Plan Your Best Strategy with These Five Trends

When it comes to your credit union’s growth in tomorrow’s economy, it’s all too easy to slide into the attitude of “prepare for everything and hope for the best”. It’s an admirable approach, but everything includes quite a few scenarios and the best is rarely the way things end up going. Don’t overextend yourself while placing your organization’s future in the hands of chance. Credit unions that dedicate their resources along all of the right avenues year after year do so by planning for the best instead of hoping for it.

Embrace insightful resource allocation. Strategic planning will allow you to commit fewer resources toward unlikely scenarios and less lucrative economic futures, freeing up those resources for areas more worthy of attention. Take a step back and get a good look at the current and future shape of economics to determine the direction that your strategy should be moving.

This year’s CUNA Environmental Scan Report (E-Scan) provides market insights, industry updates and trend information designed to drive effective strategy. In our rapidly changing economic environment, decision-makers must be constantly analyzing and enhancing their credit unions’ strategy, including economics, marketing, lending, finance, technology, compliance, human resources and more. Take a detailed look at today’s economy to reveal potential areas of growth that you may not have considered, and from there, you’ll be able to explore plausible and probable scenarios in order to best plan for your members’ needs in the coming year.

Use these five trends:

• Marketing to Generation Y – Generation Y is nothing like its predecessors, and 2012 research shows that 48% of nonmembers ages 18 to 24 are not at all familiar with credit unions. To capture the attention of this generation, credit unions must develop a Gen Y strategy including self-service products and customized social media messaging.
• Lending in the face of recovery – Credit unions nationwide are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. After years of slow growth, credit union lending is expected to increase 5.5% in 2013 and 6.5% is 2014. Now is the time to develop strategies to get ahead of the recovery and re-engineer your lending processes.
• Mobile payments growth – As mobile payments grow by 68% annually, credit unions are faced with a movement-wide opportunity to make the most of this shift. However, this transaction type also presents a great threat as credit unions will be challenged to retain member engagement and growth.
• CEO compensation trends – The executive compensation landscape is undergoing a major change: Competition for high-performing executives is intense, and credit union boards are beginning to tie CEO pay to their goals. In fact, last year, nearly 60% of credit union CEO employment contracts were initiated by the boards. Foresight into CEO compensation trends and sound retention strategies can ensure future leadership success.
• Serving the underserved – Revenue from serving unbanked and underbanked consumers totaled $85 billion in 2012. With approximately 68 million U.S. adults falling into this category, credit unions have a rare opportunity to meet the needs of this underserved market.

With the CUNA E-Scan Report and its monthly newsletter updates, a credit union can make strategic decisions with confidence. Stay on top of current market and economic trends and the effect they’ll have in the future so that the plans you make today will unfold into the results you want to see tomorrow. You can uncross your fingers now – the future state of your credit union is no longer up to chance.