By Ray Birch
PITTSBURGH—For years, credit unions have benchmarked themselves against other credit unions. But as competition for deposits, loans and member relationships intensifies, BlastPoint argues that may no longer be enough.
The company's newly launched Banking Scorecard, which analyzes approximately 4,265 FDIC-insured banks using quarterly FDIC data, is a free tool designed to give credit unions something many have never had easy access to: a side-by-side view of how the banks competing for the same consumers and businesses are actually performing.
The new tool arrives as BlastPoint's updated CU Scorecard, built from the latest NCUA first-quarter Call Report data, highlights an industry increasingly divided between large institutions that continue to grow and smaller credit unions struggling to maintain membership.
"Ultimately, capturing more members is a question of wallet share," Christopher Medina, BlastPoint's Go-To-Market engineer, told CUToday.info. "You're competing for attention and you're competing against banks that are often much more strongly resourced, both in terms of talent and marketing dollars. Credit unions need a more holistic picture of the market they're competing in."
CUs Facing Increasingly Difficult Competitive Realities
The Banking Scorecard ranks institutions across 12 core performance metrics, including return on assets, net interest margin, efficiency ratio and capital strength, while also tracking 16 behavioral indicators that can reveal emerging trends such as deposit pressure or margin compression. Users can compare banks by state, asset tier or specific institution, providing what Medina described as a free competitive intelligence platform that previously would have required significant internal analytics resources or outside consultants.
The timing is notable because the latest NCUA data suggest many credit unions are facing increasingly difficult competitive realities. BlastPoint's latest CU Scorecard analysis found the average credit union—excluding the industry's largest outliers—lost approximately 0.65% of its membership over the past year. The trend becomes more pronounced among smaller institutions. Credit unions under $100 million in assets lost roughly 1.5% of members year-over-year, while institutions with more than $10 billion in assets grew membership by approximately 3.5%. Every asset tier below $500 million showed membership declines, while larger institutions generally continued to expand.
Those findings are not new to industry observers. Consolidation, aging memberships and scale advantages have been reshaping the movement for years. What Medina believes is more significant is what the data suggest is not driving the problem.
"We're not necessarily seeing that smaller credit unions are losing members because their rates aren't competitive," Medina said. "Net interest margins remain fairly strong across the industry."
In fact, BlastPoint's data show credit unions under $100 million in assets posting an average net interest margin of about 3.8%, compared with roughly 3.1% among the industry's largest "Titan" credit unions. The challenge, he suggested, appears more tied to resources than pricing.
Smaller institutions often have fewer dollars available for marketing, branch expansion, digital investments and member acquisition strategies. Larger credit unions, meanwhile, can devote substantial resources to experimentation, digital channels and broader product offerings while competing directly with banks for consumer relationships, he reminded.
The Banking Scorecard was built with that reality in mind. Rather than simply showing how a credit union stacks up against peer institutions, the tool allows executives to examine the banks operating in their markets and evaluate factors such as profitability, growth, efficiency and lending performance.
"It's a competitive intelligence tool," Medina said. "The banks in their market compete with them for auto loans, deposits and small-business relationships. This allows credit unions to pull up the specific banks they're competing against and understand how those institutions are performing."
New 'Battlecards'
That competitive view is about to get faster to read, the company said.
BlastPoint is rolling out "battlecards" — a baseball-card-style format that distills an institution's full scorecard onto a single card: a quick-read snapshot, its core metrics ranked against same-size peers, and its clearest strengths and weaknesses.
“Built from the same underlying data from each scorecard, battlecards are designed to let users line institutions up next to one another: bank against bank, credit union against credit union, and credit union against bank — and size up the competition at a glance. The feature will be launched both on the Banking Scorecard and the CU Scorecard,” Medina said.
One early finding from the banking data illustrates the scale of that challenge. BlastPoint found that banks are generating nearly 1.8 times the average credit union's return on assets. While Medina cautioned that banks and credit unions operate under different structures and objectives, he said the figure highlights the operational and capital advantages many banks bring into local markets.
The broader implications extend beyond institutional competition. Medina noted that Federal research identifies approximately 12.3 million Americans living in banking deserts, areas with limited access to branches from either banks or credit unions. The company estimates there are roughly 3,600 such banking deserts nationwide. As smaller financial institutions struggle to grow and, in some cases, disappear through mergers, concerns about access to affordable financial services could become more pronounced.
"Americans are really feeling the pinch of inflation and cost-of-living pressures," Medina said. "The dwindling capacity of credit unions to provide lower-barrier-to-entry financial services is something that could be felt if these trends continue."