Maintaining financial excellence to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic

As credit union CFOs help guide colleagues and board directors through the different phases of COVID-19, maintaining financial excellence enables greater flexibility, creativity, and purpose-driven decision making. By staying on top of rapidly changing financial performance data, finance leaders can help their executive colleagues quickly identify the most vulnerable areas of the business. With that richness of foresight, leaders gain the confidence they need to execute inventive programs that help the members who need them most while maintaining the credit union’s own financial health.

Ideal Credit Union, an $800 million Minnesota credit union, has begun putting exactly that kind of data-driven decisioning into action via greater automation of its financial reporting. By getting clean, easy-to-decipher data into the hands of leaders faster, EVP and CFO Dennis Bauer is empowering quick, confident decisions for the ultimate benefit of the credit union’s 50,000+ members.

The automation is courtesy of the credit union’s integration of the Financial Performance Management (FPM) tool. The tool generates a variety of reports, each customized to the credit union’s individual business users. According to Bauer, the customization is essential because it allows each department leader access to the most relevant, level-appropriate data. Equally as important is the granularity of data that can be accessed via the FPM tool. Drilling down to exactly the right insight at the right time adds to confidence the credit union teams have in the business intelligence derived from the solution.

 

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