When Bill Cheney led the National Trade Association, policymakers often asked him, “If credit unions are as good a deal as you say, why isn’t everyone a member of a credit union?”
His response was always, “Exactly!”
“If I were the CEO of a bank, my job would be to maximize the value of that bank for the shareholders,” said Cheney, who is now the CEO of SchoolsFirst Federal Credit Union, the largest credit in California for school employees and their families. “We don’t pay dividends to shareholders because we don’t have shareholders; we pay dividends to our members. Our job is to put members first. It’s really an amazing business model.”
As a member-owned, not-for-profit financial cooperative, SchoolsFirst is part of a unique and trusted banking experience 90 years in the making.
Founded on June 12, 1934 during the Great Depression, what was then the Orange County Teachers Credit Union began when 126 school employees pooled $1,200 to establish it. The credit union has grown steadily since.
A 2020 merger with Sacramento-based Schools Financial Credit Union made the state’s largest credit union even bigger. Originally serving Orange County, it now covers the entire state, offering a variety of products and services such as checking and savings, credit cards, home and car loans and retirement planning.
With this expansion, SchoolsFirst’s big challenge is educating younger generations about credit unions while safeguarding its members’ finances against cyberattacks and effectively integrating new technologies.
Southern California News Group spoke to Cheney about SchoolsFirst’s 90 years of serving school employees and their families and what the future might hold. The interview has been edited for space:
Q: Do all credit unions focus on a specific community?
A: Credit unions have what’s called a field of membership. Our field of membership is the educational community and has changed only in the sense that we’ve expanded geographically.
Q: Did that expansion coincide with your recent merger?
A: No, we actually expanded our charter before that.
Schools Financial became part of SchoolsFirst on January 1, 2020, but our systems were integrated toward the end of the year. When we planned the merger, we didn’t plan to send everybody home in the middle of March — hats off to our team for pulling it off.
Q: What impact did the pandemic have on your day-to-day business?
A: We’re an essential business, so we kept all our branches open except those serving colleges, universities and school districts. For example, we closed a small branch at Cal State Fullerton, but our biggest, oldest and busiest branch in Santa Ana stayed open.
We had to move quickly to protect the employees at our branches. But we also sent hundreds of team members home, so we had to make arrangements for them to work from home.
That first week, I reassured our team — and the rest of our leadership team did as well — that everybody’s job was protected regardless of their role in the organization and that our members needed us now more than ever.
Q: And how did you reassure your members?
A: We have an emergency loan program for …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
