Dow Chemical Employees’ Credit Union (dcecu.org) has announced its Member Giveback for 2020, with $15.57 million given back to eligible members on Jan. 1 via rebates and rewards deposited to their savings accounts.
This is the 40th consecutive year that DCECU has returned a share of its earnings to members, with a grand total of nearly $250 million given back during those four decades. The Member Giveback began in 1955 and has been offered in all but one year since.
For 2020, DCECU gave back 40% of the interest that members in good standing had paid on their eligible loans over the course of the year and gave them a cash reward equal to 40% of the interest/dividends they’d earned on their eligible deposits. Members in good standing also received a flat-rate 0.125% rebate on their total DCECU Visa® Debit Card transactions for the year, regardless of whether the transactions were signature-based or PIN-based – a change to the Visa® Debit Card rebate program to make it simpler and more straightforward.
“Even in such a difficult and unusual year, our members continued to engage heavily in our financial cooperative and entrust us to manage their deposited funds,” said DCECU Chief Executive Officer Michael Goad, who assumed leadership of the credit union in April after longtime President/CEO Dennis Hanson retired. “Our Member Giveback is just one of the ways we show appreciation for our members’ continued loyalty to DCECU – and for us to have the capacity to provide one of the highest Member Givebacks in the country during such an unusual and challenging year speaks volumes about the loyalty of our members.”
In terms of member engagement, a particularly noteworthy statistic is that DCECU funded more than $360 million in new loans for its members in 2020 – a 15% increase from 2019, despite all lending activities being conducted online or by telephone for approximately three-quarters of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Based on DCECU’s more than $2 billion in assets as of Dec. 31, 2020, the Member Giveback issued on Jan. 1 utilized approximately 0.78% of the credit union’s total assets.