Unique Perspective

Caroline Willard recalls quite vividly her first experience with a credit union. She was a college student working at The Happiest Place on Earth—Disneyland—and she needed to buy a car.

“I fondly remember that little Honda Civic, which I drove back and forth to work,” Willard says. “I got my car loan through Disneyland’s credit union. It was the first time that I ever felt an affiliation with a financial institution. There’s a community spirit in credit unions that you just can’t find at other types of financial institutions.”

That affiliation with CUs has proved to be a key component in Willard’s professional life. She has more than 25 years of marketing and strategic planning experience, more than half of which has been in the movement. Her current position is EVP/markets and strategy for CO-OP Financial Services (www.co-opfs.org), Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.

CO-OP Financial Services is a CUES Supplier member. In addition, 20 of the CUSO’s top executives, including Willard, are CUES members, under the company’s CUES Executive Group membership. (Learn more about group membership for CU and CUSO leaders.)

Willard has eight-and-a-half years of executive experience at CO-OP, the nation’s largest CUSO, which works with 3,500 credit unions through all 50 states on such diverse things as ATM and shared branching networks, call center activities, debit and credit card processing, and a wide range of mobile and online solutions. In addition, Willard spent five years in a marketing and strategic planning capacity for a credit union in Orange County.

She will bring this diverse experience to her role as the 2014-15 chair of the CUES Board of Directors. She is looking forward to taking on new challenges and seeing initiatives to fruition that will further the professional development of credit union executives.

“I’m honored and flattered and excited all at once about taking on this role,” Willard reports. “I’m very lucky to be serving on this board with such a ridiculously talented group of people. I learn something every time I go to a board meeting.”

Willard is the only CUSO executive on the CUES board, which gives her a unique and valued perspective that complements those of the CU executives serving alongside her.

“CO-OP Financial Services sits at a different focal point,” she explains. “I’m able to provide my expertise on payments and collaborative efforts. I don’t have all the answers, but working collaboratively as a board, we can find the right solutions. None of us is as smart alone as all of us are together.”

From PR to an MBA

At the start of her career, Willard had no inkling that she would wind up in the financial institutions sector. She graduated from California State University-Fullerton with a communications degree and took on a job in public relations. Five years into her PR career, she made the decision to pursue her MBA at Pepperdine University.

“Up until that point, I had strenuously avoided quantitative and strategic thinking,” she jokes. “My MBA propelled me away from PR into marketing, which required an entirely different set of analytical skills.”

Willard’s initial taste of working for a financial institution was in a marketing capacity for a savings and loan. She undertook her first professional role with a CU in 2001 when she accepted a marketing position with American First Credit Union in La Habra, Calif. Her scope of duties there extended from marketing into strategic planning. She furthered her quantitative and analytic skills by serving on the organization’s asset/liability management committee.

Willard’s career changed forever when she attended a professional conference in Washington, D.C. There, she met Stan Hollen, CEO of CO-OP Financial Services, who was immediately impressed. In July 2006, he hired Willard to take on the role of VP/corporate development, which included responsibility for mergers and acquisitions. Her responsibilities at CO-OP quickly grew and diversified.

In 2008, she was promoted to SVP/business development and marketing, which involved overseeing the marketing department, as well as the company’s 22-member relationship management team and the client services department. She stayed in that capacity for four years before taking on her current position. This position includes responsibility for strategic planning, product development, marketing and market research. Her duties also include leading the company’s push into emerging technologies.

“Caroline has progressed and grown with CO-OP and plays a key role in our strategic direction,” says Hollen.

The perspective that Willard gained by working directly for a CU has proved an important component of her effectiveness at CO-OP, Hollen adds.

Willard also is frequently the face of CO-OP at a wide range of CU conferences and events.

An Exciting Time at CUES

Willard’s long-time commitment to the CU movement includes devoting a countless amount of time not only to CUES, but to other organizations and causes, such as Filene Research Institute and Credit Unions for Kids, a CU fundraising group supporting Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.

Her involvement with CUES began about 10 years ago with her participation in the Southern California/Arizona CUES Council. She was a board member and also served as chair of the council between 2004 and 2012 before being nominated to CUES’ national board of directors.

Serving on the CUES Board has been a definite highlight of Willard’s professional affiliations. She came onto the board at an exciting time for the organization.

