While the Median Credit Union Shrinks 0.6%, Our Institutions Are Growing 50% Faster

If you could implement one new platform to be among the financial institutions growing almost 50% faster than the rest of the industry, would you?

That’s not a hypothetical. Credit unions on the Vertice AI platform grew roughly 50% faster than the industry’s 1.7% average. That gap isn’t luck. It’s what happens when a growth strategy has the right data behind it.

The industry backdrop

Callahan’s latest Trendwatch data puts a hard number on the challenge: the median U.S. credit union lost 0.6% of its members over the past year. Not flat. Shrinking. Industry-wide growth came in at just 1.7%, the weakest second quarter since 2011, and even that modest gain is concentrated among a small set of institutions. More than half of America’s credit unions ended the year smaller than they started it.

The cause isn’t a lack of effort. Marketing teams are running more campaigns than ever without the data to know which ones are working. Too many members are quietly moving their primary accounts to digital-first competitors. Boards are asking hard questions of teams executing a playbook that used to work, but is now not keeping pace.

Why the gap compounds

The risk is that this gap compounds. Every new member a credit union wins brings deposits, data, and referrals that make the next member easier to win. Every member who leaves takes future loans, deposits, and referrals with them. Momentum runs in both directions, and a credit union losing half a percent of membership a year rarely feels like a crisis in the moment. It looks like a slow leak, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. There’s no single moment that forces a decision.

The prevailing theory is that this is simply what scale does: large banks and billion-dollar credit unions win on budget and digital experience, and everyone else manages decline. If that were true, most of the industry would already be a lost cause.

Our data says otherwise.

What the data shows

As our CEO recently wrote about, we compared credit unions on the Vertice AI platform against the same national benchmarks Callahan uses. Over the past twelve months:

• Credit unions using Vertice grew membership roughly 2.5%, about 50% faster than the industry’s 1.7% average.
• The median Vertice client grew 1.4%, while the median U.S. credit union shrank −0.6%, a two-point swing between a typical Vertice client and a typical credit union nationally.
• Two-thirds of credit unions partnering with Vertice grew membership outright this year, compared with fewer than half nationally, and nearly three-quarters outperformed the national median.
• Together, they added more than 250,000 new members while retaining 94% of existing members.
• Vertice clients report a $20,977 median relationship balance, compared with $18,965 nationally, and 2.40 products per member, compared with 2.25 nationally.

What separates the growth

Notably, many of the strongest performers in this group serve between 10,000 and 20,000 members. Scale isn’t the differentiator. Precision is. These institutions know which members and prospects to engage, what to offer them, and when, and they execute on that intelligence every week. Asset size is not the dividing line in this industry. The stats indicate it’s whether a growth strategy is driven by data or not.

To be clear, this isn’t a claim that Vertice alone drove these results. Credit unions that invest in growth tools tend to already be committed to growth, and the outcomes belong to their teams. What the data does show is that determination paired with the right insights and execution consistently lands on the stronger side of the ledger, and we’re proud to support that work.

Why it matters

Vertice AI was built on the premise that credit unions deserve the same growth infrastructure available to the largest banks, without requiring an in-house data science team. Results like these, people-helping-people institutions outgrowing companies many times their size, represent exactly what we set out to enable.

Every one of the 250,000+ members represented here chose a credit union over a megabank this year. That’s a win that extends well beyond our client base. It’s a signal for the entire movement.

Growth is not something that happens to a credit union. It’s something an institution goes and gets.

To see where your institution stands, visit verticeanalytics.ai or connect with our team.