This week, CreditUnions.com takes a look at wellness programs, small credit union success stories, secondary market declines, and more.
Here are five data points you need to know:
672
At Patelco Credit Union, employee benefits questions are all funneled through ALEX. And no, ALEX is not a person.
ALEX is the friendly online benefits bot who has replaced annual open enrollment meetings that were time consuming and less attended every year.
The credit union’s HR operations director says ALEX has been well received as he explains the various options the employer offers. Last year ALEX had 672 conversations with team members, and has transformed how Patelco communicatesbenefits.
Read more about how Patelco and a Vermont credit union help employees maintain healthy habits in How To Succeed At Wellness Programs
Four
In September 2009, four of the seven board members of Keys FCU signed a voluntary conservatorship order, which effectively removed the board members from their positions and instated the NCUA as the credit union’s board and supervisory committee.
Rather than immediately find a merger partner or dissolve the credit union, the NCUA let Key FCU’s management try to turn things around at the small Sunshine State cooperative. It was all on the line, and they only had one chance to get it right.
Learn how the credit union figured it out and other strategies from credit union’s mightier than their size in Small Credit Union Success Stories
84.3%
The loan-to-share ratio at Wyoming credit unions was nearly 5 percentage points higher than national average as of fourth quarter 2016, at 84.3%
And in fact, Wyoming credit unions are all about growth. They have posted some of the strongest growth rates of any state in the nation, and it appears more Wyomingites are selecting credit unions to be their primary financial institution.
Read more in State In The Spotlight: Wyoming
$76,652
Concentrating on making home loans to its first-responder members has helped Long Beach Firemen’s Credit Union stand out among its peers in several measures of member engagement, including the key metric of average member relationship.
Adding up all the shares and loan total among the 3,236 members at LBFCU yielded an average member relationship of $76,652 at first quarter. Helping to drive that performance is a huge emphasis on mortgage lending.
LBFCU has been averaging about 15% in first-mortgage penetration among its membership since at least 1998, when Callahan & Associates first started reporting those figures. About 98% of its loan portfolio is in mortgages, compared with 40.4% for the nationalaverage.
Read more in The Driving Factors Of Average Member Relationship
$11.1 Billion
So far, 5,044 credit unions have reported 1Q 2017 data, representing 88.7% of the industry’s assets. Based on that data, credit unions will have originated $30.9 billion in first mortgage loans this quarter. This quarter’s estimate is a 15.8%expansion over the $26.7 billion seen in 1Q 2016.
With double-digit mortgage origination growth, it’s perhaps surprising to see sales to the secondary market growing at a slower pace, with a 12.3% growth rate to total $11.1 billion for the quarter.
Learn more about credit unions and the secondary market in Percentage Of Sales To The Secondary Market Decline For 1Q 2017
Happy Reading!
