In A Push For Liquidity, GTE Financial Rolls Out Business Services Built For Nonprofits

GTE Financial FCU ($2.9B, Tampa, FL) has a simple name for its new account offering for nonprofit organizations: “Business Nonprofit Checking.” The account’s tagline is also straight to the point: “Banking done right, for those doing good.”

There’s a lot of strategy and mission — and a fair amount of testing and soft launching — behind the program, which is moving through its final stages before going live.

The account reduces or eliminates fees on a variety of services and products, including remote deposit capture, stop payments, wire transfers, ACH and treasury management, merchant and payroll services, non-cash items and cash deposits, checks, and money orders.

The credit union also offers a Community Partnership option that includes six months of free premium checking and early pay features for employees and board members, along with retirement planning, financial education, and free advertising and event participation opportunities.

GTE Insurance, the credit union’s own independent agency, also is available to help nonprofits find affordable, appropriate coverage for their businesses.

The idea is to be a one-stop financial shop for nonprofits.

“We can’t help with top-line revenue, but we can help them manage their bottom line so they can do even more for the community,” says Manny Aguilar, chief commercial and advisory services officer at GTE Financial.

Despite what Aguilar says about top-line revenue, the credit union has indeed helped some Tampa-area nonprofits in that area, too. GTE Financial raised and contributed more than half a million dollars to local charities and initiatives in 2022.

Some of these entities were among the first users of GTE Financial’s new nonprofit checking accounts. The credit union has migrated them over as part of the account’s soft launch, which also includes a landing page that recently went live. The soft launch allows the credit union and nonprofits alike to test the new offer, including spotting such bugs as the system automatically imposing a stop-payment fee instead of waiving it.

Altruism, Meet Liquidity

When the new program goes live, GTE will launch an outbound calling campaign along with digital marketing, print advertising, and other initiatives all geared toward helping GTE Financial meet the double bottom line of doing good while doing well.

“The altruistic reason we’re doing this is that we’re not-for-profit ourselves and should be helping other not-for-profits in our community,” Aguilar says. “It’s the right thing to do.”

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There’s a financial gain for GTE Financial, too, which Aguilar doesn’t shy away from discussing.

“There’s a liquidity concern right now for credit unions and commercial banks, and this is an opportunity for us to garner deposits at a lower cost than we could by offering higher rates on CDs,” he says. “We can’t issue stock or senior debt, but we can do something that’s both altruistic and operational, so we can grow more deposits to lend in a fair, profitable way.”

A Target Audience That’s Just The Right Size

The credit union’s target audience for the new accounts is smaller and mid-size organizations.

“We’re talking about people like the Police Athletic League, of which I’m the board president, or a spinal cord injury organization that helps people get services, or a guide dog support group,” Aguilar says. “The size of our target organizations dovetails nicely with the size of our credit union. We’re not huge, but we’re big enough and nimble enough to put together something like this.”

GTE Financial currently has approximately 8,000 business accounts among its 240,000 members. According to Aguilar, only a small fraction of those are non-profits. He thinks the credit union can do better.

“Let’s say we can grow that to 10,000 in five years and about 5% of those are not-for-profits,” Aguilar says. “If you extrapolate that into the population of our MSA, we’ll have done a lot of good for a lot of organizations that are adding to the greater good of our community.”

Gaining Accounts And Liquidity

The accounts are the creation of the GTE’s business services team, a group of former bankers that Aguilar pulled together after he joined the credit union in 2019 with 20 years of experience in commercial banking, primarily with Regions Bank.

The team has identified a wide range of products and services for which the credit union can cut costs for accountholders rather than treat them as profit centers.

“There’s a $2 million foundation for a medical association we work with,” Aguilar says. “We can serve as its fiduciary and save it a significant amount over what a commercial bank would have to charge for the same services.”

All that adds to the bottom line for the not-for-profits and, ideally, for the credit union, too, both in growing its own balance sheet and that big intangible — goodwill.

“It’s too early to say how much liquidity we’ll gain,” Aguilar says. “But my gut feeling is the community will reward us because we’re trying to make life easier for all of us. More specifically, more organizations will trust us with their operational accounts and funds.”

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