Gigi Hyland | Championing Credit Unions and Communities

Jennifer Tescher:
Welcome to Emerge Everywhere. I’m Jennifer Tescher, journalist turned financial health champion. As founder and CEO of the Financial Health Network, I’ve spent my career connecting forward thinking leaders to the growing finhealth movement. Now I’m sharing these conversations with you. Discover how these visionaries are challenging the status quo and improving financial health for their customers, employees, and communities.

Gigi Hyland’s energy and passion for financial health is unrivaled. As the executive director for the National Credit Union Foundation, Gigi has been rapidly building a movement of financial health champions in the credit union industry. Her profound empathy and ability to understand both the opportunity and challenges of technology have been vital to her success in empowering credit unions to work within their communities to meet the demands of today. Gigi, welcome to Emerge Everywhere.

Gigi Hyland:
Thank you so much, Jen. It’s great to be here. I appreciate the invitation.

Jennifer Tescher:
I’m so excited about this conversation because engaging with you always leaves me feeling newly inspired. You just have such a passion for this work. Nearly your entire career has been spent in the credit union movement as a lobbyist, a lawyer, a regulator, and now a philanthropist and thought leader. And I’m curious. Why credit unions?

Gigi Hyland:
Well, thanks for the kind words that I inspire you. Right back at you. So appreciate that.

Credit unions, I would say, are in my genes actually. So both of my parents were attorneys, and they represented the credit union industry and I followed suit as an attorney and practiced law for credit unions for several years and really just fell in love with the people in the credit union system as well as the mission of credit unions. And I think we know that banking is really a commodity. It’s a little bit like bread, but how and why you offer banking is what makes things interesting. And credit unions are a different model for offering banking and it’s a model that’s very appealing to me thinking about cooperatives and credit unions as financial cooperatives offering banking services.

Jennifer Tescher:
So say just a little bit more about that idea of a financial cooperative, what that means, and how it makes a credit union different than a bank.

Gigi Hyland:
Sure. So I think most people know some cooperatives. They might know their local food cooperative. They might be familiar with REI if they go out and they buy camping gear and hiking gear. Also a cooperative. Land O’Lakes, ACE hardware stores. This idea really of credit unions is that credit unions are financial cooperatives and they were really formed in the 1800s in Germany and England because of a need of a group of people coming together to pool their finances, to be able to lend to each other and borrow, and really advance and improve their financial health and wellbeing.

And when we think about this country, I have to think of St. Mary’s Bank in Manchester, New Hampshire that was formed 1908, 1909 because there were so many French Canadians that were working in the mills of Manchester, New Hampshire, and really their only source of credit were loan sharks and there was no other alternative really to borrow and to basically get the life that they wanted as they immigrated.

And so this idea really that credit unions are this vehicle for social empowerment, whether it’s women seeking to have access to financial services or black farmers in the South establishing financial co-ops to improve their financial future. Credit unions are this idea of really people coming together to have control, if you will, over their own financial destiny by pooling resources and by cooperating amongst each other.

And I think the difference. Again, banking is the commodity, but credit unions are a different model in that they’re non-profit. They’re not charities. They’re not for profit and they serve and are run by the suite of cooperative principles which all cooperatives, regardless of what type of cooperative they are, really abide by, this idea that it’s voluntary and open membership, it’s democratic member control, member economic participation, autonomy, and independence from any overseeing type of organization. Credit unions focus a lot on education and training information. They cooperate amongst each other and then they have a real concern for the community. So it’s these seven principles and I would add an eighth. I would add diversity, equity, and inclusion to these principles that really drive the value proposition of credit unions focusing on their members and on their communities and that drives the strategic decisions that they make.

Jennifer Tescher:
So now you sit at the National Credit Union Foundation as the executive director and a big part of your work over the last several years has been helping to shift the thinking in the broader credit union movement to this idea of financial wellbeing for all. Tell me a little bit more about this change. How is it different from, in a way, what you just described? What you just described in a way sounds like that. So why this particular change, this effort, and why now?

Gigi Hyland:
Sure. So I think I’ll start with my own journey first. And as I came to the foundation, the Federal Reserve was just starting to issue its annual survey of household economics and decision-making report, the SHED report. And I think the now infamous $400 figure that was in the 2014 report that essentially said 50% of Americans cannot come up with $400 in the event of an emergency. And that really led me to think of the foundation’s work and how does that translate for credit unions? What does that look like?

