Every credit union in America contributes data to the NCUA data. All of it is public, but not particularly usable by a human being trying to run a board meeting. BlastPoint’s team was frustrated by the lack of clarity, so they built the platform and are sharing it with everyone.
Tomer Borenstein, Co-Founder and CTO of BlastPoint, joined Sarah Snell Cooke of The Credit Union Connection to talk about CU Scorecard, a free tool his company just launched that turns NCUA call report data into board-ready strategic intelligence. He also shares what that data is actually showing right now, including some encouraging signs that credit unions are clawing back the personal connection advantage they had been losing to big banks.
CU Scorecard is built around a straightforward premise: credit unions all contribute to the same public data set, but only the large ones have the analyst teams or the software subscriptions to do anything meaningful with it. The tool is designed to change that. Any credit union can look themselves up, see how they stack up against peers in their tier, their state, and nationally, and get a quick read on where they stand across growth, profitability, and member metrics without needing a data science background. Rather than showing individual metrics in isolation, the tool identifies how metrics move together to surface patterns like institutional decline or membership headwinds, so a leadership team can see not just where they are but what kind of situation they are in. It is available at cuscorecard.blastpoint.com.
“Every credit union contributes to this data. It just seemed like a no-brainer to make it pretty and then make it free.” — Tomer Borenstein
The industry trend data is worth a look too. The most recent NCUA call report data shows steady progress with accelerating growth and rising profitability in the last quarter. But the picture diverges significantly depending on tier. Mid-market credit unions are growing at 2.2% while the national average is in negative territory. Total assets are rising for the midmarket and titan tiers but declining for what BlastPoint calls community and large credit unions. That kind of context matters when you are trying to understand whether a problem you are seeing in your own numbers is a you problem or an industry problem.
Tomer’s observation about the personal connection advantage is one of the more interesting data points in the conversation. For years, the narrative was that big bank digitization was eroding the relationship banking edge credit unions had always held. The recent data suggests that trend may be reversing. The theory he and other credit union executives have been kicking around is that big banks have built an impressive outer layer digitally, but you can’t get too far past that surface. Credit unions, when they are at their best, let members go deeper. Sitting down with a Chief Lending Officer to work through a problem is not something Chase is offering. The opportunity, Tomer argues, is to use data and technology to bring that inner layer experience all the way to the surface, at scale, for every member.
BlastPoint’s core business is member intelligence, helping credit unions use member data and machine learning to understand who their members are, predict their needs and personalize how credit unions engage with them.
NOTE: If transcription were this AI’s superpower, it would be a very disappointing superhero origin story.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Hey everyone, welcome to The Credit Union Connection. I am Sarah Snell Cooke, your host. Here is an irony. Every credit union in America contributes data to the NCUA and all of that data is public, but it is not very usable. Today I am talking with Tomer Borenstein, CTO and Co-Founder of BlastPoint, who looked at that situation and said absolutely not. His company built CU Scorecard, a completely free tool that turns NCUA call report data into actual strategic intelligence. Tor is also bringing some good news. Credit unions are clawing back their personal connection advantage from the big banks. After years of hearing that digitalization killed the relationship banking edge, the data are showing a reversal. We are talking about what is driving that and how credit unions can use benchmark data without needing a PhD in analytics.
Hello, welcome everybody. This is The Credit Union Connection. I am Sarah Snell Cooke, your host. I am joined today by Tomer Borenstein. Welcome.
Tomer Borenstein
Thank you for having me.
Sarah Snell Cooke
It is great to have you. Tor is the Co-Founder and CTO of a company called BlastPoint. Take a minute to introduce yourself and the company.
Tomer Borenstein
Sure. We have been around for about 10 years and have been in the credit union space for about three or four years. Essentially what we do is member intelligence for credit unions and other highly regulated service providers. For credit unions specifically, our whole focus is helping them connect with their members at scale by using member data and machine learning to better understand, predict, and ultimately help members get the types of experiences they deserve and expect from their credit union.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Can you speak to the national trends you are seeing in the NCUA data?
Tomer Borenstein
It is interesting. I was at the CUNA CEO Council event last year in Jackson Hole with a bunch of other CEOs, and someone from the Fed gave a really interesting talk. The thing that stood out to me was that the personal connection advantage credit unions have always had is starting to shift back toward banks. I was at another event talking with credit union executives and we were trying to figure out why. Obviously digitization and the big banks are part of it. But we are in an interesting situation now where a big bank has a really shiny outer layer. When you engage with them at the surface, it is a pleasant experience. But you cannot get too far deeper than that outer layer. With a credit union, the fact that you can sit down with a Chief Lending Officer to work through something as a member, that ability to dig deeper and have a way better experience than you would somewhere else, that is the opportunity. How do we take that inner layer experience and bring it all the way to the surface? How do we use technology and data and member data to understand who they are, what they are going to need, and how they prefer to be engaged, so we can do that at scale? That is what we are trying to do.
