WASHINGTON—As they hone their strategic plans for growth in 2027, CU management teams should Identify and target the members they can serve best, which is defined by one executive as those members who can meaningfully benefit from CUs’ services and who are sufficiently profitable to serve.
“Maximize member benefit and extend it to more members, and growth follows,” advises Sam Brownell, CEO and founder of CUCollaborate, a data and analytics consulting organization for credit unions. And the best way to start is to turn the ample amount of data credit unions have into insights and recommendations, he added.
Brownell spoke to the CU Daily as part of “The Growth Imperative” series, which is focusing on strategic planning for 2027. His insights are shared below.
The CU Daily: What trends have emerged among credit unions in 2026? Which will continue into 2027, and why?
Brownell: Three stand out. Loan growth picked up and is outrunning share growth, which brought margins back after two tight years. Mergers keep getting bigger. The average merging credit union had about $23 million in assets in 2014 and about $285 million in 2025, so this is no longer a story about small shops without a successor. And credit union purchases of banks slowed sharply, from a record 20 deals in 2024 and 15 in 2025 to four by mid-July, because bank buyers are paying more.
Bigger mergers will continue into 2027. Technology, compliance, and talent keep getting more expensive, and scale spreads the cost. I’m less sure about margins. Rates are moving again, unrealized losses are back on CFOs’ desks, and credit quality is mixed. I wouldn’t call the recovery a trend yet.
The CU Daily: CUCollaborate says it can help identify weaknesses. What weaknesses do you see?
Brownell: The one I see most is uneven member benefit, meaning the money that members keep by banking with their credit union instead of a bank, through better rates and lower fees. Look account by account, and that benefit is rarely shared evenly. A credit union can beat every bank in town on prime auto loans and lose to them on deposit rates for small balances. The average hides both.
The second is a field of membership that no longer matches the credit union’s growth plan. Charters written decades ago often leave out the markets where members now live and work. Branch networks drift the same way, with branches still sitting where members used to be rather than where the growth is.
Third, growth bought through indirect lending. Indirect lending has real value: it puts loans on the books quickly, puts liquidity to work, and reaches borrowers the credit union wouldn’t otherwise see. On its own, though, it rarely adds members who use you for anything else.
Underneath all three is the same problem. Credit unions are data-rich and insight-poor. The data sits in the core, the loan system, and the call reports. What’s missing is the time and expertise to turn it into a decision, so it gets used for reporting instead.
The CU Daily: What do credit unions not know about themselves or find most surprising? What do you recommend?
Brownell: Usually two things. The first is how much they already deliver. We measure that with what we call Risk-Based Member Benefit: what each member gets from their credit union compared with what a bank would offer that same member, given their credit risk. With the risk adjustment, a thin-file borrower isn’t competing with the national average rate. They’re competing with what a bank would charge them, if it would lend to them at all. Measured that way, 98% of the 256 credit unions we analyzed delivered more benefit per member than the average bank, and the average credit union delivered over $200 per member per year.
The second is where that benefit goes. It is rarely spread evenly, and $500 a year means far more to a member earning $30,000 than to one earning $300,000.
My recommendation: measure it, see who receives it, and decide on purpose how to distribute it. Then evaluate whether a low-income designation or CDFI certification fits your strategy. Many credit unions have never looked, and plenty don’t know they’re eligible. For the right credit union, either one opens grants and capital that help it serve the members it’s built for.
Starting Too Late
The CU Daily: What are credit unions usually seeking when they approach CUCollaborate? Are they seeking the right thing?
Brownell: Usually, a singular project. They want to expand their field of membership, pick a branch site, find a merger partner, or earn CDFI certification or a low-income designation. Those are real needs, and we deliver them.
Strategically, they often start one question too late. They ask where to grow. I’d rather they first ask which members they’re built to serve better than anyone else. A member belongs in the strategy when two things are true at once: the credit union is meaningfully better for them, and they’re profitable enough to serve. Serve members you don’t help and you drift from the mission. Serve members you can’t afford to and you drain capital.
Answer that first and the charter follows. A $227 million Louisiana credit union converted to a multiple common bond charter and grew its potential field of membership from 385,000 to 1.6 million. The size wasn’t the win. The win was a defined path to the members it was built to serve.
The CU Daily: What is the most common item on credit unions’ strategic agendas for 4Q 2026 or 2027? What should be on them?
Brownell: Right now, it’s the strategic plan itself. This is planning and budget season, and the questions we hear most are about rates: unrealized losses in investment portfolios, deposit costs that reprice faster than loans, and how to keep growing loans without giving back margin.
What should be on the agenda is the scoreboard. Banks have discovered financial health scores, and credit unions are being invited to adopt them. Treat that data as an early-warning system. It helps you reach a member before a crisis. Just don’t make it the scoreboard, because a bank can post a good score without changing a single price.
Put member benefit next to ROA instead: the dollars that members keep because they bank with you. It’s also the cheapest answer to the funding problem. Know which deposit segments you underpay, raise rates there, and skip the across-the-board promotion.
The CU Daily: How are credit unions looking at growth? If the focus is misdirected, what should they emphasize instead?
Brownell: Most still lead with asset growth, ROA, and net worth. Two of those three are borrowed from banks.
I’d flip the order. Maximize member benefit and extend it to more members, and growth follows. ROA then becomes a constraint, not a goal. A credit union growing 5% a year with an 11% net worth ratio needs an ROA of only about 55 basis points to hold that ratio steady. Earnings beyond what capital requires are benefit withheld from members.
