Collaboration among credit unions, tapping into data: Let CUPID be your guide

Credit unions are collaborative by nature, be that through interactions with members, industry peers, and even competitors in some circumstances. Many credit union leaders have turned to others in the industry to share ideas and insights or collaborate on best practices. Great leaders seek inspiration on what credit unions can do to continuously improve and evolve for long-term future sustainability and success.

Looking for insights and benchmarks from others, while beneficial, is not without challenges:

• it can be time-consuming
• information can be unreliable, or not accompanied by important context
• some of the most useful data is either not available cross-provincially, or at all
• data aggregation is usually done on a static basis, and with a significant time delay

In conversations with industry leaders, MNP identified a gap in the insights currently available, and an opportunity to support credit unions looking to utilize data to improve performance.

The Credit Union Peer Information Dashboard (CUPID) enables you to improve your credit union’s performance through critical analysis of data benchmarked against others in your sector. CUPID was developed with your challenges in mind. By looking through the lens of multiple leadership positions, it looks at not only your financial metrics but a wide range of measures that can help you make critical business decisions. CUPID infuses more confidence and peace of mind into data, informing your decision-making process.

What is CUPID?

CUPID is a dashboard that allows your credit union to meaningfully benchmark its performance in comparison to:

• other credit unions with similar attributes (peer groups)
• your historical data (trends)
• the market or other relevant industry players

Since 2022, MNP has been working to evolve CUPID based on your needs. The volume of data available as well as the metrics and KPIs included will continue to evolve and grow as we engage with system entities and as more credit unions participate.

With CUPID, you get timely information on key metrics and trends that are vital to managing your business and making informed decisions. The dashboard is available through MNP’s secure client portal and is designed to be convenient to access, and intuitive to use. Information is updated monthly, quarterly, or annually, depending on the metric. This ensures you have access to the most accurate data available, eliminating manual aggregation by your teams.

Insights can be aggregated by specific attributes, or you can utilize CUPID’s auto-clustering machine learning function which selects a representative peer group for you, maximizing the value of comparators.

The data available in CUPID yields key metrics that help you measure your performance in several areas, including:

• profitability
• productivity
• capital, liquidity, and credit quality
• operating efficiency
• growth

Optimize your credit union’s use of data

Data is only truly valuable when it’s analyzed in context. Your credit union may have the ability to view its current data, and even some historical data, with relative ease. However, without knowing how you perform next to your peers, industry standards, and other industry participants, that data may not impart true value when making decisions and driving efficiency.

As a decision-maker at a credit union, you must ask big-picture questions about performance and direction. Is there something unique in our business that is leading to lower margins, or are competitors experiencing the same thing? Are we growing at the rate we should be? How does this align with our current strategy and vision?

The best and most useful answers will not be derived by looking at your data in isolation or by reviewing a single KPI. Rather, these answers come from analyzing multiple benchmarks side by side, and looking at trend data, all with the benefit of context. CUPID was designed to help you find the best answers to a myriad of performance-related questions.

For example, CUPID lets you know where you are leading or lagging within your benchmark peer group, thus helping you allocate resources where they are needed, increase efficiency, and reduce waste. One of CUPID’s main purposes is to help credit unions reduce inefficiencies in data gathering while making informed decisions.

The benefits of CUPID are not limited to a single department — all decision-makers at your credit union can benefit from the dashboard views.

Different value for different roles