Q. You have branches in West Hawai'i. Are there plans to expand to other areas on the island?

A. With the passage of (the federal) Membership Access Act, which was about five years ago, I can take in anybody who lives and works on the island, so the opportunity I have now is to create more branch outlets for our members to use islandwide. The newest one was the Kaloko branch that we put in on the west side and we're moving our Pa'auhau branch up to Honoka'a, and we hope to have that one operational by early next year. After that, it depends on how we are doing financially before we open up the next branches.

Q. Did the Oct. 15 earthquake have an impact on your credit union and customers?

A. There were three areas that we looked at. We looked at our members, and there were some that were impacted. We haven't had any requests because FEMA came out, and they were offering low-interest-rate SBA loans. We also looked at our employees to see if any of them were affected by the earthquake, and fortunately none of them were. For the credit union itself, the new building that we're in here in Kaloko sustained some heavy damage, but we've cleaned that all up and we're up and running. The branch downstairs was closed for a week, but we still had computer service to all of the other branches, and here at Kaloko we were able to open up our four-lane drive-up windows so even though the branch was closed members could still conduct their business.

Q. What drew you to a career in banking?

A. It started back in 1975 when I was hired at the Hawai'i Credit Union League and that's the trade association for credit unions in Hawai'i. That was a great job, and I had some bosses that really let me do what I needed to do and help me get a better understanding why credit unions were quite a bit different from banks. At a bank you have stockholders and then you have board members who are paid to go to board meetings. At a credit union, everybody who puts a deposit in the credit union is an owner of the credit union. The success of the organization doesn't help me get extra stock options in the organization. I just get a good pat on the back if I do a good job. That's because we don't have that type of urgency to make a big bottom line. We don't really see ourselves as a financial institution; our mission statement simply states, "People joined together to achieve their financial goals."

Q. How have membership and assets grown since you've been with the credit union and to what do you credit the growth?

A. In 1985, it was at about $46 million and at the end of March the total assets of the credit union exceeded $298 million. There were about 3,000-something members back in 1985 and today we have a little over 34,000 members, so we've seen some substantial growth in both areas. Meeting the financial needs of the people in the area, and because we're a credit union, we're not looking at our bottom line first. We're looking at service to our member owners. We spend a lot of time making sure that we've created products that meet our members' needs. You can't go wrong if you do that.

Q. How would you describe your management style?

A. I'm not certain I would call it a style. I've read many of the management books out there and there are things that I think make a lot of sense. So to me, it's a lot of common sense. I haven't seen any organization that's successful without a good management core. You have to have a good group of managers to help you run your credit union, or any business. In my case, when I first started in 1985 I came on board as a vice president, but in two years I took over as president. During that period, I had an opportunity to do performance appraisals of most of the management group that was on staff at the time.

Q. How is employee retention at the credit union?

A. Two of the individuals that were on staff I moved up to vice president levels, and till today they're still with me. So 20 years later I'm still president and the two people whom I brought up as my number twos are still with me as executive vice president. I believe in humor as a management way of coming across. I also believe in keeping things simple. I don't know how you can communicate to a large number of employees when you're trying to make what they're doing more complex than it needs to be. If you make it complicated then people get hung up on the numbers rather than delivering the service.

Q. What are some of the challenges you face?

A. One of the challenges is if you look at our 34,000 members, the average age is over 50. So from a challenge standpoint, how do we bring that average age down? We need to make sure that we're bringing in younger members to replace the members that are moving up in the age group. From a corporate planning standpoint, we have one goal devoted to how we're going to address that, and it includes setting up credit unions in the high schools. So we have a student credit union set up at Kona-waena High School, Kealakehe High School and Kohala High School. We're using the students there as our way to teach them how to handle their financial matters. Each student credit union has its own board of directors. We train students to be tellers and we have branches set up in the schools, so in the morning when they come to school they can do their financial business. At lunch they can also do transactions and in the afternoon the student tellers will go over to the larger branches in the area and work out of those offices.

Q. What are your goals at the credit union?

A. One is our branching strategy, to put more branches out there for our members to use. Two, as I look at my age and as I look at the age of other CEOs and presidents in the financial institution sector, we're all about the same age, so there is going to be a point where a transition is going to occur. It could be a challenge, as well as an opportunity to find the right caliber of management people to take over credit unions that are having this transition.

Reach Curtis Lum at culum@honoluluadvertiser.com.