Enhancing The Performance of Credit Unions : The Evolution of a Methodology

In the United States credit unions are not-for-profit cooperative financial institutions, owned by and operated for the benefit of their members. Being part of a cooperative movement enhances the likelihood that credit unions will share performance-enhancing ideas, for the benefit of weak credit unions and the movement as a whole. In this paper we show how a conventional performance evaluation methodology has evolved into a novel performance enhancement methodology. The evolution of the methodology is the result of cooperations among individual credit union managements, movement officials and the authors. The evolution is illustrated with 1990 data on nearly 9,000 credit unions.