Credit unions have quickly innovated to remain relevant with the modern American consumer. One credit union making a lot of moves in order to change and grow is the $85 million Connects Federal Credit Union and its CEO’s can-do attitude.
.At GAC 2025, host Sarah Snell Cooke talked with Connects Federal Credit Union CEO James McBride to discuss his new CEO role and the changes he’s making to help the credit union and its employees thrive. The credit union has launched several initiatives to increase community impact and boost employee development and growth, including switching to quarterly performance reviews and getting into crypto. They also talk about the importance of small credit unions finding the right partners and believing in themselves to overcome self-limiting beliefs. WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW! James’ enthusiasm is contagious!
Read the Full Transcript with Connects Federal Credit Union:
Disclosure: Transcript is automatically generated
Sarah Cooke 0:00
Hello. Welcome to the 2025 GAC. I’m Sarah Snell Cooke, your host of The Credit Union Connection. I’m here today with James McBride, welcome.
James McBride 0:09
Thank you for having me.
Sarah Cooke 0:10
You’re welcome. James is the CEO at Connects Federal Credit Union. So tell us a little bit about yourself and the credit union.
James McBride 1:09
So I’ve been in the credit union movement since, since I was 20 years old, so almost right at 25 years I have been in both large and small organizations. I’m fortunate enough now to lead Connects Federal Credit Union in Richmond, Virginia, and when I came on the credit union, it was kind of in a transition period between being what I would call a sleepy kind of credit union that was okay, being okay. Now we have a credit union that wants to move and make difference in the community and grow. So, you know, there’s a lot of credit unions out there that are struggling with that. Are struggling with that. There’s 53% of credit unions are losing membership. Yeah, that’s one of the things we’re struggling with. So how do we find that? How do we connect in a unique way to the community? That’s really what I’m about. And so we set our North Star as loans to our community, and that’s what we’re chasing. And so we’re having a lot of fun doing that.
Sarah Cooke 1:57
Awesome. And I asked you for some things you were doing at your credit union. You sent me a laundry list of really cool stuff. So I’m going to kind of take those piece by piece, in these different in these questions. But first, which is kind of really exciting, is you’re launching a digital asset exchange for crypto.
James McBride 2:15
Yeah. So the idea behind that is to be thinking about, you know what I just said, how do we connect to new audiences, a new community. And one of the things that’s really a hot topic now because of the new administration, but really it’s been something that’s been building for years, and people are confused about what it is. And so digital, distributed ledger technology, digital assets, that’s something that’s just it’s really just a way of tokenizing deposits. And when you think about it from a perspective of the way that it works. Yeah, there are options where you can do it and it has variable values. You can also have a stable coin, which really gives you, okay, now I understand what I have. So it’s a way of trying to bring this new way of thinking about our assets into a larger marketplace. And one of the things that was important for us as a credit union is to show all of our fellow credit unions, both large and small. It doesn’t matter what your asset size is. If you see something, you see a need in the community, you can address it. So we found a really great partner with bank social to help us build bring this to life. We’re really excited about where it’s going.
Sarah Cooke 3:13
Yeah, they’re very cool over there. And so it’s funny because the first I remember the first time my kids were younger. We were buying my son a PlayStation for Christmas, and we were buying some games, and they were virtual games. My husband couldn’t handle it because it was like, I need a CD in my hand. There’s the same idea, right?
James McBride 3:30
Right, exactly, right.
Sarah Cooke 3:32
So the other thing you’re doing is you’re doing away with annual reviews.
James McBride 3:36
Yeah.
Sarah Cooke 3:36
I thought that was really cool. Tell us about it.
James McBride 3:38
Well, so I’ve been doing reviews again basically since I was 16 years old. I mean, in some form of management, since, essentially I started working. And so one of the things that I found over time is that the annual review process really has depreciating value, right? So if you do a standard process, oftentimes the supervisor checks boxes, so I’m going through it. Sometimes I had seven reviews in a row where the language literally did not change. So it’s the exact same thing. The scoring is usually the same, and there’s no value in it. In fact, a lot of times what your your employees will do is they’ll turn to the last page, if you give it to them, to see what is the increase going to be, right exactly, and then the conversation’s essentially over. So what we want to do is create value to the employee. We really want to educate our team. And I was having a conversation last night with a good friend of mine. We were talking about, look, I don’t care if they leave our organization, I want to put them in a position where they can and if we run out of room for them, we’ll help them go out into the community and find a place where they can make a bigger impact on the community that we have all said we want to serve.
Sarah Cooke 4:45
So many people are scared to invest in their people, because they’re going to leave.
James McBride 4:49
That’s right.