And we collaborated, as you know, with the Financial Health Network to really do some deep dive into credit union data and looked at whether credit union members, credit union employees, followed suit to this really startling national number. And the answer was yes. Exactly followed suit with that national number. And that’s really what energized, I would say, the foundation’s work to shift the focus and to really start talking to credit unions about really understand your members, credit unions. Make sure what they’re dealing with in terms of their financial health and make sure that you work to meet them where they are in life.

And that sounds so simple. I would say that for credit unions, this is part of their DNA and so this is not a radical 180-degree shift. I would say this is a shift by a couple of degrees, but it’s a shift which is important because the world has changed. Many credit unions were formed as single groups that came together and over time they’ve increased to representing a variety of different groups or communities. And really now focusing on that understanding of where members and employees are in their financial lives was really the driver of this conversation for credit unions, that we have a widening racial wealth gap. We have data from you and from others that show how many millions of people are struggling financially. And that credit unions really need to understand that that’s them, that that’s us, that’s our employees, it’s our neighbors, it’s our colleagues, it’s our friends. How do we think about fully understanding financial lives and then being able to leverage our cooperative financial superpowers to be able to in fact make a difference and make an impact and move people forward wherever they want to be?

Jennifer Tescher:
So it sounds like this idea of focusing on the outcome or the impact to the credit union member, that that is in a way. Maybe it’s not a shift, but it’s a reminder that even though credit unions abide by these great principles and have it in their DNA to be focused on the community, the data shows that credit union members may not necessarily be any better off than bank or FinTech customers when it comes to the outcome of financial health. Is that a fair way to think about it?

Gigi Hyland:
Yeah. I think the fair way is credit unions I think in the past haven’t really focused on showing that impact. I’d make the argument that there has been a lot of impact, but now the need to really quantify that in a way that then informs your strategy going forward and your impact going forward I think is what’s important for credit unions.

So as an example, if we think of the pandemic, credit unions gave over 300,000 PPP loans and many of those were really small loans, were under $50,000, which for larger financial institutions were not economically feasible and didn’t make sense from a business perspective, but credit unions in fact could. So that impact is right there, but it’s very data driven for a point in time where data was required essentially to be looked at in that.

But there are countless stories of credit unions and what they’ve done in different communities, whether it be a government shutdown and there’s a particular credit union that has government employees in their field of membership and offering skip a pay and offering a variety of different measures to be able to make sure that those particular people affected by that particular situation can weather through financially and not be so adversely effected that either they need to file bankruptcy or something really horrible happens in their financial lives.

And I think we’ve seen that time and time again, whether it’s a natural disaster or whether it’s a particular something that happens in a community. Credit unions are right there and they do engage and offer a variety of different things. I think now it’s the looking at how do you use that impact data point, as I said earlier, to really inform this nimbleness of your strategy, knowing that the world is changing so rapidly? So that’s how I would phrase it. A little differently than how you asked it, but that’s how I would phrase it. Yep.

Jennifer Tescher:
Got it. Well, whatever it is you’re doing, you’ve been incredibly successful at doing it because the credit unions are some of the most passionate and enthusiastic folks I encounter as it relates to financial health and wellbeing and you’ve really helped build a movement of champions within the credit union space. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you’ve done to help drive this momentum and what are the successes that you’re seeing? As I said at the beginning, talking to you in and of itself is inspiring and motivating, but I know that can’t be all of it given the level of commitment that I’m seeing from credit unions.

Gigi Hyland:
Well, thank you for the kind words. I really appreciate that. And I guess I struggle a little bit because honestly I feel like I’m a storyteller at heart, Jen, and a lot of the work that we’ve been doing is connecting the dots for folks. So pulling the national data around people’s financial fragility and connecting it with what’s happening in local areas, connecting with data and other points of data to help credit unions really have that aha moment of how the world is shifting, but also how really focusing on members and what they’re going through right now and how you can meet them with what they need right now really has been the storytelling that the foundation has done.

And what we’ve done is we’ve profiled a lot of credit unions that have really been members of the Financial Health Network for many years, but also that have taken this strategic, again, slight shift and really embedded it not only into their board conversations but also into their strategy and product design and service delivery.

And there’s so many great examples. BCU out of Illinois has its Life. Money. You. which is a whole suite of resources and financial counseling services and tools to get people on the path to financial serenity. And what’s really unique about BCU is that their field of membership, the technical term within credit unions, are some of the largest employers within the US, including Target and United Health. And being able to help those employers focus on their employees’ financial wellbeing is really a driver of what BCU is doing in the context of its particular strategy and work.

There are a couple of credit unions in my home state of Virginia, Freedom First Credit Union of Roanoke, which has done so much work to collaborate within its community to offer things like responsible rides. So for folks that would not qualify for a standard automobile loan, finding a way to get people into the transportation they need to get them to better paying jobs, to get them to more economic opportunity, is a key driver. And that same credit union has worked with the local healthcare system to be able to partner this idea of financial health and physical health to meet needs of kids in the community, but also adults in the community.

