This week, CreditUnions.com looks at developing and retaining leaders, catching skimmers, lowering insurance costs, boosting search relevance, and more.
Here are five don’t-miss data points for the week:
91%
Grow Financial Federal Credit Union launched its Step Up to Leadership development program in 2014 to cultivate the skills of ambitious staffers who wanted to move up in the organization.
The most recent graduating class of the program boasts an internal promotion rate of 64% and a retention rate of 91%.
In A Strategy To Retain Employees And Develop Leaders, Marsha Falkenburg, associate vice president of people development,discusses how the credit union created the program and best practices for developing leadership skills within a credit union’s existing ranks.
$43,000
Alert staff at Family Savings Credit Union helped bust a gas pump skimming scheme that netted the thieves more than $43,000 and an arrest.
After Family Savings detected the scheme, card issuers, retailers, and law enforcement worked together to bring the swindle to an end in April 2017, says Paula Knowles, the credit union’s fraud analyst and debit/ACH supervisor. Authorities say sevenfinancial institutions and more than 300 people in four states were victimized prior to that.
To learn more about the case and its resolution, read How An Alabama Credit Union Took Down A Gas Pump Skimmer.
22.4%
In the first three months of the year, first mortgage originations increased 15.9% to $30.9 billion and credit unions set a record high, 8.6%, in market share.
Credit unions are showing a greater propensity to offer a balloon/hybrid style mortgage, versus a traditional fixed-rate mortgage, than in the past. Across the industry, 22.4% of all first mortgage originations in the first quarter of 2017 were balloon/hybridstyle, compared with 9.8% in 2013.
In the past five years, not only the types of mortgage originations but also the average size of first mortgages have changed. Learn more in Mortgage Lending By The Numbers.
7,000
California Credit Union created California Members Title Insurance Company, a CUSO, in response to member feedback. Members reported other settlement services lacked respect and charged too much. The credit union felt it could do better.
The CUSO, which began operations in October 2015, offers full settlement services including title insurance and escrow for sale, refinance, commercial, and institutional transactions. The CUSO is licensed to operate throughout Californiabut mainly serves California Credit Union and other credit unions in Southern California.
The CUSO has processed more than 7,000 transactions since October 2015, mostly in refinances, saving members thousands. Learn more in 20 Months. 7,000 Transactions. Thousands In Member Savings.
98%
When it comes to getting potential members into a credit union’s branches, there’s no better place to start than local search. To ensure branches attract new members, it’s important they rank as highly as possible in local search results.
But how important is local search, really? Consider:
- 92% of consumers use local search to start evaluating where to take their business.
- 98% of searchers pick a business that is on the first page of the search results.
- The top five results on search engine results pages receive 67.6% of the clicks.
Learn more about local search and how credit unions can benefit in 4 Tips To Boost Branch Search Rankings.
Happy Reading!