Sarah Cooke 4:49
If you’d invest, and they don’t leave, that’s a bigger problem.
James McBride 4:52
Exactly.
Sarah Cooke 4:53
Yeah.
James McBride 4:53
So the quarterly process that we’re moving to really is to have check ins. How are you performing? I mean, if you think about how we grow. Credit Unions. It’s a quarter by quarter thing, right? It’s UA is looking okay. How do they perform this quarter? We feel like we want to connect our employees to the actual credit union experience, sure, and actually give them value there in that process.
Sarah Cooke 5:13
That makes so much sense, and not many people do it, for sure. And so the other thing that’s kind of related to that also is the career pathing at the credit union. Like you said, like you said, it’s a smaller credit union. Sometimes there’s not a much path, you know. So talk about how you’re setting that up.
James McBride 5:28
It’s got a super creative code name. The code name is Connects University. But the reality is, like on my first week there, one of my team members said, Hey, have you been into the scary room? And that’s what, that’s what they call this room. So I’m like, no, what is it? So I walk down the hallway, and there’s this massive area. It looks like a junk store. I mean, there’s stuff everywhere, stuff from like, the 60s and 70s. It’s everywhere. And I’m looking at it, and I didn’t see a scary room at all. I saw an employee education center. And I’m thinking to myself, Oh, wow, look at what we can do with this space and bring into it. So the career pathing ties to kind of I was talking about with the review process. It’s saying to our employees, you can tell us what you want to do. So imagine if your employee comes to you, and every employee gets an opportunity to do this, and they say, What do you want to major in? Well, you might want to major in CEO. You might want to major in CFO, you might want to major in chief people officer. It could be a lot of different things, and just like if you were going to university, a traditional university, you get to change your major. You’re not locked into it forever. But the idea is to give people an opportunity to build the skills that will actually help them achieve what they say they want, right? Rather than us giving them skills that we say they want. And so that’s kind of the premise behind it. It’s gonna take us a while to build this out and get some real flavor to it and some real meat into the program. We’ll start with the basics and we’ll start adding to it, but we’re gonna give people the opportunity to do electives plus core curriculum. We’re really excited.
Sarah Cooke 7:02
So important for the future of credit unions in general.
James McBride 7:05
Absolutely.
Sarah Cooke 7:06
Awesome. Glad you’re doing that. So you also have something called CU Evolution. I didn’t quite follow that one. So it’s about small business, though. What are you doing?
James McBride 7:15
So, one of the things that we recently did, I joined the board of CUSO, called CU Evolution. And a lot of times, what small credit unions think is there’s some type of business line, some type of idea that we just can’t get into because we’re too small, right? And so again, I try to buck that system. And so when I said, you know, let’s get into some business lending, let’s, let’s, let’s, again, we want to put our loan dollars to work in our community, there’s businesses in our community that need money that they’re not able to get, sometimes from traditional banking systems. And I hear so often from our members, you know, the bank that we’re using, we’re not satisfied for various different reasons. We would love an alternative, sure. And so if you think, oh gosh, well, if we’re gonna launch business services, we’re gonna launch business lending that might cost us $200,000 $300,000 to get off the ground, and we just don’t have that kind of money. How much is it gonna make you, though, right? So the idea behind it, though, is you get both the best of both worlds. So it’s you. It’s a CUSO that serves multiple credit unions, sure, all across the country, literally, from Hawaii to Virginia and all points in between that says, You know what, we’re gonna be that business lending arm for you, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna take you from soup to nuts so you don’t have to bring you the expertise. We’ll bring you the expertise, the compliance, the business development. We’re bringing everything for you for a small fee, and we’re gonna spread that out across all of our client base. And it works out really well, we’re really satisfied.
Sarah Cooke 8:41
Yes, so happy with CUSOs. They are. They’re some of the secret sauce to credit unions, for sure. So I allow my guests to always give the final thoughts, final word to our audience. What would you like to tell our credit union audience?
James McBride 8:55
You know, when I first joined the small credit union, if you want to call it small, I think all credit unions are small, but the smallest asset size category credit union, I joined one. I went to the league conference for the first time, and I started counting the number of times that I heard the word can’t. And I stopped, and I was like, Y’all stop saying that we can. So that’s what I would want to say to all of my friends and colleagues in the small credit union world. Don’t tell yourself lies. If there’s something out there that you want to accomplish, you can do it. You just have to believe in yourself. You got to find the right partner sometimes. But go out and do it. If you don’t try, you’re never going to win.
Sarah Cooke 9:37
Awesome, awesome. And that’s how small credit unions win.
James McBride 9:39
There we go.
Sarah Cooke 9:40
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
James McBride 9:42
Absolutely, thank you.