Similarly, Virginia Credit Union down in Richmond has worked with the Financial Health Network, has looked at its membership, and has realized that there’s a significant need for women in its field of membership and how do they lift up basically the financial health of working women within their field of membership? And so again, done a lot of great work locally to be able to do that. Patelco Credit Union out in the Bay Area has used its own data on loans that it had to reject and members with low credit scores in order to create a whole new product, a credit builder loan for those members. Again, meeting that need and making sure that we don’t have members that essentially don’t get served and don’t have the products and services they need to improve their financial wellbeing.

University Federal Credit Union down in Austin, Texas, has done amazing work with its own employees and collaborated with a group called Inclusive within the credit union system that has a micro coaching program called Pathways, again to help their own employees be more financially healthy so that as those employees turn around and they face the members, the consumers, who are coming in the door, they’re really armed with the data and the information to be able to help people navigate all of the complexities that life and certainly financial life throws at them. Those are five examples. There are so many others that I could point to in terms of what credit unions are doing to really embrace this issue of financial wellbeing for all.

Jennifer Tescher:
Yeah. Well, there’s about 10 different questions I have now coming out of that. I’m trying to think about in what order I’d like to ask them, but I really appreciate your highlighting the power and importance of storytelling. You hear that a lot, but I don’t think we always appreciate how, particularly in the world we live in today where we’re so focused on the day-to-day, minute-to-minute, what’s right in front of us, that being able to pull back or have someone like you pull back and connect the dots and weave a narrative that helps people see how it comes together I think is incredibly powerful and particularly when you can include stories of the actual humans, the people, that are benefiting from the work. I think that can be especially moving.

I was just speaking somewhere the other day and I was talking about how during COVID for a lot of employers they all of a sudden were seeing more of their employees than they might have in terms of their fuller lives. And I was talking to one CEO who said that she came to learn that a couple of her call center employees were actually living in their cars. And she found this out because when they asked them to go work from home, well, that wasn’t really possible. And I was telling the story and telling the audience that once you see something like that, you can’t unsee it. You can’t turn away from it. You have to do something about it. And I don’t care who you are, what your politics are, how much of a capitalist you are. I think the majority of humans would feel compelled to do something. And so I share your passion around storytelling.

Gigi Hyland:
So I agree, and that’s a great story to tell, the one that you just told. And I think it helps people. I am a believer. Maybe it’s just because I’m an optimist. But I do believe that people have really good intentions and how they think about the connectivity of what they do and the impact it can have on people is really, I think, what drives this financial wellbeing for all work. Because as we think of many folks who work in credit unions or finance folks, they think about the numbers at the end of the month and the dollar amount of loans that they got out of the door. And that’s true across the banking industry. And yet if you assign that with really the human value. So if you got a hundred thousand dollars worth of car loans out the door, what did that really do for the people who got those car loans or mortgages or any other loans or alternatives to payday lending? Whatever it might be.

It’s that human component of impact that’s going to then drive a strategy which really focuses on the impact that you’re making on the members, which in turn have ripple effects on their families and on the communities, which I think all of us want. We want to live in financially healthy communities. We want people to live their best financial lives. And that all starts with that one member or one consumer that walks in and says, “I have $20,000 worth of medical debt and I don’t know what to do because I could file bankruptcy and I really don’t want to do that.” It’s those conversations that really can make a profound difference.

Jennifer Tescher:
So we were talking there a little bit about the role that employers play in credit unions… Historically often were arms of or founded by employers. And today, even if they’re not, they often work very closely serving the workers of different companies. And one of your latest efforts on this financial wellbeing for all journey has been to encourage credit unions to put their own oxygen masks on first and consider the financial health of their own employees. Talk to me more about where that came out of. How did that come up and what are you seeing some credit unions doing now?

Gigi Hyland:
Right. Well, as you know, the whole oxygen mask analogy is yours. I think you used it at the 2016 Emerge conference. So I think I grabbed onto that.

Jennifer Tescher:
I heard another good analogy today that I’ve heard before, but I realized maybe I should switch it up. It was that we have to eat our own cooking.