Growth also has to be targeted. Acquiring a member now costs about $565, an all-time high, so marketing to the wrong people is expensive. Define the members you serve better than anyone, find where they are, make sure they know they’re eligible, and spend there.
Soundness still comes first. A credit union that gives away its capital eventually has nothing left to give.
Where One Gap Can Be Found
The CU Daily: How are credit unions using AI? What are their strategies for adding it to their technology stacks?
Brownell: Most of what credit unions use today faces the member. Chatbot adoption went from 3% in 2019 to 46% this year, and AI is also showing up in fraud detection, call centers, and lending. Most of it is bought rather than built, arriving inside products from core and digital banking vendors.
The gap is strategy. AI is answering members’ questions, but very little of it is answering the CEO’s questions. That’s where we’re focused. Our Strategy & Analytics Platform puts AI on top of a credit union’s own data plus peer data from our Data Collaborative. A CEO can pick a peer group of credit unions that look like theirs and ask in plain language how loan growth compared last quarter, or what changed most in their numbers this year, and get an answer with the reasoning shown. No data team required. Several CEOs are using it right now for strategic planning and due diligence.
The test I’d apply to any AI investment is simple: does it help you serve members better, or does it just cut your costs?
The CU Daily: How does or will CUCollaborate use AI? Do you have an AI strategy?
Brownell: Yes. We’re a small team, and AI is how we deliver an impact well beyond our size.
Our strategy is to point it at the work that keeps our consultants and functional teams away from clients: pulling numbers, preparing analysis, reviewing calls, and drafting first versions. Every hour AI takes off that list is an hour back with a credit union.
It also lets us tailor the experience to each customer. Our team can walk into a conversation with that credit union’s own numbers, its peers, and the questions it’s likely facing, instead of a generic deck. A firm our size couldn’t do that for every client a few years ago. Now we can.
Speed doesn’t replace care. We test the answers our Strategy & Analytics Platform gives before customers see them, a person reviews every client deliverable, and client data stays in approved, secured systems. There are multiple safeguards in place to ensure that we continue to deliver at the high quality our customers expect from us.
The CU Daily: How do you monitor what’s happening in the fintech space?
Brownell: Mostly through our clients. We talk with credit union leaders every week, and they tell us which vendors they’re evaluating and what’s working. That beats any press release.
We also watch the numbers. When a fintech starts winning members in a market, it shows up in the deposit and loan trends we track month to month.
On top of that, we follow the trade press, conferences, and technology providers.
And we don’t keep it inside our walls. We share what we learn with the whole industry. Our chief economist, Luis Dopico, kicks off a monthly webinar series on October 21 that covers the economy, credit union performance trends, and what account-level data shows about member benefit. The filter for everything we share is the same: does this change what a credit union should do for its members?
What’s New for 2027?
Brownell: The biggest was launching our Strategy & Analytics Platform, which in 2026 we rolled out only to our existing customers. Imagine an AI assistant built specifically for credit unions, with more than 30 years of industry context behind it. That’s the platform. A CEO can ask something as simple as “What are our best growth opportunities?” or as detailed as “Benchmark our profitability, growth, and credit quality against our peers and show our three biggest opportunities,” and get analysis in minutes, not weeks, with a written explanation and a recommendation. It also builds KPI dashboards they can check anytime.
It’s grounded in our Data Collaborative: more than 350 participating credit unions and 32 years of call report data. That takes credit unions beyond the public numbers everyone already has and shows them where they sit against real peers. Credit unions can compare themselves with standard peer groups by asset size, footprint, or growth, or build their own. It’s the cooperative model applied to data, which seems only fitting for this industry.
In early 2027, we plan to bring the platform to the broader market, so any credit union can use it, not just our current clients. That also strengthens the Data Collaborative: more participants mean sharper benchmarks for everyone in it.
Brown Where will CUCollaborate focus next year? Why?
Brownell: Three things, all aimed at getting the benefits of credit union membership to more people.
First, making the Strategy & Analytics Platform the best analytics platform in the market. We’ll keep expanding its capabilities to drive more value for our customers and give them a more complete picture of their credit union: what their own information shows and how it stacks up against its peer groups, in minutes, through chat or dashboards.
Second, supporting new credit unions. Starting one today takes a large amount of donated capital, and that’s one of the biggest barriers to new charters. We’re launching the Credit Union Formation Fund, a nonprofit CDFI loan fund that buys subordinated debt from new credit unions at below-market rates, so they can get chartered with far less donated capital. Because the fund is a nonprofit, donations to it are tax-deductible.
Third, joining itself. Many eligible people never realize they qualify, and those who apply often hit a clunky process. Borrowers have to join before they can get a loan, so that friction loses them right when they’re ready to act. We’re building one-click membership to make eligibility, joining, and borrowing a single step.
The thread through all three is the same: more people getting a better deal because they bank with a credit union.
Reporting by Anne Battle Schultz
Other Reporting in This Series
- As CUs Plot Plans for Growing in 2027, One Person Urges Them Not to Overlook the Unicorns
- In Planning for 2027, Don’t Overlook the Value of a Clear, Consistent Brand: A CU Daily Series
- As CUs Prepare 2027 Strategic Plans, a Reminder of the Value of Offering PMI
