By Ray Birch
BALTIMORE—What’s the best way to turn around a struggling credit union? According one CEO—who steered her organization away from an $800,000 loss in mid-2022 to $1-million in net income in 2022—the key has been focusing on staff to improve member service.
And the key to boosting staff focus has actually involved spending more money by ensuring their personal balance sheets also improve, according to Securityplus FCU CEO Tricia Szurgot. To that end, the organization added a $500 “Financial Health Deposit” to each employee’s paycheck at the close of 2023.
“If we can't get our employees excited about what we're doing, we're certainly not going to be able to get our members and our community excited about doing business with us,” said Szurgot. “Our Financial Health Deposit was born from our new strategic focus on financial health.”
‘I Knew Exactly What I Was Getting Into’
When Szurgot—who came to Securityplus from First Commonwealth FCU in Pennsylvania, where she was EVP/COO--joined the $580-million credit union as CEO in early 2022, she did so knowing it faced challenges.
“The board was looking for, in their words, a visionary CEO to turn around and transform a neglected and somewhat status quo organization,” she said. “When I joined the organization, I walked into a serious turnaround situation and I knew exactly what I was getting into. In less than two years we have taken Securityplus from an organization that was experiencing an $800,000 loss in mid-2022 to, by the end of 2023 posting over $1 million in net income. We ended this past year about 300% over our net income goal.”
Szurgot said Securityplus has been able to drive the improved financial results with a five-year strategic plan that has at its center the focus on staff. She explained that better attention and service to members begins with staff.
One-on-One Meetings
“One of the very first things that I did when I joined the organization was to sit down and speak with our employees, starting with leaders, then managers…(I sat) down one-on-one and just asked them a few basic questions,” Szurgot said. “And, after I had been asking them questions and we talked, at the end I would say, ‘OK, tell me what you really want me to know.’”
That led the CEO to understand employees at Securityplus felt they had not had opportunities to learn and grow.
“The culture had been toxic, I heard staff say. And that word was so polarizing for me that I realized we were not going to be able to transform this organization that's just been sort of neglected,” she told CUToday.info. “We had managed with more of a cookie-cutter status quo—what everybody else is doing. We needed to do something different.”
Tricia Szurgot
Hyper-Focused
In response, Szurgot said, she has been “hyper focused” on transforming the culture
“We’ve had to upskill, re-skill…and to do that we have to start with the financial health and psychological safety and overall well-being of our employees,” Szurgot explained. “Because happy employees equal happy members and financially healthy communities.”
Part of that is the new Financial Health Deposit, she explained.
Szurgot said the deposit is the “culmination” of a year of focusing on a “member obsession mindset.”
“We've coined that term to describe how we interact with each other and how we interact with our members. It's all centered on financial health,” she said.
Certified Counselors
Earlier in the year the CU rolled out the CUNA (now America’s Credit Unions) Credit Union Certified Financial Counselor program for all of its employees.
“We have a goal to have all of our frontline employees become certified financial counselors,” she said. “We also rolled out a new corporate incentive program where every employee across the organization can earn, at minimum, 5% of their annual compensation based on our strategic scorecard. We also increased our 401(k) match and have worked very hard to reinvigorate our employee benefits program. We’re looking to enhance benefits and keep any out-of-pocket costs to our employees at a minimum.”
Security Plus recently won the Mayor’s Business Recognition Award for the greater Baltimore community, and has also been named one of America's best regional banks/credit unions by Newsweek.
A New Plan
“We have gone from a serious turnaround situation to be ranked a top credit union in Maryland by Newsweek, in less than two years,” she said. “I brought in an entirely new executive leadership team. We have the new strategic plan, as I said.”
The credit union’s capital stands at 9.64% and ROAA is up from .18% in 2022 to .70%.
Employee attitudes have turned around 180 degrees, according to the CEO.
“We have a lot of tenured employees who over the years have wanted to get involved and wanted to learn and grow,” Szurgot explained. “But they didn't have the opportunities, or they didn't understand what their role was in achieving the strategic mission of the organization. That all has changed.”