Gigi Hyland:
That’s good. That’s another good one. As a cook and someone who loves to eat, I really like that one too. I think for me, using that analogy for credit unions was to help credit unions really stop and say, “If it’s too big to think about this concept of financial health or financial wellbeing for all with your members, let’s start with your own employees.” If we know that so many people are financially vulnerable or financially coping, it means that your employees are part of those statistics. And so let’s get a handle on where are your employees? Who’s really struggling? And what are the opportunities for you as an employer to make business decisions and to offer a suite of benefits beyond a 401k to really help your employees advance their own financial lives? And whether that is offering access to pay a couple days earlier. Whatever the issue might be and whatever the challenges that your employees might have, think about that first.

One of the things that we’ve been working on. It’s just finishing. Is that we’ve been collaborating with Common Sense Lab and USC to do some pretty rigorous research around split deposits to see whether with three large credit unions and their employees, encouraging with more behavioral prompts, whether that actually would encourage more savings. And so we’re just getting those final reports in. I’m going to look forward to reporting that out because maybe, again, that data, that research-driven approach, will help credit unions with their own employees, if they haven’t already encouraged their employees to split their deposit into savings, but also with members and think about how credit unions can really encourage members to save more. So it’s all of these opportunities within credit unions to really think very, very locally within their own shop about what the opportunities are.

The other argument I make to credit unions, Jen, is this is also your business opportunity. Because if you have somebody my age coming into your 24-year-old teller asking for help about, “How do I really think about caring for my aging parents?” There’s going to be a disconnect, I’m guessing. And I don’t want to paint it so broadly, but it’s probably going to be a disconnect. And how do you arm your frontline staff and your member service folks with the tools, the resources, the understanding to be able to serve people at all life stages and all life choices? And this is part of that, is to start with your employees. They’re also your best focus group, honestly, for your members because they’re talking to members, they understand what members are going through, and they’re going to give you a lot of really great ideas about how the credit union can focus its products and services around financial health to show impact.

Jennifer Tescher:
Well, one of the reasons that I love talking with you is because you see the interconnections between things. We’re both silo busters in a way. And one of the intersections… It actually just came up when you were giving examples of what some credit unions are doing. Is the connection back to healthcare and the significant intersection between physical, financial, and mental health. And if I’m not mistaken, your husband is in the public health world.

Gigi Hyland:
He is. Correct.

Jennifer Tescher:
Which may have helped to fuel your interest in this topic, but in a perfect world, what would credit unions do to further this link, the health-wealth connection?

Gigi Hyland:
Right. So you mentioned that many credit unions have employers within their field of membership, and that includes healthcare systems for a lot of credit unions, whether they’re community chartered or whether they specifically have that group within their field of membership. I think in a perfect world, credit unions would start the conversation with their healthcare systems that are within their field of membership on, “How can we serve/treat the consumers who are coming to both of our respective institutions looking for healthcare services, on the one hand, physical and mental, on the other hand financial? And how can we help ‘treat’ those consumers in a way that is very holistic?” Please.

Jennifer Tescher:
Just to be clear, for the credit unions that have health systems as their field of membership, am I right in saying that they are primarily serving the employees?

Gigi Hyland:
Exactly.

Jennifer Tescher:
The doctors and nurses and frontline staff of those health systems, but not necessarily the patients?

Gigi Hyland:
It depends. So yes. If the credit union is really chartered to serve the doctors and the nurses and the janitors and the cafeteria workers of the healthcare system, that’s an employer conversation similar to what we were talking about earlier, that your employees need financial health services and the credit union can be part of that solution. But I think it’s a much broader conversation, knowing the pressure on healthcare systems, certainly in communities, to be able to either achieve this idea of triple aim and serving people in a way that really brings value to the individual and ensures their health. Credit unions can have a part of that conversation.

And I guess let me give you an example. Is probably the best way to do it. I think of a legacy federal credit union down in Winston Salem in North Carolina that partnered with Baptist Health to really think about a place and establish a place called WellQ that members of the community can go to and get not only a physical checkup, but also a financial checkup at the same time.

Jennifer Tescher:
Love that.

Gigi Hyland:
Yeah. And it’s this idea of helping people understand that your finances affect your health and your health affects your finances. And there’s that great quote from probably from now five or six years ago from the community health survey that was done in Rochester, New York, where one of the respondents said, “If you want to lower my blood pressure, help me pay my electricity bill.” And as you know, many foundations, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and others, have really looked into this, that not being financially well really is a social determinant of health, because that financial red thread runs through everything, whether it be food insecurity or whether it be access to quality healthcare.

And so for credit unions, it’s opening up this conversation and understanding the lexicon on the healthcare side and honestly helping the healthcare side understand the lexicon in the financial services world because right now they speak completely different languages. How do we join forces?

