Erin Mendez is quick to say this year’s volatile economy isn’t the first time she’s had to lead in difficult times. She took the helm of Patelco Credit Union in August 2013, quickly adopting services to help members still struggling in the wake of the Great Recession. The credit union continues to debut services to help members improve their finances, while avoiding layoffs among its own staff.
When you joined Patelco in 2013, you offered products to help consumers still recovering from the Great Recession. Have those services now fallen by the wayside? Those products are still in place, and we’ve added a couple more since then. We’ve added a product we call ScoreUp Credit Builder Loan, which helps members strengthen their credit while creating an emergency savings account. It’s probably one of our more innovative products and has been well received by the membership. We actually worked with Duke University to help design ScoreUp, which debuted in mid-2021 and has about 1,300 members participating in the service.
Why do you say the middle class might be getting lost when it comes to the financial services industry? What I’ve seen over the years is the banks raise the amount of money, for instance, for their wealth management pro-grams. It went from $250,000 and now it’s $400,000 or $500,000. Everything has kind of increased.When you think about a fam-ily of four in the Bay Area making $150,000, they are so far from wealth. But they still need the services, they still need to begin some type of strategy to take care of their future.