Mike Mercer, president of Georgia Credit Union Affiliates, was recently honored with the Herb Wegner Award for Lifetime Achivement. The remarks below were delivered by Mr. Mercer after receiving the award during the Herb Wegner Awards dinner in Washington, D.C.
By Mike Mercer
In 1980, I developed a friendship with an economist at the Federal Bank of Atlanta. When he retired, he did work for the World Council of Credit Unions in Russia and South America. At one point, he told me that American credit unions are relevant, even meaningful in some places. but he went on to say that credit unions in America are not vital to people.
By ‘vital’ he meant essential. For a long time I dismissed his observation as irrelevant semantics. After all, most of us regard economists as not being vital to people, either!
But I have to admit, the distinction between relevance and vitality began to torment my thinking as years passed. That distinction has become my way of framing possibilities for credit unions in the future. You see, people will always need, but rarely want, to save money. They will also need convenient ways to convert their money into things. And they will, thankfully, desire to obtain things with money that they don't yet have.
Helping people do these things is fundamental to credit union relevance. Credit unions can exist for a long time if they aim for relevance. But relevance has a habit of becoming ordinary. Credit unions could become transformational in our society by aspiring to be vital, indispensable, and essential.
To be relevant, credit unions must provide quality service at good prices. To become vital, credit unions will have to find new ways to help people afford their lives. Our fortune is tied to the well-being of the great sea of Americans who hold middle class aspirations, those who imagine better times ahead. Our role is to enable better times. Our mission should be to provide hope.
If you think about it, relevance is a local issue. Good prices, great service. But vitality is a collective aspiration. Building a reputation that “credit unions will help me afford my life.”
To achieve vitality and indispensability in the minds of people we will all have to grow in the same direction to achieve an institutional reputation of the central helpfulness. System collaboration and a credit union consolidation have been with two great forces of our time. Will these forces converge to forge a common crusade for vitality? Or will they just coexist while local domain growth routinely trumps global initiative?
Martin Luther King had a way with words. While incarcerated in Birmingham he wrote this: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
In the long run I think my economist friend will turn out to have under-estimated American credit unions. I encourage the young leaders in this room to aim beyond relevance, and instead to vitality in the years ahead. I encourage you to work with, not against, your colleagues to achieve this higher plane of strategic differentiation.