By Ray Birch
PITTSBURGH— BlastPoint’s newest CU Scorecard is delivering a blunt message to credit unions: 2025 may have looked like a strong year on the surface, but beneath the headline gains the industry became more divided—and more structurally fragile—than at any point in recent memory.
According to BlastPoint’s latest “CU Wrapped” year-in-review analysis, 2025 was “the industry’s most divided year on record,” with credit unions posting their strongest margin recovery in years even as broad-based member growth turned negative on an equal-weighted basis and the performance gap between the largest and smallest institutions widened further.
The core warning from BlastPoint co-founder and CTO Tomer Borenstein: many credit unions may feel healthier than they actually are, because rising profitability is masking a deeper erosion in long-term franchise strength.
“The headline is that 2025 was the industry’s most divided year,” Borenstein told CUToday.info, pointing out that BlastPoint is a member intelligence platform and CUScorecard is the organization’s new free tool. “You had the best margin in a decade, you had member growth that turned negative industry-wide for the first time, and you had the widest performance gap between the large credit unions and the small credit unions in a way that would probably make everyone nervous.”
BlastPoint said the industry’s 2025 story is defined by two competing realities. On one hand, financial performance improved materially. Borenstein said return on assets rose to 0.73% from 0.64% a year earlier, while net interest margin expanded to 3.72% from 3.56%, reflecting what he described as a successful margin recovery as rates normalized. That broad improvement is consistent with recent NCUA data showing stronger industry earnings and rising capital in 2025.
But Borenstein said those gains are obscuring what may be the more important story: most credit unions are not actually growing their member bases. While total industry membership still increased in aggregate—because a relatively small number of large institutions added large numbers of members—BlastPoint’s equal-weighted analysis, which looks at growth across individual credit unions rather than being dominated by the biggest players, shows member growth in Q4 2025 turned negative, at roughly -0.69% year-over-year. In Borenstein’s telling, that makes 2025 a year in which “the industry is harvesting higher margins from a shrinking member base,” a dynamic he said should raise long-term sustainability questions.
Divide Not New
That divide between large and small credit unions is hardly new, but Borenstein stressed the latest Scorecard suggests it is intensifying. BlastPoint buckets credit unions into six asset tiers, from institutions under $100 million to “Titans” above $10 billion. In 2025, he said, the smallest credit unions—those under $100 million in assets, which still account for roughly half the industry by count—saw average membership decline by 1.6%. Mid-small institutions between $100 million and $500 million also shrank, down 0.3%. By contrast, institutions above $500 million all posted positive member growth, with community-tier credit unions at +0.6%, mid-market at +2.2%, large at +2.7%, and Titans at +3.2%.
That is not simply another data point in the industry’s longstanding consolidation narrative, Borenstein argued. The real story now is that even some of the “winners” may be misreading the moment.
“If you’re a $5-billion credit union growing 2.7%, you should ask yourself how old are your new members,” he said. “A lot of that growth is consolidation gravity, not acquisition.”
In other words, larger credit unions may be picking up scale and members from mergers, branch closures and shifting geography—but not necessarily winning the younger, primary-relationship households that determine long-term relevance, he explained.
That distinction matters because the competitive threat is changing. Borenstein said the industry’s biggest blind spot is that fintechs are not primarily coming after the smallest, most fragile credit unions; they are targeting the same under-35 demographic that larger and growth-oriented credit unions need most. In his view, institutions can easily look at today’s margin expansion and conclude strategy is working, when in reality they may be deepening relationships with an aging existing base while failing to replace it with the “right kind” of new members.
That is one reason he described the current margin recovery as potentially deceptive. Much of the earnings lift, he said, reflects a temporary spread benefit as loans reprice faster than deposits in a still-elevated rate environment—not necessarily a durable operational breakthrough.
“A lot of the good signals that appear in some of these scorecards are good, but not necessarily as good and as sustainable as the credit unions that have those signatures think that they do,” Borenstein said.
CD Time Bomb
He pointed to what he called a looming “CD time bomb” as one of the clearest examples. Share certificate balances helped many credit unions stabilize funding and support margin during the rate cycle, but as those higher-cost deposits mature through 2026, each maturity becomes a retention and repricing decision point. That means institutions currently benefiting from favorable margin conditions may soon face tougher deposit competition and harder questions about whether those balances—and those members—were truly sticky.
At the same time, Borenstein said other legacy growth channels are becoming less reliable. He pointed to the industry’s pullback in indirect auto lending and a portfolio shift away from auto toward mortgages and certificates. Some credit unions, he noted, used indirect auto heavily in recent years to add accounts, only to discover those borrowers often did not convert into meaningful, relationship-driven members. In that sense, he said, 2025 exposed a central tension: many credit unions are becoming more engaged with the members they already have, but not necessarily building sustainable pipelines of future members.
That is where BlastPoint says CU Scorecard’s biggest value may lie—not as another leaderboard, but as an “early warning” tool that can show how healthy-looking metrics can coexist with signs of institutional decline. In the prior CUToday.info interview, Borenstein explained that the platform was originally built as an internal tool and later made public and free because executives repeatedly asked a simple question: how are we really doing against peers, without waiting weeks for custom analysis or paying for a costly analytics platform. He has described credit unions as often being “data rich but insight poor,” and said the goal was to make board-ready benchmarking and pattern recognition more accessible.
That includes the “signature analysis” BlastPoint has emphasized since launch—looking not just at isolated metrics, but at how they move together. In the latest interview, Borenstein described one example of a credit union that showed strong wallet-share growth and stable credit quality, yet also had negative member growth and negative loan growth. On the surface, some of those indicators looked solid. But taken together, the scorecard flagged what he called “institutional decline”—a warning that the credit union was becoming more dependent on a shrinking pool of existing members, even if short-term financials still looked healthy.
A Moment In Time?
For credit unions trying to understand whether that warning applies to them, Borenstein said the site now offers more than just a national snapshot. Beyond the national year-in-review report, users can drill into asset-tier reports, state-level analyses, leaderboards and individual institution scorecards, allowing them to compare performance by peer group, geography and charter. He said credit unions can also pull a free customized “wrapped” scorecard for their own institution, giving leaders a way to contrast their own results against the broader 2025 story and spot whether apparent strengths are truly sustainable or just “a moment in time.”
As CUToday.info previously reported, BlastPoint said CU Scorecard was made public without a login or subscription as a way to give the industry a simpler, executive-friendly benchmarking tool based on NCUA Call Report data—one designed for CEOs and boards, not just analysts buried in spreadsheets. The platform also includes national and state-level “analysis” views that synthesize trends with charts and commentary, and users can create custom comparisons and reports around their own credit union, state or asset tier.
Borenstein’s bigger point, however, is strategic: 2026 may be the real test. If 2025 was the year when strong margins masked structural weakness, then the coming year could reveal which credit unions used the earnings window to invest in real member intelligence, sustainable acquisition and relationship depth—and which ones simply enjoyed the windfall.
“Some credit unions are going to thrive because they’re going to see the warning sign,” he said. “Some might not.”