NACUSO Annual Conference Wrap-Up

by Ron Daly 

Just got back from this year's NACUSO Annual Conference and happy to see that the attendance was up. Even more glad to see a number of new CUSOs and first-timers at the event. Many of my contemporaries, collaborators, business partners and friends were in attendance to share their thoughts and feelings about the current state of credit unions and CUSOs. The theme of this year's conference was "Big.Bold.Smart." I think the description fits. These three simple words sum up what credit unions need to be in the coming months and years. 

• Big - We need to drive up investments, membership and assets across the board to keep ourselves alive.
• Bold - As we've talked about before (in the wrap-up of the NACUSO Regional Meeting), CUs need to start drinking a little of their own Kool-Aid and acting like the super institutions we know they are. 
• Smart - In the course of being bigger and bolder, we need to stay smart and do right by our members and our bottom line. 

In my opinion, the conference did a great job of bringing together industry professionals to talk about ways to grow CUSO and Credit Union "opportunity share" through networks and collaboration. Interesting the difference between market share and opportunity share and how a small networked revenue piece of opportunity share could surpass the revenue brought in by large market share bought with a low-cost pricing model. 

Couple of questions that I jotted down that successful organizations ask themselves and might be worth your time to answer for your shop 

1. What is your value proposition? 
2. Why Me? AKA - Why should a customer or partner choose you for the service you are selling?
3. How does your value proposition help you compete? 
4. How can you switch your offering to compete for a share of the opportunity vs. a share of the market?

Some of the highlights that we wanted to share with our loyal Soapbox readers: 

• NACUSO has put a list of presentations from the conference online on their website. Take a look at presentations from Jeff Russell (TMG), Guy Messick (Messick & Weber), Dennis Dollar (Dollar & Assoc.), and George Hofheimer (Filene)
• NACUSO's Twitter feed had some great highlights - follow them and give it a read.
• CUInsight offered up some YouTube videos of Interviews (including one with yours truly!). Click here to view.
• CUInnovators' blog has a detailed wrap-up with even more links and info. Click here to read, and don't miss the interview with Robbie Wright on the aforementioned CUInsight video page.

Congratulations to our partner Ongoing Operations for winning CUSO of the year!