“Fred Johnson had announced his retirement as CUES’ president and CEO, and the board was tasked with picking his successor,” Willard says. “We took this responsibility very seriously. We knew it would set the tone and direction of the organization moving forward. I believe we made a great choice in selecting Chuck Fagan.”

As Willard takes on the chairmanship of the board, she sees potential for building programs that will further the professional development of CUES members.

“Our strategic plan calls for reinvestment back into the organization. We’re expanding into new offerings, like CUES Elite Access™, which is designed to maximize Ivy League educational value for executives while minimizing travel and time away from work. We’re also focusing on new growth and revitalization.”

Another program Willard is excited about is CUES’ Strategic Innovation Institute (cues.org/sii), a two-year transformational program featuring an integrated curriculum of strategy, innovation, technology and leadership that was developed specifically for credit union executives. The program’s development was underwritten by CO-OP Financial Services, and CUES Supplier members CUNA Mutual Group, Madison, Wis., and MasterCard Worldwide, Rye, N.Y.

“This is something where my dual role with CUES and CO-OP comes into play, since CO-OP is a founding sponsor of the program,” Willard says. “We’re very much invested in getting this one off the ground.” The MIT segment launched in 2014; the Stanford segment will be held for the first time this fall.

Willard views continuing education as a way for executives to develop strategies for keeping pace with the multiple demands on their time. “All of us are struggling with a flood of data. It can become information overload. CUES recognizes the challenges of living in an information age and addresses these topics by focusing on the necessary leadership traits. It’s tough to keep up if you haven’t figured out a way to manage.”

A firm believer in practicing what she preaches, Willard avails herself of educational opportunities even as she advocates the importance of education for others.

“For example, I started attending CUES’ CEO Institute this year,” she reports. Completing CEO Institute will give Willard the Certified Chief Executive designation, which signifies completion of all three institutes and the between-segments projects. More than 520 top CU leaders, ready to take on top challenges today and tomorrow, have the CCE behind their names.

“This is great, actionable education,” Willard says, explaining that one thing she and her classmates focused on is setting strategic priorities. “A lot of us can get prone to adult ADD,” Willard says, based on hearing Tom Flick at November’s CEO/Executive Team Network. “With a myriad of distractions throughout the day, it can sometimes be tough to hunker down and get things done. Complacency and false urgency are the death of leadership. We need to focus on actions that will give us the most leverage, and the best way to do that is to stop focusing on non-essential things to make time for what’s really important.”

An Emphasis on Collaboration

Moving into the future, Willard sees the need for credit unions to place more emphasis on collaboration as they strive to control costs and go up against more well-financed competitors. Having worked in the movement for some time now, she has had the opportunity to witness successful collaborations among CUs—not only shared branching and ATM networks, but also additional shared resources, such as IT solutions, back-office functionality, even marketing and strategic planning. She cites as a case in point the collaboration of three credit unions that pooled their technology-related services to form Open Technology Solutions LLC in Centennial, Colo.

“There are pockets of collaboration throughout the credit union movement, which I think is a healthy trend,” Willard says. “Collaboration is a definite advantage that credit unions have over banks.”

Willard’s unique perspective with CO-OP also has equipped her with unique insights into the important and competitive area of payments.

“From where I sit in the movement, I see changing forces in payments due to new entrants, such as the Merchant Customer Exchange,” a merchant-owned mobile commerce network, she reports. “To address these new players, credit unions are going to have to be nimble and tactical. We’ve weathered tough challenges before, such as the mortgage-backed securities meltdown. I like to think that we are leaner and better positioned to deal with additional challenges from new competitors, given that credit unions have such a great history of serving their members effectively.”

Committed to making a difference in the movement, Willard brings that same passion for service to her personal life. She is very involved in service projects through her church and community organizations where she lives in Claremont, Calif. She also sets time aside for visiting family and friends as well as participating in a variety of recreational activities. She was introduced to golf by her father, and also enjoys scuba diving and snow skiing.

Willard’s personal and professional lives converge as a result of the many great people she has met through the credit union movement. Since she devotes so much time to her work and affiliated professional organizations, she considers herself fortunate that she has forged so many long-lasting relationships with individuals who have the same devotion and commitment that she does.

“I’m blessed to be working in a movement that has given me so many friends,” she concludes.

Diane Franklin is a freelance writer based in Missouri.