In 1995, rapper Skee-Lo released “I Wish,” a song built around a pretty relatable premise: his life would be better if a whole bunch of things were different. He wishes he were taller. More successful with women. Driving a better car. Living a slightly different life than the one he has.

It is funny, catchy and, nearly three decades later, perhaps an unexpectedly useful way to think about credit union strategic planning.

Spend enough time around credit union boardrooms and you will hear our own version of “I Wish.” We wish we had younger members. We wish we could grow loans. We wish more members would use us as their primary financial institution. We wish employees would have deeper conversations. We wish people understood the credit union difference. We wish our digital experience could compete with SoFi, Chime and the largest banks.

None of these are unreasonable aspirations. In fact, most of them are exactly the outcomes credit union leaders should be pursuing. The problem is that we have become remarkably good at articulating what we wish were different without being nearly as disciplined about changing the things necessary to make those wishes come true.

That distinction matters because an aspiration is not a strategy. “Grow younger members” is not a strategy. Neither is “grow loans,” “increase checking penetration” or “improve member engagement.” Those are descriptions of a future we would like to have. Strategy begins when leaders ask the more difficult question: What are we willing to do differently to create it?

For a industry movement facing significant demographic, technological and competitive change, that may be the most important question we can ask.

The Gap Between What We Want and What We Do

Consider the obsession with attracting younger members. Credit unions have been talking about this challenge for decades, yet Filene Research Institute reports that the average credit union member is approximately 53 years old and fewer than 20% of Americans under 40 use a credit union. McKinsey's analysis is equally sobering: baby boomers represented 39% of credit union members in 2023, up from 28% in 2015, while Gen Z accounted for only 10%.

Those numbers should cause us to question one of our favorite explanations for the problem. Perhaps younger consumers aren't rejecting the credit union idea nearly as much as we think.

McKinsey found that younger consumers changing financial institutions value many of the things credit unions have historically claimed as strengths. Younger consumers still need financial guidance. They still need affordable access to credit. They still want institutions they can trust. In fact, Federal Reserve research found that only 66% of adults ages 18 to 29 and 67% of those ages 30 to 44 said they were doing okay or living comfortably financially in 2024, compared with 84% of adults 60 and older.

That hardly sounds like a generation with no need for credit unions.

It sounds like a generation with tremendous financial needs that may not be finding us particularly relevant.

The distinction is important. If younger consumers simply didn't believe in the credit union value proposition, we would have a positioning problem. But if they value many of the things credit unions offer while choosing other providers anyway, we have a much larger strategic problem. We have to examine not just what we stand for, but how effectively we deliver it.

That is where the wish begins colliding with reality.

You can put “attract younger members” in the strategic plan. Marketing can build a campaign around it. You can create Instagram reels, sponsor events and redesign the creative to feature younger faces. But eventually that 27-year-old consumer has to interact with the credit union. She has to find you, understand you, join you, move money to you, borrow from you and manage her financial life through you.

And that experience is where the strategy is either validated or exposed.

McKinsey estimates that credit unions generate less than 10% of sales digitally, compared with more than 30% for comparable regional banks. It has also estimated that as many as 75% of credit unions operate with legacy loan-origination systems without true automation. Credit union websites, meanwhile, have experienced bounce rates significantly higher than those of regional banks.

This creates an uncomfortable possibility: marketing may actually be doing its job.

We may be attracting the consumer and then handing her over to an experience that was designed for the credit union we used to be rather than the consumer we say we want to serve.

If that's true, more marketing won't solve the problem.

You Cannot Market Your Way Around Friction

This is one of the reasons I believe credit unions need to stop treating growth as primarily a marketing challenge. Marketing absolutely matters. Brand matters. Awareness matters. Communication matters. But none of those things can permanently compensate for a business model that makes it difficult for consumers to do business with you.

Loan growth provides a perfect example.

Almost every credit union wants more loans. But “we need more loans” is about as strategically useful as saying “we need more money.” The important questions come next. More loans from whom? What financial problem are we particularly well positioned to solve? Why would that borrower choose us instead of the lender already embedded in the purchasing experience? How quickly can we make a decision? How easy is the application? How many steps are required? How many applications fall into manual review? How many policies exist because of actual risk, and how many exist because “that's how we've always done it”?

