From its humble beginnings in the early 1940s, the Credit Union of New Jersey has grown to serve all government employees of the state of New Jersey in addition to the employees of more than 200 businesses and organizations.
The Ewing-based business, which was originally created in 1943 to serve State Highway Department Employees, has continued to grow over the years—expanding in both its field of membership and number of locations.
In April, CUNJ celebrated its 80th anniversary by opening a new location in Hamilton Township.
The new office increased the financial institution’s number of full-service locations to four, which are located in Mercer and Burlington Counties.
Other milestones over the years include a merger with the State Credit Union in 2002 to create the largest state-chartered credit union in New Jersey, and the construction of its current headquarters on Parkway Avenue in 2003.
That building was the first project to be located on the site of the old General Motors plant and helped herald the eventual redevelopment of the site.
In May, Ewing Observer Editor Bill Sanservino sat down with Andrew Jaeger, the Credit Union’s ling-time CEO to talk about the anniversary, the operations of credit unions, and the issues that some banks have faced during the first few months of 2023.
An edited version of that conversation appears in the Q&A below.
Ewing Observer: This is a milestone year for the credit union, the 80th anniversary. Can you reflect a little bit on what it’s like to be a business that has been serving the community for such a long period of time?
Andrew Jaeger: When I think about the Credit Union of New Jersey in 80 years, I think about all the members and the people that have served on the board and worked here, and all the effort that’s gone into keeping the credit union moving forward and successful for all these years and all the lives that have been touched by the credit union, by helping everyday people and households and families with car loans, home loans, personal loans.
To be able to withstand all the different things that have happened in the past 80 years—we’re talking about 1943. The depression was over, but the U.S. was fighting World War II. I’m not going to go through all the history, but there’s been a lot of business cycles, ups and downs and challenges for credit unions over the years. It’s a testament to this credit union, to the leadership, that it’s been able to weather all of those and continue to stick to its core mission of serving members for all these years. I feel lucky to be part of that for all these years.
EO: How long have you been CEO?
AJ: Since May of ’92. It was 30 years in May, when the board at that time—and some of them are still on the board—appointed me. I should say, promoted me. I was working at the credit union at the time, and then the CEO position opened up through unfortunate circumstances. My boss became ill and passed away, and then the board promoted me to the to the CEO position.
EO: These days being with a company for 30 years is a long time, no less being the CEO and running a company.
AJ: I think it’s not uncommon in the credit union industry to see longevity—with the employees and board members too. I think it’s because people truly enjoy what they do here, and it’s not always about the financial or the economics for the individual. It’s about doing something that is meaningful. We have a mission to help our members. And we exist only for our members. There’s a kind of a mission there the members are being taken care of and being financially secure. So, it’s a good business to be in.
EO: What is the difference between a regular bank and a credit union?
AJ: That’s a good question and one I get frequently. Particularly, as credit unions have grown in size, and we’ve grown. Each year I take a look just for perspective. In 1992 we were at $39 million in assets. At the end of 2022, we were $425 million in assets, so that’s about a 9% annualized compound growth rate.
We’ve averaged about 9% growth a year for 30 years. What that means—and I’ll get to the difference with banks—is that more members valued what the credit union is doing. We’ve attracted more members, new members, and those members brought business to the credit union, because they wanted to do business with the credit union. The size of a credit union’s balance sheet, or asset size, is almost irrelevant in terms of, “are you like a bank or not like a bank.”
Our contrarians in the banking industry might say, “Well, you’ve grown, you’re like a bank.”
Well, we’re not like a bank. There’s fundamental differences. Number one, under our charter, we’re not for profit. And that’s established by the U.S. Congress, because we’re owned by our members. We’re a financial co-operative. Technically, we’re financial cooperatives owned and directed by our members, so we exist for the benefit of the membership.
Congress has said cooperatives will receive certain benefits from tax treatment, so we’re tax exempt, and we use that to make sure members are taken care of. Another difference is because of that tax exemption, we’re not permitted to raise capital stock in the equity markets. The only way we can create capital is through retained earnings.
It’s a very simple business model. Members pool their money, lend it to each other. We offer services, we cover expenses, and then what’s left we give back to the members and make sure we have enough equity to be financially sound.
But we can only grow based on our ability to retain earnings, whereas a bank can go out and do a capital issuance to fuel growth. There are no stockholders, only members. So that’s a big difference. We’re no different than, say, Agway or a food co-op. We’re owned by the people that use us, and that’s a big difference.
Another key difference is that the governance of a credit union is by a non-compensated board of directors. When the members of the board do their duties, they do it because they care about the credit union and the membership. They’ll put in their two or three hours at the board meetings each month. They have to keep up on rules and regulations and understand risk. They have all of the same responsibilities of a for-profit financial institution director without the financial reward.
