ISL offers a variety of topics in presentation and workshop formats as shown below:
Topic #1: 4 Pillars of Future Competitiveness: Building a Sustainable Business Model
As credit unions gather for their 2011 strategic planning sessions, several long-term threats to the future viability of credit unions appear on the horizon:
Low loan-demand will continue for years and may not return to pre-recession levels for the foreseeable future
New regulations and legislation will threaten income sources and swell compliance costs
A resurgent banking industry will intensify competition among financial institutions and exert ongoing margin pressures
The consolidation and concentration of the CU system, driven by size-linked economies of scale, will result in fewer but larger CUs
Member facing technologies will transform how financial services are delivered and the costs of staying relevant to members will increase
Serving the youth segment will be a growing challenge for CUs, and fewer members will likely be in current or future peak lending groups
This presentation will make the case that, to address these challenges, CUs need to take a hard look at the fundamentals of how they do business and work to strengthen what we believe will be four pillars of their future competitiveness.
Strategic Pillar #1: Diversified income sources
Strategic Pillar #2: Sustained efficiency improvement
Strategic Pillar #3: A strategic approach to member-facing technologies
Strategic Pillar #4: A “What’s in it for me?” competitive difference
This presentation will then guide you in identifying specific opportunities to further strengthen these four pillars of competitiveness in your own credit union. Looking ahead five to ten years, we are convinced that the winners will be those CUs that have successfully made the development of these four pillars a central focus of their strategic plans.
Topic #2: Competitive Differentiation and Niching: More than Great Service.
Many CUs struggle to answer an apparently simple question: "Why choose us over all of the other financial institutions in the market place?" Most CUs instinctively answer, “We provide great service.” But is great service a strong enough differentiator to overcome superior rates, convenience and products from competitors?
Learn about several top-performing CUs, large and small, that have gone beyond “great service” by defining a specific area of excellence or focusing on a specific target market they can be the best at serving. No longer seeking to be “all things to all people,” these CUs have created a distinctive competitive edge through innovative products, pricing, technologies, marketing, and culture.
Find out how the key to your CU’s future competitive success is already inside your organization today, part of its DNA. Then take a close look at your CU’s unique strengths and capabilities, identifying a few powerful areas that have the greatest potential to lead to a lasting competitive advantage.
Topic #3: Beyond Financial Literacy: Strategic Literacy - The Board's Critical Role in Strategic Planning
Few topics are receiving more interest in 2011 than Board financial literacy. While very important, it is essential that Boards understand they have a critical role in addition to financial oversight. They are also ultimately responsible for establishing a long-term strategic direction that will sustain the CU's value to its member-owners well into the future. In this presentation, you will hear the stories of several whose Boards have stepped up to the plate by:
Becoming increasingly active and assertive in providing strategic direction
Raising the bar of expectations for achieving superior results
Challenging the CU to innovate and take managed risks
Discover a best-practice model for Board involvement in strategic planning, identifying specific steps to strengthen your Board’s contribution to obtaining superior CU results and ensuring sustainable member value.
Topic #4: The Strategic Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Results
ISL has been a long-term pioneer in the use of the Strategic Scorecard (sometimes referred to as the Balanced Scorecard) with credit unions. Find out the difference between the Strategic Scorecard and other measurement systems that produce a complex array of dozens of tracking measures but fail to define in clear, simple terms what strategic success looks like. Then discover a proven process for implementing the Strategic Scorecard based on ISL's experience with over 150 different organizations.
Topic #5: Taking Your CU to the Next Level: Key Steps to Becoming a High Performer
Credit unions love to look at what the next guy is doing, especially if the next guy is a high performer with a track record of great performance. Yet, high-performing credit unions were not always high performers. After reviewing the performance of 1,700 CUs for more than a decade, ISL's "Taking It to the Next Level" study identified 11 credit unions that were once "average Joes" and, apparently overnight, turned themselves into top performers. Find out what these CUs did before, during, and after they became high performers and some key lessons you can apply to your own credit union.