “In 2017 we’re concentrating our efforts in this area because it’s a big population. There’s an expanding population down here and we think we still have plenty of untapped growth potential down here in the tri-county area.”
According to its third quarter 2016 call report, the credit union has nearly 17.7 million potential members in its field of membership, ranking it fifth among credit unions with the greatest number of potential members.
Spence described the credit union – which until a few years ago was known as City County CU as “pretty old school” in the way it goes about business development, adding that We Florida continues to work with employers in the region on SEG development.
“We do have a fairly robust education program, and we’re finding that in our society there’s more and more need for financial education,” remarked Spence. “A lot of our partners are calling us to come in and talk to groups and talk to their employees about general financial education topics. We’re getting a lot of growth in that area, meaning members are coming to us because of these old-school activities.”
While 46 additional counties across Florida would seem to give We Florida numerous openings for increasing its membership base, Spence said that for now the credit union is still working on plans for how it might expand to serving those counties – whenever it elects to do so. In the meantime, it’s growing in mostly traditional ways.
“In the Central Florida/Orlando area we have a very robust indirect lending program, so we are getting some growth there and we do plan to continue,” said Spence. “We have members in other parts of the state who do a lot of home equity loans or even first mortgages, but in terms of direct advertising to other counties, we don’t have any immediate plans for that.”
