Treat your credit union like a professional sports team

I don’t know about you, but my life has been dominated by the NFL and Fantasy Football lately. My husband, son and I all went into a league together and my kiddo has been borderline obsessed with all the players, statistics, teams, and options available to him in the competition. This got me thinking about professional sports in general – they are crazy on the statistics!

All sports seem to be tracked down to the smallest detail. For example, as a Seahawks fan, we hear a lot about the height and stature of our quarterback, Russell Wilson. He is shorter than most quarterbacks but has still had an amazing career so far. A few weeks ago, the announcers were going into great detail about the size of Russell’s hands and how they compare [MY1] to his fellow quarterbacks that are taller than he is. According to the article, he is 5’11” with the hands of someone 6’5”. Did you know they track things like that? Something that minute makes a big difference in the long run to allow him to be a stellar quarterback. Hands that are larger than most men of his stature means he can get a better grip on the ball. If they didn’t have the statistics of all quarterbacks to make the comparison, the Seahawks might not know in the draft that Russell was a good guy to take a chance on (obviously, there are other factors involved, but I can bet that most of those have statistics to back them up too!).

So, what does that mean for credit unions?

We have tons of data. Mountains of data. Oceans of data. Numbers and statistics everywhere, but most of us don’t even scratch the surface of the data available to us to use it to our advantage. What is our “hand size comparison” that is just sitting there waiting to be tracked? If we looked at some of our data more completely, categorized it and used it to our advantage, what could it do for the credit union? Decrease the average age of our membership? Add new members? Increase loan penetration? Why not? Shouldn’t we be able to identify if someone will be profitable for us even if they look “too short” at first glance?

Have you found a statistic to track in your credit union that has made a difference? I would love to hear about it! And, go Hawks! (Sorry – I couldn’t help myself)