Steve Koenen, President & CEO, Altra Federal Credit Union

We understand that Altra has been around since 1931. You have expanded the business, helping the members, who I believe are 90,000 as of today, and have US$1 million in assets under management. Will you please start by giving us a brief introduction to the institution as it stands today?

Yes, I’d like to talk about the things you just said because I don’t know if that’s accurate or not. We were formed in 1931 as Trane Employees (Federal Credit Union). That is how we were formed back in 1931. We changed our name to Altra in 2005. We’re based in Alaska, Wisconsin, but what is unique about us is we have other markets outside of Wisconsin. We’re also in Rochester, Minnesota, Clarksville, Tennessee, and Tyler, Texas. And we’re in Tennessee and Texas because of our relationship with Trane company going way back. And now, obviously, we’ve moved beyond them in our business. But that’s how we got our start. We are actually just shy of 150,000 members. We have, give or take, 500 employees, and we’re just shy of US$2.9 billion in assets. And that’s where we are at this point in the way credit unions are measured.

What would you say are the keys to success for this growth?

When Cheryl (Dutton) came, we changed our vision statement to “Helping You Live Your Best Life.” I think what this credit union has done really well in the last maybe 10 years is focus on the members and expanding that to a focus on the communities we serve. So, the diversity of our membership helps. As I mentioned, the four core markets have been really helpful for us to diversify our business, which is really good and gives us a lot of opportunity. With our focus on members, I would say we’re a trusted financial partner as we consistently deliver value. Tackling basic stuff goes a long way. 

I also wrote down a note here. I had to do the math on just our talent and some of the longevity we have at Altra. There are five of us on the executive team, and we have been with Altra for 132 years. It’s an average of 26 or 27 years for each of our exec team. I think our talent down throughout the organization, giving them a clear vision of what we’re about, why we do it, and how we’re going to do it, and giving them a sense of purpose and all that, and allowing our employees to do good work at work and also in the community, all of that just creates a good culture. Looking back, people just want to work for us. They know they’re doing good and valuable work in the community and for their members. People talk, and it catches on. We’ve grown substantially here in the last five, 10 years.

I think one other piece I would add to that is for a credit union in our industry, we have a pretty innovative mindset. At Altra, we focus on it, we live and breathe it, and we expect it from our staff. I think that that has played a role in our success as well. Our members and our employees see that as a benefit.

You have grown to have all the necessary key offerings from personal to business banking. You have a strong focus on insurance. Could you tell us a little bit more about the different services and products that you have for your members?

We have retail lending, mortgage lending, and business banking. The difference is we go after all three aggressively, and that has fueled our growth. Some credit unions do not do business banking, or they don’t focus on mortgage lending quite as much, but they focus on auto lending and things like that. We do it all. 

Our checking account is called A+ Checking. It’s a rewards-type checking account, which has been very popular for us since we put that in place more than 10 years ago. Now, it’s been very helpful. We offer wealth management as well, and we’ve expanded that area over time, which is doing really well now. 

Another thing that separates us is our focus on financial wellness. We have financial counselors and coaches on staff. We really talk about helping our members live their best lives, but we walk the talk, too. And so, we help people when they need help, and it creates a lot of member loyalty when you work through or help a member get through a tough time. I think we’ve been very good at that over time.

One of the coolest things we’re doing now is we’re building new branches and remodeling some existing branches to go tellerless. And basically, we have ATMs we call SAMe.  And they do 90 plus percent of what a teller does for most of our members, but we can do it 24/7. And so, we really can advertise 24/7 banking, and it’s worked really well for us. So, we give them a name, and they’re pretty cool, really good machines that are very intuitive in taking care of a lot of our members’ needs. The big thing about that is we can now offer those kinds of traditional or basic banking needs 24/7 for our members.

So, when you discuss innovation, this is mainly what you will be referring to, or is there also innovation in terms of products?

Yeah, this is one of them. There have been other things where we’ve been the first in the country to try this or that. This is one of our bigger successes: going out on a limb and doing something different than somebody else. We’ve been doing some things with digital and online banking. We’ve been trying to do more with RPA or robotics process automation. Again, we are trying to be more efficient, using technologies and bots to do basic functions for the credit union internally more than externally at this point. We’re using technology and partnering with fintechs, which we used to think to be kind of enemies of the credit union industry. Most fintechs are kind of becoming a trusted partner, and we invest in fintechs, and we sometimes get board seats in their company.

