In the finance game, Maritime, Mining & Power Credit Union has found that there are many benefits in teaming up with other culturally aligned organisations. Three mergers in the past five years have significantly opened up new opportunities and markets, enabling the business to expand and provide a better service to its customer base. CEO Mark Genovese has been involved for over a decade and has witnessed the growth firsthand. He says the credit union would not have been able to expand anywhere near as fast as it did without the alliances.
”When I started here, we were an organisation with around $90 million in assets,” Mark says. “We were doing home loans, really focused on just the maritime industry full stop. Since that time, the credit union has grown to close to $800 million in assets. We’ve broadened our membership base to miners, in particular coalminers and their families. We’ve also extended it to energy workers and people in the power industry. And we also have a significant operation in central New South Wales, with our major retail centre being Bathurst.”
”In terms of our alliances and partnerships, the two critical ones are certainly the ones we have with both the Maritime Union of Australia and the mining and energy division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining & Energy Union. They’ve been great supporters of ours. We’ve been able to leverage off each others organisations in terms of getting members and making sure that were very in tune with the members needs.”