I always tell that to members or anyone who asks. When I meet with every new employee and do an orientation with them, I tell them that one of the biggest differences between us and a bank, is that when the CEO of a bank goes into the monthly board meeting, ultimately that board of directors wants to know how their stock has been performing. Customer service is a means to an end of shareholder wealth.
When any credit union CEO goes into that monthly board meeting, the only thing the directors want to know is, “Are we taking care of our members and are the members happy, as well as our employees?”
Ultimately when we’re talking about the modus operandi of a credit union—regardless of size and regardless of homogeneous products that might be offered—we all offer checking, auto loans, mortgages. That’s just the vehicle. But the reason we exist and how we operate is so fundamentally different that there’s no comparison.
Some will try to say, “Well, because you’re offering the same product as a bank, your bank-like.” But we’re not, because we have different objectives as an organization. Congress has recognized that and provided us certain benefits. But we also give up benefits to be not for profit as a credit union that our bank friends do have.
Like I said, we can’t go into the capital markets. Say with a local bank, the board says, “We need to grow and we need to grow fast. We want to get large enough so then we can be more attractive to a larger bank to buy us. Let’s issue common stock or preferred stock. Let’s go into the markets and raise $30 million in capital and then lever that capital to grow the franchise.”
We can’t do that. So we grow slow and steady over the years. You’re not going to see credit unions have rapid growth over like two years, because we can’t. It would dilute our safety and soundness.
As financial cooperatives, the members pick their directors, and that’s another key difference. I should mention that at a credit union, if you have $100 or $100,000, you still get the same vote at an annual meeting or for your directors. One member, one vote. It’s very democratic in that sense. No member has more say in the operations or the direction of picking their governing body, the directors, because they have more money on deposit.
Whereas at a bank, if you own 3% of the bank, you get more say than the person that owns 1% of the bank. You have more votes. It’s not like that at a credit union.
And it doesn’t matter how large a credit union is. There are billion-dollar credit unions in this country, but they started as small credit unions and they’ve grown because they do a great job of serving their communities in their fields of membership.
EO: How does one become a member of the credit union?
AJ: Every credit union has a field of membership that is approved by their board of directors and ultimately, it’s approved by the (government) regulator. When you adopt the field of membership, it’s in your charter who can join your credit union and then you can amend that field of membership through bylaw amendments or charter amendments.
We have about 250 companies that are within our field of membership and all the employees of those companies are eligible. Our history is that we started out as the Department of Transportation Credit Union. Back then it was the Highway Employees Credit Union in 1943. And then as the state changed the name from Highway Employees to the New Jersey Department of Transportation, we changed our name.
Then in 1994, the NJ DOT Credit Union Board approved adding other companies to the field of membership. They had the strategic foresight to say, “If we want to continue serving our current group, the NJ DOT employees, it would help the credit union if we started adding other groups to bring more people in, because the more members using the credit union, the stronger it becomes and it will have more of a sustainability over time. “
EO: How many members you have right now?
AJ: Just over 37,000.
EO: How does one find out whether they’re eligible to be a member? Is there a place they can go online?
AJ: On our web site there is a section where it says, “join the credit union,” and then there’s dropdowns. It asks you questions. Do you work for one of these companies? Do you live in one of these areas?
So people can go to our website CUNJ.org and determine whether or not they meet the eligibility requirements of our field of membership. Or they can call into our call center and we can walk them through that process.
EO: Talk to me a little bit about expansion. Why did you decided to open an office in Hamilton?
AJ: Any time a credit union opens a branch, they’re doing it really for two reasons. One, to serve your existing members in that area, which we have a lot. Being the credit union for state employees in New Jersey, an overwhelming majority of the people that work in Trenton live in Hamilton.
We also know there’s a lot of state employees that aren’t members, so we wanted to see if we could make ourselves more attractive to those existing state employees who are not members yet by having a branch there. It was an issue of convenience.
The other piece of that is we do need to continue to add members. Every organization does. If you’re for-profit, you always need new customers. If you’re nonprofit, you still need new members. You need members to keep the organization moving forward and growing.
As members go through their life cycles, they age. They go from the building years and needing credit, to paying off their credit and saving. Because we’re a credit union, 75% of our income—our revenue that drives this operation—comes from loans. Our primary purpose is to provide credit at reasonable rates to people of modest means. That was the whole idea of credit unions.
If we don’t have borrowers, it’s going to be tough to survive in the future. And who borrows? That’s the 24- to 54-year old crowd. So we identified Hamilton is a very good area in terms of trying to get out into the community, talk to the businesses, get them to sign up and get their employees eligible for the credit union.
Hamilton represented a good growth opportunity for us as well as convenience for our existing members. So it’s kind of a win win in that respect.
The majority of our members actually don’t come to a branch, because if you have direct deposit, a mobile phone and a debit card, you can do 95% of what you do on a daily basis without ever coming to the branch.
