An Ounce of Prevention is worth a Pound of Cure
Run by members for members, credit
unions offer ethical loans at favourable rates and by sharing the profits
equally, aim to give their savers better rates of interest than banks.
Running a thriving credit union is a bit like balancing a see-saw. On one
hand, you need plenty of savers in order to offer loans. However, on the
other you need plenty of borrowers because interest payments fund dividends.
Balancing that seesaw has become increasingly difficult since the
economic downturn as many people are nervous about borrowing. There’s also
stiff competition from aggressively marketed payday loan firms to contend with.
As a result, when our client George
took over as CEO of SPCU, a large Scottish credit union, his biggest challenge
was to uplift their flat loan portfolio. He needed to know:
“How many loans are coming to an end
this month? Who’s had a holiday loan from us, but hasn’t had one for two years?
Who might need to save, or pay for their children’s higher education?”
With over 9,000 members and a reliance
on manual processes, getting the answers was a painful process. It took
two staff, four days to deliver month-end information to the board. For George,
this was unacceptable.
There’s no crystal ball in business
This challenge is not unique to credit
unions. Every CEO has to ensure the books balance, the pipeline is full, the
promises are kept. While there is no such thing as a crystal ball, there’s
always plenty of information available.
From the beginning, George knew he had a
rich store of data, but the problem was unlocking it. The answers he needed to
actively run, and grow his business were buried in their database, but there
was no easy way of accessing them. He sums up their data dilemma: “We
could get the data out, but we couldn’t get it out in time, as soon as we’d
output the data it became historical.”
Next best thing to a crystal ball
When George contacted us he was
frustrated but he also had a feeling for what was possible. We had never
worked with a credit union before but we were very familiar with their
situation.
We built a holistic layer of technology
over their existing database and were able to pull the answers they needed into
one web-based report. As a result, what used to take an analyst the best
part of a week now takes under an hour. George explains: “I
can see whether we are up, down, above or below target. I’ve got a level of
grip over the business sitting at my fingertips. I can see the entire financial
health of my organisation on one screen.”
By improving their insight into their
data, the business has now saved 14 days a month of staff time.
The secrets are not in the data, but the insight
From our experience we know that access
to the data is just the beginning, the key is what you do with the answers now
you have them.
George sums up the challenge facing
most CEOs: “In business, when a crisis happens, we're always saying to
ourselves, ‘I wish I'd known that last week’ — but most of the time, the answer
was there in the data.”
That’s why we ask all our customers:
“What do you need to know before it’s too late?"
Customer Story - George Nedley from the Scottish Police Credit Union
Customer Story - George Nedley from the Scottish Police Credit Union
