Failure, future and cooperative finance

by: William Azaroff and David Klavitter

When we joined the Filene Research Institute’s prestigious i3 (Ideas, Innovation, Implementation) Group in late 2012, we were excited. That’s because we were invited to join a group of peers and colleagues from credit unions across North America to focus on innovating concepts, solutions and advancements in service of credit unions.

And we didn’t mean to, but we started off by breaking some rules.

In i3, we were meant to work in six month cycles. Within each cycle, participants must ideate, innovate and implement ideas and report back on to the rest of the i3ers and industry leaders about lessons learned and results. This method is pretty cool, especially because it forces i3ers to slow down and focus deeply on the idea portion of the process.

In our i3 cohort, we started looking through that lens at how can we help our members’ overall well-being and reward and incentivize members based on a number of factors–that go way beyond the traditional thinking of consumer finance. We came up with the Credit Union Well-Being Incentive Program.

Our hypothesis was that members who make good choices by living more responsibly–in terms of their environmental footprint, community activities and personal actions–are less risky, highly aligned and more loyal members who will become stronger advocates and more profitable over the long term.

And according to the Filene Method, we totally failed.

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