I mean, if you think about in your day-to-day banking needs, there aren’t many instances where you physically need to go to a branch anymore.
And we’re not far away from offering video chat. Our new branch in Hamilton, has ITMs—interactive teller machines. We don’t have tellers there. So when you go to the bank, you can do an ATM transaction, but but if you want to speak to a knowledgeable, friendly representative, you touch the screen and they come up and they’ll say, “Good afternoon, how may I help you?”
They’re not avatars. They are located right here in our operations center (at the Ewing headquarters). We have a group of what we call, “ITM tellers.” They talk to members through the video in our Hamilton branch.
Now, we do have financial representatives at the Hamilton branch to discuss things such as opening a new account or if you want to talk about your mortgage, or you need problem resolution, or you want to do some financial planning. But for your basic routine teller transactions, we’re going to send you to the ITM.
EO: Recently there have been news reports about some banks failing. Can explain as simply as you can how they got into trouble. And is it possible for you guys to get in that same kind of trouble?
AJ: That’s a good question, and a lot of members and employees have asked the same thing. Silicon Valley Bank (based in Santa Clara, Califonia) was the big one that went first. Then Signature Bank and First Republic Bank. Where those banks got in trouble was that they took in a lot of deposits that were large deposits, and a high percentage of those deposits were uninsured. (The U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insures bank deposits up to $250,000).
And then they went and bought longer term assets. They were safe assets, but they were locked in at lower interest rates.
So, for example, they bought a 5-year treasury at 2.5%—at the time, it was good because they took the deposits in and they were only paying point one or point two, so they had a nice spread.
But then the interest rates went up at the fastest pace in the history of the United States. The Federal Reserve, said, “we need to do something with inflation,” and they started hiking interest rates up, up, up, up. Depositors were then able to get much better rates.
So in the instance of Silicon Valley Bank, I think in one day they had over $40 billion leave the bank. So what happened was that they ran into a liquidity crisis. To raise liquidity, they had to sell their investment portfolio, and because their investments were all lower interest rate investments, they were worth less. So they took a big loss when they sold them.
That was really the beginning of the end. A key fundamental difference between that bank versus our credit union, for example, is that over 90% of their deposits at Silicon Valley Bank were uninsured over the $250,000 threshold, so they had a lot of exposure to large deposits.
A lot of their customers were fintech (financial technology) startups and there was hedge fund money coming into these fintechs and startups. They got money and then they put it all into this bank.
What happened was that the controllers and CFOs at these companies [all withdrew their money] and it created a run on the bank.
Runs didn’t used to happen that quick. It would take a little more time. But now in the age of social media it happened fast. $42 billion in one day is insane. They all got nervous. They were like, “Uh oh, something’s going on, let me wire my money over into a money market fund with some brokerage house” or whatever else they did.
And the bank was like, “Oh, my God!” Essentially the bank didn’t have enough to cover all that was being withdrawn. They tried selling their investment portfolio, but it was at a loss.
On the flip side of that, I had my CFO give me the percentage of insured deposits here, and 95% of our depositors are insured. They have nothing to worry about. We could fold tomorrow and 95% of our members would get every penny back. We communicated that to employees and to members that they have nothing to worry about, even though we’re safe and sound. They’re insured.
Now, did we have some members that were over that $250,000 threshold move some money? Yes, and we’ve been tracking it, but we haven’t seen any significant or material movement of money, because of the fact that such a high percentage of our deposits are under the threshold.
But could it happen to a credit union? Yeah. But it’s unlikely for that reason. I don’t think you’re going to see runs on credit unions or even local community banks.
EO: It would be unlikely, I would think, for 30,000 members to come in at once and all withdraw their money.
AJ: We’ve had members that have over $250,000 who have said they would be more comfortable if they could move some funds. Most of the members that have moved money kept the relationship with us. They just decided to move some around to multiple institutions. They should do that. Let them sleep well at night and have that comfort.
Credit unions have failed, sure. I mean, every year there’s credit unions that fail, but it’s not typically because of a liquidity crisis that causes losses on their investment portfolio, which happened with SVB and they became insolvent.
EO: Is there anything else I haven’t touched on that you would like people to know about the credit union?
AJ: I think we’ve covered quite a bit.
We feel honored to have been serving the area, the state employees, and all the employer groups in the area for 80 years.
It’s a lot of fun. Our employees love it. I think our members love it. We do a lot of good work for a lot of people, and if someone hasn’t heard of us or they are not familiar with what we do, check us out.
We’re happy to tell them more about the credit union, because we care about our members. We care about the member’s financial well-being, which is our primary purpose.
Our board purpose statement, is that the reason the credit union exists is to make sure members have the knowledge and ability to be in control of their financial lives. Another way to say that is we want to help members with financial well-being.
So they would have confidence if they became a member of the credit union that we’re an organization that cares about its members, puts members first and you can trust us to do the right thing.