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The 2019-2020 CUNA Lending Council Executive Committee was announced at the 25th annual conference in New Orleans, La., in early November and includes Lisa Cox, CORE Credit Union’s vice president of lending. Outgoing committee member Mike London, chief lending officer for Georgia United Credit Union, based in Duluth, Ga, was honored for his service last two years as chairman.
This will be Lisa’s first term on the committee, and she credits encouragement from CEO Bob Clampett for her decision to be part of the organization. Clampett encourages networking and taking a deeper dive into the credit union for all of the senior management team at the Stateboro, Ga.,-based credit union.
“As a member of the lending council, I learned there were not small credit union members on the executive committee,” Lisa said. “I wanted to bring the perspective of a smaller, rural credit union into the mix on the committee so that we could have input.”
Already the new team has met at the November conference and Lisa sees opportunities to voice the priorities of small-asset organizations. She will serve on the Member Resources Committee and the Scholarship Committee.
“The challenges are so different between smaller and larger credit unions,” Lisa said. “With member resources, I’m getting to have input on topics for white papers, roundtables and webinars. That’s very beneficial. The content we can offer to credit unions from CUNA is just amazing. They provide a wealth of knowledge and information.”
Lisa, who has worked for CORE for 18 years, is looking at the insight she can provide from smaller credit unions that can’t hire costly vendors or implement expensive technology. Departments in large-asset sized institutions staff specifically for those needs, while smaller credit union professionals tend to multi-task.
Lending, real estate lending and collections are all under my function at the credit union,” Lisa said. “I also work to motivate staff. We wear a lot of hats at our credit union.”
CUNA Councils is a member-led, collaborative community of credit union leaders providing vibrant peer interaction, new ideas and innovation to foster professional development for members while advocating for the overall success of the credit union movement.
Lisa encourages others to get involved through committing to credit union development.
“Collaboration goes a long with credit unions of all sizes,” she said. “I love what the credit union movement is all about. Everybody is willing to work together and help each other.”
It’s that cooperative spirit that has kept Lisa in a credit union career from the time she started as a part time receptionist at CORE while she attended college. A few months after she began, she was promoted to administrative assistant to the CEO. In 2008, she was promoted to lending offer and more recently to vice president of lending.
“When I started working for the credit union, I didn’t know what I was going to do, but fell in love with everything about the credit union industry and just helping and serving our members,” she said. “This is my place.”
