Fewer members at CUA

Australia's largest credit union, CUA, is losing members despite investing in a slick marketing campaign featuring high-profile TV celebrities and scoring well in customer satisfaction surveys.

CUA's campaign slogan is "A change for the better" and asks bank customers to "come and experience the CUA difference. It might just be a change for the better."

Bank customers are firmly staying put. CUA suffered a net decline in membership for the year to June 2009 of about 4000 members.

Chief executive Chris Whitehead says recent mergers and flat lending growth are to blame.

"Membership growth has been nowhere near as much as we'd like, that's true," said Whitehead. "Lending hasn't been growing for us and that's been the main reason for that."

CUA has approximately 330,000 members.

"When we merged with Australian National Credit Union we found there were quite a few duplicate memberships. We have also worked hard to clean out our membership list since the merger. Often people don't close their accounts when they leave so the figures that we are seeing now are more a true reflection of the number of real members we have."

CUA topped a recent 'day to day banking' customer survey by consumer group Choice, recording the highest proportion of satisfied customers, with an overall score of 84 per cent. Since that survey, which identified lack of branches and ATMs as the major weakness of credit unions, the rediATM network has joined with NAB to provide wider access for credit union members to fee-free ATM withdrawals.

CUA posted an underlying net profit after tax of $43 million for the year ending June 2009, up from $36.7 million last year. The credit union had a reportable loss after tax of $2.9 million, down from a $60.6 million profit last year, after accounting for the fair value of interest rate hedges.

Lending growth was minimal and interest revenue from loans was down $28 million.

Deposits grew by $725.2 million to almost five billion dollars, driven by strong demand for term deposits, which attracted an extra $589.4 million during the financial year.

Whitehead says he expects lending growth to improve.

"We have changed our strategy in a few ways and pulled out of the broker market completely over a year ago," said Whitehead yesterday.

"Now we are selling more loans through our branches than we did through the brokers and the branches combined."