How common bond insights help credit unions grow stronger lending
Lending performance sits at the centre of a healthy credit union. It drives income, supports members, and strengthens reserves. Yet many credit unions still struggle to get a clear picture of how lending is performing across their common bond.
Most teams rely on spreadsheets, manual reporting, and local knowledge. While these tools have served credit unions well for years, they limit visibility. Important trends are missed. Gaps remain hidden. Decisions take longer. Growth slows.
Holmes changes this by giving credit unions a full view of their common bond in one place. The software shows where lending is strong, where there is room to grow, and what behaviours shape each area. This clarity helps managers build better plans and support their boards with confidence.
Why better data matters for loan growth
Stronger lending starts with better insight. Credit unions need to understand:
• Which Small Areas have high demand • Which areas show untapped potential • Where loan sizes or approval rates vary • How member behaviour changes over time • Where competition may be stronger • How product performance differs across locations
Without this detail, most credit unions rely on broad assumptions. Some areas get more attention than they need. Other areas receive less focus than they deserve.
A clear view of your common bond changes the conversation. It helps teams act with intent. It turns instinct into evidence. It makes planning easier.
What Holmes reveals across your common bond
Holmes collects and visualises data so managers can make quick, accurate decisions. The focus is on clarity, not complexity.
You can:
• Identify lending gaps in minutes • Compare performance across all Small Areas • Spot early shifts in loan demand • Track month to month and year to year trends • Understand what drives strong lending zones • Support targeted campaigns with evidence • Share clear reports that improve board discussions
These insights help managers decide where to focus outreach, which products need attention, and how to shape strategies for growth.
Turning insight into real lending results
Data only matters when it leads to action. Holmes is designed to support that step.
Credit unions using common bond analysis can:
• Direct marketing to areas with real potential • Set targets that reflect local demand • Strengthen member engagement by focusing on the right places • Build products that match behaviour in key areas • Improve branch level conversations with evidence • Measure the impact of lending campaigns quickly
This approach improves loan growth without adding heavy workloads. It also helps teams show clear progress to boards and regulators.
Moving away from manual work
Many credit unions spend hours gathering data for board packs or planning sessions. Holmes takes this work off your list.
Ready made reports and simple charts save time each month. Teams can shift energy from collecting data to acting on it. This helps managers stay focused on member needs, growth goals, and operational priorities.
A better way to understand your common bond
Every credit union knows its community. Holmes brings structure to that knowledge. It blends local insight with clear data so teams can make stronger lending decisions.
Loan growth depends on clarity. When you know where to focus, you build better strategies. You support members with the right products. You help your board see progress. You strengthen the long term position of your credit union.
Holmes gives you that clarity in minutes.
If you want to see how Holmes can support your lending goals, reach out and book a short demo.
For every credit union, the common bond is more than a rulebook definition; it’s the foundation of your organisation. It defines who can join, it shapes your member base, and it ultimately determines your growth potential.
But here’s the question: are you making the most of it?
The Hidden Opportunities Within Your Common Bond
Too often, credit unions treat the common bond as a static boundary when in reality it can be a map of opportunity. Within your common bond are:
Areas where membership is strong, and others where awareness is low.
Communities with growing populations and new housing developments.
Segments where lending is underperforming despite strong potential.
Large workplaces where employees are eligible to join but have yet to be engaged.
These untapped opportunities represent significant growth potential, but identifying and acting upon them requires more than intuition; it requires data-driven insight.
Why Traditional Credit Union Marketing Falls Short
Many Irish credit unions continue to rely on broad-brush marketing approaches, sending generic messages across their entire common bond. This shotgun approach often results in:
High marketing costs with uncertain returns
Wasted resources targeting members who aren’t interested in specific products
Missed opportunities in high-potential demographics
Poor marketing ROI due to a lack of targeting precision
In today’s challenging economic climate, with recent dips in consumer confidence affecting financial decisions, credit unions need to be smarter and more strategic with their marketing investments.
The Holmes Advantage: Turning Data into Growth
Holmes gives you the tools to unlock the hidden picture within your common bond. Using a combination of credit union member and lending data, CSO data, ESRI data, and other comprehensive data streams, Holmes builds a complete picture of your common bond’s potential.
With Holmes, you can:
Analyse your common bond in detail, pinpointing where membership and lending are underdeveloped
Identify new opportunities where demographic or community changes are driving growth
Define your ideal member persona, and then find where those people live and work within your common bond
Highlight major areas of employment in your common bond, and the team at Holmes can help you design tailored workplace marketing initiatives
Target your marketing efforts precisely, ensuring the right message reaches the right people at the right time
The power of common bond analysis isn’t theoretical; it delivers measurable results. Synergy Credit Union, serving as a modern member-driven financial co-operative, recently leveraged Holmes to transform their car loan performance.
