Customer Stories
Interra Credit Union
This northern Indiana-based credit union is still fulfilling its mission 90 years later, but now with modern, digital capabilities thanks to OnBoard.
Customer Stories
This northern Indiana-based credit union is still fulfilling its mission 90 years later, but now with modern, digital capabilities thanks to OnBoard.
Industry: Credit unions
Headquarters: Goshen, Indiana
Board Management Goals
Results
During the heart of the Great Depression, in 1934, seven farmers founded Interra Credit Union for the purpose of agriculture lending. Ninety years later, the northern Indiana-based organization still lives out its original purpose.
“We still do that to this very day,” says Amy Sink, Interra CEO. “We focus on agriculture and small business lending. That is unique among most CUs.”
Fast-forward to 2024, and Interra features 17 branches that serve 27 northern Indiana counties. Sink joined the organization as CEO in 2014.
Almost immediately, she saw a need for a digital board portal. “We started shopping day one,” she says. “We used Passageways as our (intranet) at the time. I started in October; by January, we were using OnBoard.”
Amy said she didn’t want to overhaul everything upon taking over as CEO, but switching from paper-based meetings to digital was non-negotiable.
“I was new enough to pick what things I wanted,” she says. “(Board members) didn’t challenge it at all; they just moved.”
Her main motivation to make the switch was to move away from the laborious processes that paper-based meetings demanded.
“I had a whole team of people who did processing,” Amy says. “They can be 200 to 300 pages long. They would stack them on my desk. How do you take that home? It’s horribly confidential information. You have to sit there and read those things.”
Interra’s board of directors consists of seven members, including six committees and 10 internal committees, each of which has three to five members. Five company executives also are part of the meetings. State law requires all Indiana financial institution boards to meet monthly.
— Amy Sink
CEO
Interra Credit Union
Amy didn’t leave much room for negotiation for the switch from paper to digital, but it was a change the board not only embraced but made quite easily.
“They’re all business owners,” Amy says. “They were very willing to learn. I got here and I said, ‘This is how we’re going to do the board meetings.’ Everybody just migrated. It’s super easy to use.
“I run six committees through the board and all my internal management committees,” Amy adds. “Everything goes on this. There is no information outside this product. I don’t go to every single one of our internal committees, but I keep a pulse on all of them because everything is there (in the portal).”
As for paper, Amy said it’s almost completely a thing of the past for Interra’s board. “My paper requirements are so small,” she says. “We don’t file anything; we don’t print anything. All our documents are in OnBoard on the resource side. We have a governance manual we wrote all in OnBoard.”
Since Interra has used OnBoard for 10 years, and Amy has been the CEO that entire time, the only real transition period in recent times has occurred whenever a new board member joins the team.
Char Willett, executive assistant, inputs all board-related minutes and committees, except for the loan committee (Interra doesn’t use OnBoard for voting). She also trains new board members on how to use OnBoard.
“Char handles everything if we’ve got a problem,” Amy says. “I never have a problem because she gets it fixed.”
Amy described the onboarding process and OnBoard training as cut-and-dried. New board members learn quickly they won’t do much work outside of the portal.
“We give them an iPad, we open their portal,” Amy says. “We don’t give them an email from Interra, and we don’t email them things. You get everything from us in your board portal. We point them toward the implementation videos. We do our compliance training with a link we give them through the board portal. We show them the (meeting) cadence right away, it gets them going really fast. They can get the feel of the rhythm of the meeting and learn the language. The structure that I create around the meetings gives them the cadence. The reason you get a portal is I don’t want you printing this stuff. If you lose your iPad, I can immediately wipe it. You don’t want a board packet sitting at your house.”
Ten years later, Amy can’t imagine running board meetings without OnBoard.
“We love it,” she says. “I don’t know what I would do without it. I don’t know how people run internal management meetings with all the nonsense that goes on with phishing and stuff. The important stuff is in the portal.”
Amy cites everything from improved meeting engagement to monitoring how much time board members spend viewing certain materials via OnBoard’s Meeting Analytics capability.
“It makes the meeting process better; it makes the board more easily engaged,” Amy says. “My engagement for my board is through the roof. We don’t have to check on how many people read the packet, because they read the packet.”
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