Message from CEO James Gergen

For this newsletter I wanted to thank each of you for the ownership you feel for your credit union. Our member owners are loyal and engaged, they speak their minds, and they help us improve. When a bank gets something wrong their customers might just quietly move to another bank. When we get something wrong our member's reaction is "I own this place, I am not moving on, and I am going to speak my mind because they need to fix this." That is such a great outlook and a big competitive advantage for us! We are not seeing "quiet quitting" with our members. They own the place, they aren't leaving, and they expect us to get things right. They speak their minds and that is incredibly valuable to us!

Recently, a member shared he brought his granddaughter to CPM for her first vehicle loan and he was going to be the co-signer. Our pricing for loans with co-signers wasn't as competitive as a local bank, so we lost her loan and the chance to develop a relationship with an impressive young professional. He took the time to let us know and he got our attention. We strive to have our rates be incredibly competitive, and we love it when one generation of CPM members introduces the next generation to their family's credit union. It was really painful to hear we missed even this one opportunity to win over the next generation. As a result, our lending leaders quickly looked at our pricing for co-signer loans, recommended changes that would have offered the granddaughter a lower rate than the bank, and then we took the changes to our Board which promptly approved them. We let the grandfather know we changed our policy and our pricing thanks to him. As his input really helped us, as well as our other members, we offered him a gift card as our thanks. He suggested we send the gift card to his granddaughter, and that is what we did.

We also hear from our member-owners as they take the time to respond to our surveys. We are so grateful they take the time to do that! Based on survey feedback we recently made these additional improvements:

When completing forms to send money to CPM by direct deposit or wire transfer, members can now provide either the MICR number for their account or the account number and suffix for their account.

We improved our digital banking experience by making it easier than ever for members to see both their account balances and their available balances for all deposit accounts and revolving lines.

We also improved our digital banking experience by introducing a path to add an external transfer account instantly. Previously, the only option was to go through a multiple-day process involving CPM sending micro-deposits to the external account and then the user had to confirm those amounts to complete the process of adding that account. Our member-owners asked for a same day process and we delivered on that.

The engagement of our member-owners drives us to improve for the benefit of all members, and the result of member-owner feedback is a better brand of banking!