Protect The Future

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