Most importantly, where is the consumer when the borrowing decision is being made?

A member shopping for a vehicle may begin with Google, a dealership website, an automotive marketplace or a payment calculator long before visiting a credit union website. If our entire auto-loan strategy consists of an email announcing a great rate and a banner on the homepage, we haven't really developed a lending strategy. We have advertised a product and hoped someone happens to need it at exactly the right moment.

There's that word again: hoped.

The industry's aggregate performance can make this problem easy to overlook. Federally insured credit unions held approximately $2.48 trillion in assets and $1.73 trillion in loans in the first quarter of 2026, with total loans growing 4.6% year over year. But the median credit union's loan growth was only 0.6%. Median membership declined 0.5%, and approximately 55% of federally insured credit unions had fewer members than they did a year earlier.

Those are very different stories.

The credit union industry can grow while a significant portion of individual credit unions slowly lose relevance. Aggregate growth can therefore become a dangerously comforting statistic in a boardroom. The question isn't whether credit unions are growing. The question is whether your credit union is creating a sustainable reason for tomorrow's consumer to choose it.

The Capital Question We Don't Like Asking

This is where the conversation becomes more uncomfortable.

Whenever the industry discusses modernizing technology, redesigning lending, improving digital account opening, using data more effectively or fundamentally changing the member experience, cost quickly enters the conversation. And appropriately so. Credit union leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to protect members' money and maintain a safe, sound institution.

But there is a difference between prudent capital management and institutional paralysis.

Federally insured credit unions entered 2026 with roughly $279 billion in net worth and an industry net worth ratio comfortably above regulatory well-capitalized standards. The industry, collectively, is not starving for capital. Yet we continue to hear some version of the same refrain: we wish our technology were better, but technology is expensive. We wish our digital experience were better, but replacing the platform is expensive. We wish we had better data, better automation, better talent and better lending capabilities, but those investments are expensive.

Of course they are.

Transformation generally costs money.

The strategic question is not whether an investment has a cost. The question is whether the cost of maintaining the status quo is ultimately greater.

That calculation rarely appears neatly on an income statement. There isn't a line item labeled “Members Who Never Considered Us Because Our Experience Felt Outdated.” There is no monthly expense category called “Loans We Never Booked Because Someone Else Made It Easier.” Nobody sends the CFO an invoice for “Twenty-Eight-Year-Olds Who Will Never Become Members.”

But those costs are real.

And they compound.

Capital is supposed to protect a credit union's ability to fulfill its mission. It should not become a museum exhibit that everyone admires while the institution it was accumulated to protect becomes less relevant.

This doesn't mean credit unions should recklessly spend down capital or chase every new piece of technology. It means boards should recognize that inaction is itself a capital allocation decision. Choosing not to invest in digital experience is a decision. Choosing not to modernize lending is a decision. Choosing not to develop data capabilities is a decision. Choosing not to redesign processes that members hate is a decision.

Every dollar we preserve today comes with an implicit assumption that preserving it creates more long-term value than deploying it.

Sometimes that's absolutely true.

Sometimes it isn't.

Strategic planning is supposed to help us tell the difference.

The Risk of Being Safe

Credit unions are understandably wired for caution. We are financial institutions. We manage other people's money. Risk management isn't optional.

The problem comes when the mindset required to manage credit risk begins influencing every other strategic decision. New technology feels risky. Changing underwriting feels risky. Redesigning processes feels risky. Hiring different talent feels risky. Changing the branch model feels risky. Experimenting feels risky.

Eventually, maintaining the status quo begins to feel like the safest choice available.

But “do nothing” has never actually meant “assume no risk.”

There is risk in having an average member in their 50s. There is risk in a business model heavily dependent on consumers moving closer to retirement while younger generations establish financial relationships elsewhere. There is risk in generating less than 10% of sales digitally when competitors have built entire businesses around digital acquisition. There is risk in protecting today's earnings while gradually losing tomorrow's member.

There is also enormous opportunity in solving those problems. McKinsey has estimated that closing the digital-sales gap with regional banks could represent a $5 billion to $10 billion revenue opportunity for credit unions.