And that is part of why we built CU Scorecard, which is separate from BlastPoint’s core product. We launched it this month in February and have already had hundreds of people sign up, which was a little overwhelming. We did not expect everyone to run with it quite like that. But essentially what this tool allows you to do is look your credit union up and see your NCUA data in a way that is board-ready rather than having to sift through mountains of call report data, which are well-structured but also incredibly confusing to a human being. We surface how your credit union compares to its peers along all of these axes: member growth, loan growth, profitability, whether you are in the top or bottom quartile for your tier, your state, and nationally.
We also have a signature analysis piece that is not just individual metrics in isolation. This is how different metrics move together to create patterns that give you early signal into things you need to pay attention to. For example, when asset growth, member growth, and loan growth are all negative at the same time, that gives you a particular signature that looks like institutional decline. It helps you say, this is where we need to focus our efforts. It also helps you see positive behaviors, like growing fast with none of it coming from indirect lending.
On the industry trends side, the most recent NCUA call report data shows steady progress with accelerating growth and rising profitability in the last quarter. You can see member growth improving, though year-over-year for the full 12-month period it went from positive to negative. Total assets are growing for the midmarket and titan tiers but declining for community and large credit unions. The midmarket tier is growing at 2.2% right now while the national average is in negative territory. Being able to see not just the top-level picture but what is happening in your specific neighborhood and tier, that is the kind of visibility we want to provide. There are also leaderboards where you can see who in your state or tier is doing the best, who has the most strengths or concerns, and how different credit unions are growing year-over-year. All of this is completely free at cushorecard.blastpoint.com with no credit card required.
We built this internally to help us understand our partners and the industry better. As we started sharing the insights with partners they kept saying, there is really something here. And since it is all publicly available data anyway and our mission as a company is to democratize access to data so organizations can find the humans in their data and serve them better, it just seemed like a no-brainer to make it presentable and then make it free.
Sarah Snell Cooke
What are credit unions currently doing with data and specifically with benchmarking?
Tomer Borenstein
I will separate this into two questions because there is benchmarking and performance data, which is what CU Scorecard addresses, and then there is member data and modeling, which is a different data set and requires a different level of data maturity. For benchmarking specifically, the larger credit unions absolutely do this. They have teams of analysts who sift through this public data and produce reports. There are also subscription tools like Callahan that help you engage with this data at a much deeper level than CU Scorecard was designed for. CU Scorecard is not meant to replace those. But even with those tools, you typically need an analyst to pull the right reports. As we built this for ourselves, we were thinking at the executive level, the CFO, Chief Lending Officer, CEO, CMO level. We designed it to push insights at you rather than requiring you to sift through data, so busy executives can quickly see how they are doing and move on. The other thing is that none of those existing options are accessible to smaller credit unions. In the spirit of the industry, it just makes sense to democratize access to data that all credit unions contribute to so all of them can benefit from it.
Sarah Snell Cooke
How can credit unions use this in the boardroom for more strategic conversations?
Tomer Borenstein
The way I would think about it is you start with the scorecard, then go to the leaderboards, then go to the industry analysis. When you look at the scorecard, first you can see exactly where you stand and whether the things you thought you needed to work on are actually showing up in the data. My hope is that when people look at this, they get a mix of data that validates what they already know, because that means the data is good, and data that surprises them, because that means they are getting genuinely new information. The signature piece surfaces the areas for opportunity without hitting anyone over the head with it. The leaderboards give you a sense of whether what you are seeing is a you problem or an industry problem. Is everyone in your tier moving in the same direction or is yours uniquely different? And then the industry analysis gives you the headwinds and tailwinds view, which is exactly how I frame things in my own board meetings. That is how I see CU Scorecard contributing to that board discussion.
Sarah Snell Cooke
For about 10 years we have been saying fintechs and neobanks are relatively new competitors, and since COVID credit unions have realized they needed to adapt digitally fast. I am now hearing the exact opposite from what we were hearing before, which is a good thing. I always allow my guests a final thought as we wrap up. What would you like to leave our credit union audience with?
Tomer Borenstein
Honestly the thing that comes to mind without even having to think about it is just a thank you for welcoming BlastPoint into your industry. It has been really good for us. We have been growing like crazy because of the credit union industry and I could not imagine BlastPoint without it at this point. So just thank you. And please do go use CU Scorecard and leave us feedback. I would love to hear from you as we will continue evolving it based on what we learn.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Appreciate it.
Tomer Borenstein
Thank you so much for having me.