Twenty credit unions with assets of $350 million or more accepted Cornerstone’s invitation to participate on advisory boards to help shape the survey instruments behind The Cornerstone Report 2006: Benchmarks and Best Practices for Credit Unions.

Modeling the credit union survey after the one used for the highly respected Cornerstone Report: Benchmarks and Best Practices for Mid-Size Banks, our Advisory Boards fine-tuned the questionnaires to elicit the most pertinent, useful data possible for credit unions in this asset size range to use in benchmarking, process improvement and strategic planning initiatives.

Cornerstone Advisors then invited credit unions with $350 million or more in assets to take part in this important project by completing questionnaires that gathered detailed productivity and staffing benchmarks in 11 key credit union areas:

• Retail Banking
• Deposit Operations
• Consumer Lending
• Mortgage Lending
• Business Services
• Loan Operations and Collections
• Enterprise Risk Management
• Wealth Management
• Corporate Administration
• Information Services

The inaugural edition of The Cornerstone Report: Benchmarks and Best Practices for Credit Unions offers a wealth of valuable peer data and performance improvement information not available anywhere else.

It supplies the data to answer critical questions such as these:

• How many employees should we have in this function and what type of performance benchmarks should we use to measure success?
• What successes – and challenges – are credit unions facing with alternative delivery channels like Internet banking, call center and ATM?
• What percentage of credit unions has deployed a particular new technology?
• How much are peer credit unions spending on training?
• Where are they concentrating their investment?
• What are peer credit unions outsourcing and how much are they spending?

By providing the most accurate and in-depth benchmarking data and best practice information available in the industry, The Cornerstone Report can potentially identify millions of dollars of process improvements and cost savings for large credit unions.