That is not a social media opportunity.

It is not a branding opportunity.

It is not a campaign opportunity.

It is a business-model opportunity.

And realizing it requires leaders to think beyond what marketing should say and toward what the organization itself needs to become.

Strategic Planning Should Turn “I Wish” Into “We Will”

This is why I believe many credit unions need to rethink strategic planning itself.

Too many planning sessions begin with a list of problems and end with a slightly more polished list of aspirations. Grow membership. Grow loans. Improve technology. Develop employees. Increase engagement. The wording may change from year to year, but the underlying strategy often doesn't.

A good strategic planning process should make that impossible.

If the board says, “We need younger members,” the next conversation shouldn't immediately be about marketing. It should be about understanding why younger consumers aren't choosing the credit union today. Perhaps the answer is awareness. But perhaps it is digital account opening. Maybe it's product design, payments, lending speed, hours, underwriting, financial education, the website, the branch experience or simply the fact that we have designed the institution around people who already know how a credit union works.

Only after understanding the problem should the organization decide what it is prepared to change.

The same discipline should apply to loan growth. Don't tell me you want 8% loan growth. Tell me where the 8% is coming from. Tell me which consumers you're going to serve better than competitors. Tell me what friction you're going to remove. Tell me which policies you're willing to question. Tell me what technology you're going to improve. Tell me what data you're going to use. Tell me how much capital you're willing to deploy and what return you expect from it.

Then tell me who owns it, when it happens and what we should see 12 months from now if the strategy is working.

Now we're getting somewhere.

Strategy should force an organization to move from “I wish” to “therefore, we will.”

We wish younger consumers would choose us; therefore, we will redesign the experience around the financial lives of younger consumers rather than merely advertise to them.

We wish more members would borrow from us; therefore, we will remove unnecessary friction from lending, reconsider outdated policies, improve decisioning and meet consumers earlier in the buying journey.

We wish members would make us their primary financial institution; therefore, we will define the behaviors that constitute a primary relationship and intentionally design onboarding, checking, payments, lending and communication around creating those behaviors.

We wish employees would build deeper relationships; therefore, we will give them the training, tools, expectations and authority to solve financial problems instead of simply completing transactions.

We wish our technology were better; therefore, we will stop viewing technology only as an expense to minimize and start evaluating member experience as infrastructure necessary to compete.

The words after “therefore, we will” are the strategy.

Everything before them is the wish.

The Industry Doesn't Need More Wishes

Credit unions possess an extraordinary collection of advantages. We have trust, community presence, competitive pricing, human relationships, a cooperative ownership structure and a mission that should be increasingly relevant in a financial world that can feel impersonal, complicated and predatory.

In many cases, we also have the capital necessary to build the next version of the institution.

What we don't have is unlimited time.

The number of federally insured credit unions continues to decline. There were 4,411 federally insured credit unions in the first quarter of 2025. One year later, there were 4,250. Not every merger represents failure; sometimes consolidation is absolutely the right strategic decision. But the long-term direction of the industry should make every board wrestle with a question that is much bigger than next year's budget:

Are we managing this credit union primarily to protect what exists today, or are we investing enough to make sure it deserves to exist tomorrow?

That doesn't mean abandoning the fundamentals that made credit unions successful. Quite the opposite. The mission may be more relevant today than it has been in decades. Younger consumers are navigating expensive housing, rising debt, fragmented financial relationships, buy now/pay later products and an increasingly complicated financial ecosystem. They need institutions willing to help them make better financial decisions.

The question is whether we are willing to become the institution they need rather than continuing to wish they would become the members we already know how to serve.

Skee-Lo could spend an entire song wishing things were different. It worked. Thirty-one years later, we're still talking about it.

Credit union leaders don't have that luxury.

We can wish for younger members. Wish for more loans. Wish for deeper relationships. Wish for better technology. Wish for employees to behave differently and consumers to understand us better.

Or we can decide what we're willing to change, where we're willing to invest and what we're willing to stop doing in order to produce a different result.

Wishing makes for a great song.

“Therefore, we will” makes for a much better strategic plan.