The credit union member age gap no one’s fixing, with Nick Wodogaza.

In the latest episode of the Digital Banking Podcast, host Josh DeTar welcomed Nick Wodogaza, credit union champion and advisor with CuS Together, and former CEO of Palmetto Citizens Federal Credit Union. Wodogaza spent 45 years in the credit union movement across just two employers, a state league and Palmetto Citizens, where he led for 28 years before retiring to work with credit unions full time.

Wodogaza laid out a framework he used in strategic planning sessions: important issues were rarely urgent, and urgent issues were rarely important, which meant credit unions often spent their time firefighting instead of addressing the member-focused, people, and operations issues that actually determined their future. He and DeTar also discussed how generative AI had reshaped what skills credit unions needed on staff, from developers who could write custom code to subject matter experts who could simply describe a business process to an LLM, while cautioning that most institutions were still in the infancy of figuring out safe, effective use.

The conversation turned to what Wodogaza called a “future closed account,” a member relationship built on a single product and a competitive rate that evaporated the moment a better rate appeared elsewhere. He argued that credit unions built lasting relationships not by chasing prime borrowers or advertising rates on billboards, but by serving the members other institutions overlooked, from first-time car buyers to formerly incarcerated members rebuilding credit. Wodogaza closed by pushing back on growth for its own sake, pointing to a shrinking number of credit unions nationally and arguing that being the best for a defined group of members mattered more than getting bigger.

Key Insights

Important Things Were Rarely Urgent, and That Was the Problem

Wodogaza organized credit union strategy into three buckets: member-focused issues like reducing friction, people issues like culture and training, and operational issues like the technology stack underneath it all. His point was that the urgent problems, a staffing shortage, a broken phone system, a member complaint in the lobby, always got attention, while the important strategic issues quietly went unaddressed because they never felt urgent enough to prioritize. He compared it to a boxer who keeps their eyes fixed on the outcome rather than the pain of getting there, and argued that credit unions needed the same long-term focus even while putting out daily fires.

A Single-Product Relationship Was Always a Future Closed Account

DeTar raised Plaid’s new integration with ChatGPT, which let a member connect every account they held and ask an AI where to put their money, a conversation happening entirely outside any single institution’s view. Wodogaza tied that directly to member retention data: the average car loan lasted about 36 months before payoff or trade-in, and Federal Reserve research showed that a member with only a savings account had roughly a coin-flip’s chance of leaving within two years. The defense, he argued, was never going to be a better rate. It was a deeper relationship built on multiple products a member actually used.

Growth Wasn’t the Goal, Being the Best Was

Wodogaza pushed back on a prediction from a former industry colleague that the country would eventually need only around 300 credit unions and community banks. He pointed out that the number of credit unions nationally had already fallen from over 25,000 to about 4,200, and argued that each merger erased a unique organization built around a specific community’s needs. Economies of scale were real, he said, but they were not guaranteed, and a small credit union serving a defined group of members exceptionally well could be every bit as successful as a large one chasing size for its own sake.