Meeting the Needs of Members Today and Tomorrow
We were delighted to host another successful credit union conference in Manchester on 17th January, with almost 100 attendees from 55 organisations from Britain, Ireland, Romania and the USA. Thanks to everyone who joined us.
The overall theme was Meeting the Needs of Members Today and Tomorrow, with a range of relevant presentations from Drew Povey on leadership, Rob McIntosh of Dozens on building digital community, Marloes Nicholls of the Finance Innovation Lab on open banking and Todd Proulx from f64 business services on credit union core IT systems. A full report on the proceedings is available for download here, and the full programme with the agenda and attending organisations is here. You can also view and download the presentations by Marloes and Todd here and here respectively. We are very grateful to all our fantastic speakers, who are happy to be contacted – email details are shown in the programme.
Feedback suggests the levels of interest were pretty evenly matched across these diverse subjects, which generated excellent discussion between attendees – our conferences are a great place to meet new and familiar faces from across the credit union movement and beyond, and share ideas and best practice.
At the end of an information-filled day, Dr Paul Jones, Director of Research, noted some of the themes that had emerged, including the importance of:
- Good analytics to evaluate and anticipate the needs of members
- Rigorous analysis of loan performance to reveal effectiveness and profitability service delivery
- Realising that much can be done to improve loan products and delivery within current legislative and regulatory constraints
- Speed, efficiency and convenience of loan application and delivery channels
- Ensuring our credit unions have a modern, digital suite of services to compete effectively
- Working with Government and the regulator in the respective jurisdictions to ensure that legislation and regulation in relation to lending is fit for purpose.
There was also an opportunity for an impromptu presentation to mark the visit to British credit unions of Dr Iulia Pasa, Director of Supervision at the Romanian credit union trade association UNCAR.
For queries, please contact Nick Money, nick.money@swobodacentre.org.
