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With $7 million in assets and seven employees, Village Credit Union believes it’s the right size to provide the personalized service the Hispanic community values but isn’t receiving.

It has spent the past two years researching this market, which it says is underserved by most mainstream financial institutions, and on May 10 publicly launched a campaign to attract this ethnic group.

“We didn’t want to jump into anything just because it’s a fad,” said Becky Zemlicka, marketing director of the credit union. “We wanted to make sure it was the right fit for us, and we really felt after our research it was. … It wouldn’t hurt our current members, and it could only grow the credit union.”

Established in 1967, Village Credit Union started out as Blue Plans Credit Union and served only Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield employees. Then in 2000, Wellmark moved to Two Ruan Center and didn’t have space to house the credit union within its offices. The company moved to its current 601 E. Court Ave. location and slowly began to lose touch with Wellmark.

“We just found that support from Wellmark kept decreasing,” said Village Credit Union CEO Deborah Whittie. “They weren’t as interested in supporting the credit union like they did in years back, so we thought about when we moved here changing to a community (credit union), but there’s so much competition between all the financial institutions, we thought, ‘How can we compete?'”

Two years ago, Whittie attended a credit union conference that talked about the underserved Latino market. Given Village Credit Union’s location near a burgeoning Latino business district, its size and desire to grow beyond its 1,800 members, she realized this would be a natural segment to target.

Still, the decision involved months of research and working with Coopera Consulting, a subsidiary of the Iowa Credit Union League focused on helping credit unions reach this emerging market. “They really encouraged us to be very methodical about it, be careful and make sure we were completely ready before we launched into anything,” Zemlicka said. “It took nine months of preparation.”

Coopera encouraged credit union officials to look at “the four P’s”: personnel, product innovation, process redesign and promotions/marketing strategies. The organization’s leaders found they could make a few adjustments without having to change its overall focus and primary services that its current members wanted.

In spring 2007, the company changed its name to Village Credit Union, chosen for its positive connotation in both American and Hispanic cultures. Its board of directors unanimously approved the change and agreed to open up membership to the community. Over the course of the year, it hired two Latino employees to replace two departing staff members and added a Hispanic advisory panel in addition to its Wellmark staff advisory panel.

It also joined a pilot project with the World Council of Credit Unions, where for $300, the organization set up a remittance service, trained staff on how to use it and helped market the service in exchange for the Village Credit Union to do some additional reporting on how the program is working. Latinos often use remittance services to send money to family members in other countries.

Village Credit Union also had to adjust some of its policies and procedures, such as how to use Matricula Consular cards or visas instead of driver’s licenses and Social Security cards as forms of identification. “We just had to learn what it means and how we would work to make sure we did the right thing,” Zemlicka said.

Finally, on May 10, Mother’s Day in most Latin American countries, Village Credit Union hosted its first public event in an attempt to attract the Latino community. It had an open house and La Ley, a Spanish-language radio station, broadcast live from the location. Though Whittie and Zemlicka wished a few more people had shown up, in the two weeks following the event, they had around 15 people join the credit union, compared with the six new members per month the organization usually receives.

One of the biggest challenges, the organization’s leaders said, is getting a group that doesn’t use most mainstream financial services to trust their institution. They often bring their entire family in when they bank, Zemlicka said, and want to be known by name and not as a number.

This means that most of Village Credit Union’s growth will come slowly as word of its services spreads. “Word of mouth is big with this group,” Zemlicka said, “so once you start building trust with a few, then they’ll start telling others.

“It will be some time before we really see a return on investment, but that’s OK.”

But growth is important, especially if the credit union hopes to add new technology that will allow it to attract younger generations and keep up with larger financial institutions. For example, it cannot afford services such as bill pay.

Still, its small size and focus on service make it a prime candidate for serving the Latino population, Whittie and Zemlicka say. In fact, one Latino man was impressed when Whittie – a grandmother who loves children – started playing with his 2-year-old daughter so he could finish his banking business.

“I think that was really a high point for us,” Zemlicka said. “We realized we were made to do this; we were made to serve this population of people because we do this every day with our current members.”