Earlier writing. I wrote this during my time in financial services, and it’s left here as it was published. More earlier writing
Your Credit Union Forgot It Was a Cooperative
Walk into most credit unions today and try to find the difference between them and the bank across the street. Same overdraft fees. Same upsell scripts. Same member who is treated exactly like a customer.
We traded the cooperative model away, one growth target at a time.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: I’ve sat in the rooms where it happens. There’s never a meeting where someone says let’s stop serving the members who need us most. It dies in increments. A fee structure that quietly mirrors the for-profit down the road. A lending model that optimizes for the members who already have money. A marketing budget aimed at the easiest acquisitions instead of the hardest needs.
Mission drift doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in the data.
What the data tells me
When I look at a credit union’s portfolio, I can tell you within an hour whether it still believes its own charter. The signals live in:
- Who actually gets approved, and at what rate, by income band
- Whether the products that serve the financially stressed are subsidized or quietly priced to discourage them
- How much of the surplus goes back to members versus into growth for its own sake
- Whether member appears anywhere in the metrics leadership actually reviews
A cooperative that measures itself like a bank will eventually become one. You manage what you count, and most credit unions stopped counting the thing that made them different.
The original credit union movement was hard-nosed. It answered a real problem: people of modest means couldn’t get fair credit, so they pooled their own. That’s structure, and it still works.
The credit unions that will matter in ten years are the ones that rebuild the measurement around the mission. The actual numbers that determine what gets funded, who gets served, and how surplus gets returned.
You can’t drift back. You have to steer.
So ask your team the question that never makes the agenda: if we disappeared tomorrow, would the members we were chartered to serve notice, or would they just open an account at the bank across the street?
The answer is in your data. You just have to be willing to look.