The Challenge
Synergy wanted to increase car loan transactions within its common bond efficiently and cost-effectively. However, they faced significant obstacles:
High mailing costs limiting their marketing reach
Uncertainty about which demographics were already taking out car loans
Need for better targeting to maximise their marketing budget
The Holmes Solution
Working with Pat Morrissey, Marketing Officer at Synergy Credit Union, Holmes developed a comprehensive analysis of their car loan performance across different demographics and regions within their common bond. This revealed specific areas and demographics exhibiting low performance, enabling the development of a highly targeted mailing campaign using Holmes’ campaign builder.
The Remarkable Results
The results speak for themselves:
21 new car loans were issued during the campaign period
Overall loan value increased from €720,000 to €1,446,555, an incredible increase of over 100%
€726,555 increase in total loan value
€165,000 increase in first-time loan value
30-34-year-olds showed the largest improvement, with €75,000 issued in first-time loans to this demographic (starting from zero)
These results demonstrate that with the right credit union data analysis and targeted marketing approach, significant growth is not just possible, it’s measurable and sustainable.
The Strategic Advantage of Targeted Credit Union Marketing
Holmes transforms the fundamental question credit unions ask about growth. Instead of asking “who might join us?”, Holmes helps you ask “where are our future members, and how do we reach them?”
This shift in perspective is crucial because:
Precision targeting reduces costs while increasing conversion rates
Data-driven decisions eliminate guesswork from your marketing strategy
Demographic insights reveal opportunities you never knew existed
Performance tracking enables continuous improvement and optimisation
Beyond Marketing: Building Sustainable Growth
Credit unions already have something most financial institutions don’t: a deep, trusted connection to their community. Holmes helps you turn that connection into insight, and that insight into sustainable growth.
The platform’s intuitive interface makes it easy to:
Adjust strategies based on real-time performance data
Identify emerging trends within your common bond
Respond quickly to changing demographic patterns
Optimise campaigns for maximum member satisfaction and business growth
Your Next Step: Discover What’s Possible
So we’ll ask again: Are you making the most from your common bond?
The evidence is clear: credit unions that leverage data-driven common bond analysis are achieving remarkable results. They’re finding new members in unexpected places, increasing loan volumes significantly, and doing it all whilst reducing marketing waste and improving ROI.
Your common bond contains untapped potential waiting to be discovered. The question isn’t whether opportunities exist—it’s whether you have the tools to find them and the strategy to capitalise on them.
Ready to transform your approach to credit union marketing?
Call us now to book a demo and discover how Holmes can help your credit union uncover hidden opportunities and grow sustainably. We’d love to show you what’s possible within your own common bond.
Don’t let another opportunity slip by; your future members are waiting to be found.
In today’s financial landscape, credit unions face fierce competition from traditional banks and fintech companies. This blog explores different strategies to help your credit union thrive in a competitive market.
Understanding Your Unique Value Proposition
To successfully grow membership and loan transactions in a competitive market, it is essential to identify what makes you stand out from other financial providers. Your unique value proposition (UVP) is the foundation of your marketing and member engagement strategies. It could be your personalised customer service, lower fees, community involvement, or member-focused initiatives. Creating messaging that clearly communicates your unique features will attract new members that share the same values.
Additionally, regularly reassess your UVP to ensure it remains relevant and compelling. Use the data analytics toolkit in Holmes to identify your high/low performing members, which will, in turn, allow you to understand who you are really speaking to when sending out marketing material.
Furthermore, engaging with current members to getfeedback is a fantastic way of understanding what your members value most about your credit union.
Leveraging Holmes for Member Engagement
As we are in a digital era, integrating technology is vital when engaging with credit union members, specifically the younger generations. Providing an online banking app and payment options can enhance the member experience and gravitate towards your credit union.
Integrate Holmes and use it to identify your member demographics and in turn, creating personalised marketing materials that are likely to resonate with your members and non-members.
Furthermore, in terms of performance, a tool like Holmes can help you to either confirm or challenge current beliefs regarding membership demographics and loan performance.
Building Strong Community Relationships
The main characteristic that credit unions have when standing out from other financial institutions is their ability to build strong relationships with their community. Collaborating with local businesses, schools and events adds an individualised touch and a sense of trust to the member experience. These efforts should then be highlighted through direct mailings, social media etc. UsingHolmes to do this will allow your credit union to make sure the correct message is being shown to the correct audiences.
Expanding Your Membership Base
Behind growing your credit union, is growing your membership. Use Holmes to identify specific demographics that align with your credit union’s values and services.
Have you tried offering incentives for new members? These may include referral bonuses or exclusive member benefits. These will attract new members and encourage current members to refer their friends and family to your credit union.
Innovative Marketing Strategies for Credit Unions
Conducting innovative marketing strategies in a competitive finance industry can allow your credit union to stand out. Combining traditional and digital marketing methods will help you reach a broader audience. Using Holmes will allow you to identify specific audiences that are performing well, which can then be translated to your digital marketing efforts. For example, if you find, while using Holmes, that car loans perform well amongst younger generations, you can concentrate your digital marketing on specific platforms where these generations are most active. For example, Generation Z and Millennials are more likely to use Instagram and TikTok, while baby boomers and Generation x, are more likely to use Facebook.