And I think of some of the work that the foundation has done. We wrote a white paper in 2018 that offered a case study for credit unions and suggested ideas of how credit unions could maybe bridge that gap. And then we also did something called the Side Effects Project, which was a series of videos of four credit union members who – all women. It just happened to work out that way. Who were dealing with cancer and how their credit union either did or did not meet their financial side effects of the cancer or the cost of trying to wrestle with cancer and then also pay all of the regular bills that came up. And just, again, my hope is that credit unions really open their vistas and their eyes around the possibilities here that this is all interconnected and that there’s opportunity to be able to respond.

Jennifer Tescher:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think COVID really demonstrated how everything is interconnected and I think that it’s an important point also from the perspective that there’s a lot that credit unions can and are doing, but it can’t just be credit unions either, can it?

Gigi Hyland:
It can’t. No, no. Obviously, as proud as I am to work within the credit union system, these are big issues that we’re wrestling with, whether it be, again, the racial wealth gap or whether it be persistent inequities in our policies, in our laws that disadvantage people, brown, black, LGBTQ+, women. And again, this is not political. I want to be really clear on that. This is just how do we look at how our financial system functions in order to offer people the opportunity to go where they want to go financially? And that’s got to be then a focus of more than just the financial services industry. Really, it does have to involve healthcare and nonprofits and thought leaders and researchers and government honestly to be able to think through what are the barriers? How do we break those barriers down? And how do we move forward with a financial health or financial wellbeing for all strategy in each community, in each state, and really for the US.

Jennifer Tescher:
So lately, I’ve been ending my podcast episodes by asking people about who inspires them, and I’m curious. Who are some of the leaders that you admire or look to for inspiration?

Gigi Hyland:
I thought about this question when you gave it to me ahead of time to think about, and it’s a really hard question to answer because as a storyteller, which I admitted I am, it’s people, people telling me their stories that inspire me. So again. And I’m not brown-nosing here, Jen, but I’ll start with you again. 2016-

Jennifer Tescher:
Oh, no!

Gigi Hyland:
Yeah. 2016 was my first Emerge conference, and that conference really did inspire me, not only your words, but the words of others that I heard there, to really help me think about what does this look like within the credit union system? So start with that. Others that come to mind… Cathy Mann, who heads up a group called Inclusive.

Jennifer Tescher:
Cathy is fantastic.

Gigi Hyland:
Cathy’s fabulous. I mean, she’s done so much work in terms of community development, but also she’s a big thinker and understands the linkages between providing capital, but also providing tools and resources to help, in her case, community development, credit unions really be able to leverage capital and be able to leverage ways to serve communities.

Fiona Greig at JP Morgan Chase Institute I could listen to all day long. Her insights, her ability to distill complex data into clear directional points and what I’ll say guideposts of how we think about the linkages of what’s going on in people’s financial lives. I would add Rachel Schneider, who worked on the Financial Diaries for the same reason, that ability to really distill and connect the dots. There’s so many people within the credit union system. I would point to Renee Sattiewhite, who’s the lady who heads up the African American Credit Union Coalition. In the face of the George Floyd murder, in the face of, again, the racial equity issue, she’s been a force for joining our system together to really commit to a change of how we think about providing financial services for our members and for our communities.

And then all of the credit union practitioners, the tellers, the VP of lending, and everybody in between to the CEO level who day in and day out think about what can I do to improve my members’ financial lives? What does that look like in my role? And then those who act on it and actually do something and effectuate change. That’s what inspires me and I’m lucky enough to hear those stories regularly and I celebrate them. And that’s what I use to help other credit unions really understand the power of this work around improving financial wellbeing for all.

Jennifer Tescher:
Well and I would note that all of the examples you just gave are all women.

Gigi Hyland:
They are. There are others.

Jennifer Tescher:
I don’t know if that was on purpose or not, but I noticed and I appreciate it.

Gigi Hyland:
There are a lot of men who are doing amazing work and I can certainly list them too. I don’t know how much time you have, but Benson Porter in BECU, Tony Budet, Mike Valentine. Oh my goodness.

Jennifer Tescher:
There are many.

Gigi Hyland:
There are tons. There are tons.

Jennifer Tescher:
There are many.

Gigi Hyland:
But yes, I did focus on the ladies first and yes, that was intentional, admittedly.

Jennifer Tescher:
Excellent. Well, Gigi, thank you for joining me on Emerge Everywhere.

Gigi Hyland:
You’re so welcome. You’re so welcome. Thank you again, Jen.

Jennifer Tescher:
This has been Emerge Everywhere, a Financial Health Network production. If you like the show, please help us spread the financial health message by leaving a review. And if you have ideas for future guests or thoughts on the show, please click on the link in the show notes to connect with us. See you next time.