COVID-19 puts two big pressures on credit unions: Deploy capital and transform digitally
Credit union leaders who succeed at tackling these challenges will be celebrated and remembered for decades.
When governments ordered businesses to shut their doors in March, the stock market fell off a cliff. Private investors withdrew their capital from volatile assets and decided to sit on cash until the markets calmed down. To stimulate the economy and prevent it from collapsing, the Fed lowered interest rates to the rock bottom. In turn, the government supported taxpayers through a variety of monetary measures.
As a result, technology stocks rallied, and bank accounts became more and more flush with deposits. All these events put two big pressures on credit unions, which now have to:
- deploy more capital quickly—that is, make loans, and
- move their business and member engagement online to meeting rising demand for digital service delivery.
These are not unknown challenges to CU leaders. However, never before did the world change so much so quickly. Leaders had to send their teams home for work, find new ways to deploy capital and compress half a decade of digital transformation into 12 months.
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