STARTING AND GROWING A CREDIT UNION - THE FIVE CRUCIAL INGREDIENTS

There are five essentials that must always be in place at the beginning, and increasing, to start and maintain a financially viable and operationally self sufficient credit union, to satisfy both the needs of its owner-members and the Regulatory Authorities, who are there to protect these interests.

• People – to start it
• People – who express an interest in joining the credit union, becoming its “owner-members”.
• People – to help run it in a variety of unpaid voluntary roles; ideally promoting the credit union to their family, friends and colleagues.
• People – to manage it on a day to day basis “24/7 – 365”
• People – to take the ultimate legal and custodial responsibility for it; prepared to join and take on its care and custody as members of the Board of Directors/Committee of Management to carry out key tasks and the same people or others to run it day-to-day. This is a legal requirement for every credit union. The development and education of these people can be provided by the Credit Union Consultancy through its Company.

How to Grow an Existing Credit Union

The Company has engaged in developing credit unions all over the country since 1994, encouraging credit union managements and those holding voluntary positions to apply existing trading skills and acquiring new ones to develop their credit union.

A credit union in its purest form is:

• A collector of deposits (money) as shares from its owner-members •
• With loans being made from its total deposits on an individual basis to its owner-member depositors
• To be repaid by instalment, that includes an element of interest charged.

A credit union is no more complicated than that and requires only all the business skills to accomplish these key tasks, click here to find out more about “Learning and Doing.”

How Much Money is Required to Start a New Credit Union?

Contrary to the statements produced by many other commentators, it doesn’t take vast sums of money to start or develop a credit union, if business skills dormant or present in those undertaking the initiative are developed and applied to key tasks, such as procuring all the necessary facilities and infrastructure.

This is particularly so now with the growth of highly developed reliable computer software accounting and management packages that can be rented (subject to terms) from “cutting edge” suppliers; and these systems are capable of running a credit union in “real” time and servicing many of the requirements of its owner-members remotely.

This is a real benefit to a start-up credit union, reducing the need to raise funds to purchase expensive computer software packages and to existing ones, bringing their services and systems up-to-date at a lower cost.

There is no laid down template to fit every circumstance. During my years of experience in the credit union sector, plus ideas and inspiration drawn from my international network of credit union colleagues, I have gained the know-how to make the most of facilities and systems, in many circumstances already existing, required for the start-up of a new credit union and the development of an existing one.

Initially, you and I will talk and during the course of that conversation, it will be necessary to discover just four things, which in sequence are the other key ingredients for developing a credit union, either in the community or workplace.

• 1st - the presence of some dedicated “people” who wish to lead the project and are prepared to be a part of it in different roles until the launch of the credit union and beyond.
• 2nd - to find out what physical infrastructure and financial resources are available to those “people” immediately.
• 3rd - to find out the physical infrastructure and financial resources that can be provided by the community or workplace the credit union is going to serve.
• 4th - to find out the amount of money and infrastructure that has to be provided to the credit union start-up to ensure its success; and to explore and work out the methods to be used by the credit union leadership for obtaining these.

A perfect example of this route and a credit union that travelled it successfully, with very little physical resources and finance available at the start, is the credit union set up to serve those to live and work in Ipswich, which is now county-wide. Click here to learn more about my Made-to-Measure Syllabus for Credit Union Business Education and Development

You will learn –

• How to get individuals to come forward to join and help develop the credit union
• How to organise and address different types of awareness meetings to promote interest
• How to organise a lay leadership team and volunteer support.

To get started contact