Credit Unions

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Credit unions are different from other financial service providers. Other providers, such as banks have a primary goal of profit for their owners. They must prioritise those profits over their customer’s experience. For credit unions, there is no tension between customers and owners. There are no customers – only members. The members are both shareholders, and users of the credit union’s services; and so their interests are in step. Credit unions top ranking in customer experience and brand trust surveys show this.

But credit unions still face challenges. The credit union must balance the needs of borrowers, savers, and transactors. The credit union must satisfy national rules while maintaining a community or local focus. They must embrace digital channels without losing the personal touch. To meet its members’ future needs, a credit union must grow its business in a safe and secure manner. This requires a culture of good governance within the organisation.

Governance can seem costly for both small and large organisations. A fully integrated solution, such as red flare, can help reduce those costs.

red flare allows your team to focus on managing risk, by reducing the cost of recording and reporting on risk. With red flare, your Board can see that their decisions and policy statements are the keystones of the business operations. Show your regulator that the right people with the right skills, the right experience, and right attitudes are in control of your operations with red flare’s proper persons module..

Our secure cloud based solution allows any size of Credit Union to have a best in class GRC platform, with no capital spend

Trusted by Credit Unions

Strategic planning

Decide what you can achieve in the next three years. Record the goals, and break these down into a set of tasks. Assign the tasks to job roles, teams or individuals and allocate budgets. Track the schedule and cost of tasks, and provide insight to the board on which goals are on track, and which ones need additional resources to be completed.

red flare simplifies Board reporting with a traffic light dashboard. Board members can start from a birds eye view of the status of the overall plan, and drill into the goals, and even right down to task level. They can read any documents, understand the issues, monitor the progress. They can assess what is working and should be repeated, and what is not and needs to be rebooted.

red flare frees up both management and the board from asking for and delivering reports and instead the Board can concentrate on monitoring the plan and management can focus on executing the plan.

Governance

Governance is the process of translating the credit union’s mission into actionable plans. It requires that key roles are filled by fit and proper persons; that policies exist to guide tactical decisions and choices, in a way that always advances the credit union’s strategic goals. Decision making should be delegated to the correct level be it functional role or committee. Delegation of authority should be scoped with boundaries between different authorities clearly delineated. Decisions must be recorded and their implementation planned and monitored.

redflare.governance records each authorities charter, tracks that decisions were validly reached based on quorum rules. It records votes, including the discussion and dissension on each decision. It tracks the progress of implementation tasks to provide the governing body with the necessary information to have effective oversight on how the credit union’s strategic goals are progressing.

Performance measurement

Our integrated solution allows risk reviews to be triggered by compliance breaches, task over-runs, or key measures exceeding specified thresholds. red flare provides real time reporting, and so the Board always have access to correct information in a timely manner to make the right decisions in guiding the credit union towards its future goals.

redflare.performance allows key performance measures, whether WOCCU’s PEARL ratios or internal Key Risk Indicators (KRI) or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to be recorded and reported.

Enterprise risk

ISO 31000 defines risk as the uncertainty of achieving strategic objectives. This risk flows from the actions, and sometimes the inactions of an organisation’s operations. It is only possible to avoid risk by offering no services, by having no members, by working towards no goal. A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

redflare.risk does not reduce or eliminate risk, but it properly records and reports on risk. It measures both inherent (the risk exposure based on environmental context, scale of operations, and intrinsic uncertainty) and residual (the risk remaining post management activities to reduce, transfer or avoid risk) exposure levels. Through documentation of risk cause and consequence, the Board can visualise the effectiveness of controls deployed and identify inefficient, absent or weak controls on critical risks.

Regulatory compliance

Credit unions differ from other financial institutions but still must comply with financial rules, regulations and standards. There are capital rules to ensure credit unions are solvent and liquid; lending rules to prevent credit bubbles; AML/CTF checks to protect the financial sector from misuse; payment processing rules to ensure payments are fast and efficient; conduct of business rules to protect service users from mis-selling.

Additionally as places of work, credit unions have health, safety and welfare obligations; responsibilities to their employees and pensioners; and must uphold their members personal data and privacy rights.

redflare.compliance allows credit unions put in place multi-year plans to check that all compliance obligations are in place, effective and embedded in the culture of the organisation.

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