Lending Perspectives: Five loan and leadership lessons from COVID-19

Sitting down at my computer at the end of another long day, I find comfort and stress relief thinking about what our credit union has achieved in the last six weeks. In early to mid-March, our members and our staff quickly transitioned from COVID-19 prevention in the form of washing our hands and not touching our faces to a shelter-in-place order in a matter of 48 hours.

Operationally though, the impacts had only just begun. Staff at risk of being acutely affected by the virus were sent home. Staff that could work from home started transitioning to a different and, in most cases, less productive environment. Requests for help from our members came flooding in. There’s a lot of things I could talk about that we faced and dealt with very quickly during a very short period of time. However, here are five things that I think were my most important lessons learned or validations of what we already knew about our organization.

1. Past results are not a predictor of future success.

A variation of this is most often used when describing the return on an investment, but was certainly applicable to my credit union and, specifically, our plans to assist members. We have a lot of practice either helping our members, or being prepared to help them, over many years. Ent was very much ahead of the curve with loan modification plans before the Great Recession. We developed what we believe were innovative strategies to reduce payments and interest rates through unprecedented member outreach as early as February of 2008. We had a series of natural disasters in Colorado between 2012 and 2017, from fires to catastrophic hail storms, for which we developed emergency loan plans to assist members with short-term funding. We also had developed a government shutdown loan plan as well. In short, we felt we were ready for anything.

 

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