Message from CEO James Gergen CEO James Gergen

Thanks for your patience and flexibility as the pandemic has altered how we serve you. We are pleased to again be operating with our lobby doors open. We continue to require taking temperatures and wearing masks in our lobbies, and we thank you for respecting our staff and our protocols. We have the best members!

Our staff take pride in being essential workers, and I am very grateful to each of them for being there for you and our other members during these times. Just like you, they faced new challenges and had to bear many new concerns. And like you, they put those aside when it was time to help others. They left their troubles and concerns at the work door each day and focused on your needs.

I am especially grateful to our staff for their continued support of our members in need. They continued to support them with special Lifeline loans, skip-a-payments, consumer loan extensions, payment suspension agreements for
mortgages, and special waivers of fees and penalties. We are proud to walk our talk.

Having a mission and serving others gives us purpose and joy, and it feels great to have completed several important initiatives to serve you better. Since the last newsletter:

  • We upgraded the air filtering system at each of our retail and back office locations by installing bi-polar ionization systems which kill molds, bacteria, and viruses flowing through our air handlers.
  • Our digital banking rocks! We set our goal to be the best in the State, and our rating in the Apple Appstore is now at 4.9 stars! We are not resting on our laurels. More enhancements are underway!
  • We completed our work to support GooglePay and SamsungPay for our debit and credit cards. We have long supported ApplePay, and now we support three wallets.
  • We set records for mortgage originations. Refinance activity continues to boom, and the purchase market is now hot in many areas. Our turn times are slower than we would like, but thankfully we were adding capacity for other reasons prior to the pandemic, so our turn times were not hit as hard as many others in the industry. We continue to add capacity to meet demand. I never thought I would see a 30-year mortgage with a rate under 2.00% for the first 5 years, but here we are.