Page 6 - 2015 Contact Magazine: 3rd Quarter

CEO PROFILE
Sharing the Love
With the Entire
Community
By the time Lisa Mahler was old enough to start looking for a
job, she already knew she wanted to work in a credit union. Her
father worked for a cooperative in Ottawa Lake, Michigan, and
she grew up as a credit union member.
“When I graduated from high school and even before then,
I used to have accounts at First Community Credit Union, and
I walked in one day and they were hiring,” she explained. “I said,
‘This was a great environment, let’s see what it’s all about.’
I applied, I was a teller and I ended up absolutely loving it.”
Mahler worked at a series of credit unions across the state
before landing at United Bay Community CU (UBCCU) in Bay
City in 2012. A year later, following the completion of a merger,
she took over as CEO.
Much of her tenure as CEO, she said, has been spent “reinvent-
ing the credit union.” At $188 million in assets, it is by no means
a small institution, but is not big enough to achieve the efficien- “We need to focus on our younger generation, but we still have
cies of many larger credit unions. So, that reinvention process,
she said, has involved reexamining contracts, vendor relationships
and staffing needs while also working with community members
to say, “How can we spread the word on United Bay, but not
necessarily through billboards or having to have a branch on
every corner?”
6 T hird Q uarter 2016 I Contact
Name: Lisa Mahler
Credit Union: United Bay Community CU
CEO Since: 2013
Assets: $188 million
Members: 18,312
First Employed in CU Movement: 1992
The key to that, she said, is knowing the communities that
UBCCU serves—a split between Bay, Midland, Saginaw and
Arenac counties in the east, and Kalamazoo and Van Buren
counties in the west. It does that through extensive involvement
in local chambers of commerce, rotary clubs, neighborhood
associations and more. That active presence in the communities
and positive word of mouth have led to growth, including a 7.7
percent increase in loans between March 2015 and March 2016.
UBCCU also generated positive buzz last fall when it won the
inaugural Share the Love competition. That victory—in which
the credit union donated $25,000 to the Ronald McDonald
House of Ann Arbor—illustrates its commitment to community,
since the donation capped more than two decades of the M&M
Memorial Golf Tournament, an annual event to benefit the
Ronald McDonald House in honor of the memory of two girls
with family connections to the credit union who were killed in
a car crash in the 1990s.
“It’s something that we’re very passionate about, and it hits
home to us at the credit union because the story is about us
and people we love and care about,” said Mahler.
Like many institutions, UBCCU wants to attract more Millennials,
but Mahler said the focus is on how to serve all members,
regardless of their demographic.
a huge population of our existing members that are older and
want to do their business in person,” she said. “It’s about finding
that balance between your entire membership. We’re trying to
make sure we can serve our existing membership at every level.”