We’re kind of in a mindset of trying things. We’re not afraid to fail, and we push the envelope more than I think most credit unions our size.  We just started to collaborate, get our arms around artificial intelligence, and deploy some use cases for it. We’re trying to push ahead there and see what that can do for us. It’s kind of a culture here, and there’s a lot of little wins internally. Little things we do that add up to big efficiencies over time. But I like the fact that our company embraces innovation. They’re not afraid to try things, not afraid to fail.

I would like to ask you as well about the extensive impact on the community. You mentioned the coaches and the financial education. Could you tell us a little bit more about how Altra helps the community?

It’s something that we are very proud of. I didn’t realize the impact this would have years ago when I started here at Altra. I’ve been here almost 28 years. We didn’t do as much of it as we do today. And it really matters in so many levels.

So, we help we help nonprofits. In the community, we want to be a good community partner. We want to support our community. So, there’s capital campaigns that come to us for that like boys and girls clubs, All Abilities Parks, and things like that. You know, we’re a United Way Center company, and we do fundraising for CMN.

One thing we do that’s really cool is close one day a year. We call it Altra Gives Back Day.

We close, and we send all our employees out in the community to volunteer. And that’s a really good time, a really fun day for all our staff to get out and do something really impactful in our community. I think it’s really given our employees a sense of purpose that they maybe wouldn’t get from some other organizations, and it’s helped us retain and attract talent. They really feel good about what they’re doing not only in their day-to-day job with helping somebody with their finances but also getting out in the community and helping people who need it. I think it’s had a significant impact on our business as well. The word gets out, and people want to do business with good community partners. So, I think it’s helped us grow as well. It’s just been kind of good for business. 

We just are involved in all four of our core markets way more than we used to be, and we sponsor events. We help with school. We do some things in the schools with Edge financial education. It’s pretty crazy how many things we were involved in the community every year.

We’ve implemented our Best Life Community Awards, where we help nonprofits. Our members in the community vote on who should receive that funding, and it’s been a very good program. We actually won an award with this program. It’s called the Dora Maxwell Award for social responsibility. We also donated over US$1.2 million to the communities that we serve and have helped the nonprofits and our communities to be a better place to live.

One more that’s pretty neat is what we call Altra Acts of Kindness. We have a fund set up so that if a member comes in and has a unique situation going on and is just really financially strapped because of something that happened in his life, our employees have the power to support them with up to $400 in emergency money at any given moment. We allow our employees to make that decision on the spot pretty much just up to $400, and we call it Altra Acts of Kindness. And that’s been a big hit, too, for our employees that have been involved in it. So, we just keep trying to support our communities. And there’s a lot of need, and we try to do what we can. Everybody’s got a good case for a good cause, and it’s amazing how much need there is in the communities. And we do what we can.

I wanted to add just one more thing. Our employees are also very important to us. We extend Altra Acts of Kindness to employees. We’re very, very concerned about their wellbeing. How they’re growing within the organization? What can we do to help them into a leadership role? What education can we provide? That’s all part of our culture. So it’s kind of three-pronged. It’s our members, it’s our community, and it’s our employees. We all want them to live their best lives.

What key message would you like to send through this feature?

Alter’s mission is to help our employees, members, and community live their best lives. Because, in reality, that’s what it comes down to. There’s a lot of stuff underneath that. But you know, when you’re making decisions for the credit union, it pretty much obviously falls under one of those buckets.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you about that you would like to mention? 

The only thing I wanted to add to the SAMe discussion is that it is not so much eliminating the teller role as changing that role so that they’re more of solution specialists. They can spend more time with our members on critical issues like financial well-being. So, I just wanted to clarify that technology has taken those basic transactions and allowed our employees to spend more time helping the members.

That probably could be construed as we’re laying people off, but we’re not. We did not. We have not laid off anybody during this time. We train our employees to work on more meaningful and more in-depth conversations with our members. Basic teller transactions, depositing money and checks, and pulling out cash are all done with the ATMs. So when I said tellerless, we don’t let them go. It’s actually a good thing for them to have a chance to do more meaningful work. So we’re not laying people off in that.