As we begin 2024 and reflect on the year that was, I think it’s fitting to begin by acknowledging that 2024 marks our 90th anniversary—90 years of serving our members and the communities in which we exist!
In January 1934, our 22 founding members opened the doors to the Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union. Their goal was to create opportunities for their friends and families to have better lives and to achieve more. Their original pool of just $90 has turned into a ninety-year legacy of living the credit union philosophy of “people helping people.” Today, PSECU manages more than $8 billion in assets on behalf of our 590,000 members.
The reason we’re here at all boils down to one simple thing: YOU, our members. Everything we do as your trusted financial partner is to help you, as an individual and as part of the overall membership, achieve more. Whether that’s saving more money, paying down debt, buying a home, building credit, or enabling some other lifelong dream, we're dedicated to your financial health and success. Thank you for being a member.
This past year was a challenging year for all. Inflation put a strain on budgets, interest rates kept rising, and the threat of a recession loomed in the background. Despite these challenges, we stayed focused on continuing to offer our members competitive banking products, services, and rates and made significant investments in the member experience to ensure we’re providing the experience that you, our members, deserve.
Recognizing that our call wait times were longer than we’d like, we hired and onboarded more than 50 additional representatives in our call center. We also offered more training for those representatives, and all our front-line staff, to ensure that your member experience is not just timely, but also reliable and consistent.
As a digital-first credit union, we have also made quite a few enhancements to our digital channels – all aimed at making your banking experience easy and convenient. Examples include:
An enhanced sign-on summary page design
A redesign of our entire website to assist members in quickly finding the information they need
Introduction of Plaid and Zelle® to make transferring money inside and outside of PSECU much easier
Enhancements to account alerts and security
Implementation of a spending summary tool to provide insight into where your money is going.
Functionality to allow certificate maturity option updates in digital banking
24/7 live chat in mobile banking
A new service to digitally deliver documents previously sent via email, allowing for more timely delivery, easy access and retention, and no paper waste
Despite all of these investments, I’m pleased to tell you we’re not done! Starting in 2024, we’ll be commencing a four-year effort focused entirely on laying the foundation necessary to deliver exceptional member experiences. We’ll be making significant incremental investments in reengineering and streamlining processes, putting practices in place to collect and assess member feedback and turn that feedback into actionable results, deploying additional digital features, providing even more training and support resources for our front-line employees, and much more!
This list is certainly not exhaustive--we’ll be constantly evaluating our progress and the results of any changes or improvements that are implemented. I’m confident our member-focused strategy will provide even more value to your membership.
I’d like to thank you once again for your continued support and membership. We’re glad to have you as a member of PSECU!