Other digital marketing methods such as SEO, can attract a broader audience to your CU website.
Furthermore, publishing Case Studies of customer success stories is a fantastic way to highlight the benefits of being a member of your credit union. Displaying your community involvement and how members were able to achieve their dreams with the help of your credit union can create an emotional connection with potential members and build trust.
Established in 1965, Synergy Credit Union is proud of its heritage and continues to be governed by their members and voluntary Board of Directors.
They are a modern member-driven financial co-operative owned by their members and are driven by a passionate and genuine desire to enrich their members’ lives.
Synergy Credit Union provides members with the resources to manage their money and financial affairs, by offering current accounts, loans, money management and personal savings.
The Challenge for Synergy
Synergy was looking to increase car loan transactions within their Common Bond in an efficient, cost-effective manner. Using their research from a report created on Holmes, they identified an opportunity to increase car loans issued within high-potential segments revealed through analysis.
There was a challenge to market Synergy’s full potential with high mailing costs and the teams uncertainty of what demographics were already currently taking out car loans.
Synergy needed to find the right solution so they could effectively increase their car loan transactions in an efficient manner without needing a significantly large budget.
How Holmes Helps Synergy
Integrating Holmes allows users to confidently identify what’s working, uncover new opportunities, and make smarter, faster, evidence-based decisions.
Holmes collaborated with Pat Morrissey, the Marketing Officer at Synergy Credit Union, to develop a report that analyses the current performance of their car loans within their Common Bond. This led to the identification of areas and specific demographics that were exhibiting low performance. A targeted mailing campaign was subsequently developed using the Holmes campaign builder, aimed specifically at those demographics and regions.
What were the results?
From beginning to end, the insights acquired helped Synergy streamline their campaigns, reduce wasted efforts, and enhance their marketing ROI. The intuitive platform facilitated easy adjustments to strategies, catering effectively to the needs of their members.
The campaign ran from January to March and at the end of it, the value of first time loans increased by €165000. Additionally, their loan value went from €720,000 to €1,446,555. That is an incredible increase of over 100%.
Furthermore, throughout the campaign, 30-34 year olds experienced the largest increase in value by loans which resulted in them performing the best by the end of the campaign. At the beginning of the campaign, there were no current first time loans in the 30-34 year old age bracket, while at the end of the campaign there was €75,000 issued in first time loans.
Conclusion
Holmes has demonstrated its value, proving to be exceptionally effective in assisting credit unions to boost their membership and loan transactions through targeted marketing strategies.
Credit Union Plus is one of Ireland’s largest and most progressive credit unions, proudly serving members across Navan, Ballivor, Clonmellon, Dunshaughlin and Ballyjamesduff.
With over €270 million in assets and a growing loan book exceeding €100 million, Credit Union Plus is committed to providing exceptional financial services while maintaining a strong community focus. Their continued investment in technology and innovation reflects a forward-thinking approach to member service and sustainable growth.
The Challenge for Credit Union Plus
Credit Union Plus wanted to increase membership and loan transactions within its common bond in an efficient, cost-effective manner.
Using their research from a report created on Holmes, they observed a significant percentage of non-members within their common bond compared to the percentage of members.
High mailing costs made it challenging to target both current and potential members, particularly those who did not use social media.
Behind the scenes, the team were unsure what demographics made up the majority of their membership, increasing the challenge to market the credit union’s full potential.
Credit Union Plus needed to find the right solution so they could effectively increase their membership without needing a significantly large budget.
How Holmes Helps Credit Union Plus
Holmes allows users to analyse their common bond at a small area level and create highly focused mailing campaigns.
Holmes worked alongside Stephen Doyle MSc, Chartered Banker, SIA, QFA, Head of Business Development, Marketing and Sales in Credit Union Plus to create a report to analyse the status of their current membership within their common bond.
They identified areas and demographics where performance was weakest. A targeted mailing campaign was created using the Holmes campaign builder to reach those specific demographics and areas.
What were the results?
From start to finish, the insights gained assisted Credit Union Plus in simplifying their campaigns, minimising wasted effort, and improving their marketing ROI. The user-friendly platform made it easy to adjust strategies to assist their members’ needs.
In the months of April and May, they gained 15 new members. Additionally, 45 loans worth €272,889 were issued. With the original cost of the campaign being €2,268, their estimated income is €69,510 (before accounting for early repayments or defaults). That’s a return of over 30 times the campaign cost, meaning for every €1 spent on the campaign, roughly €30.65 in interest income could be earned over the life of the loans.
Conclusion
Holmes has proven its worth, and it is extremely powerful at helping credit unions increase their membership and loan transactions through effective targeted marketing.
Discover how personalised marketing, powered by data analytics, is transforming how credit unions connect with their members.
In today’s digital-first world, personalisation is no longer a luxury, it’s an expectation. Credit union members, like all modern consumers, want communications that are timely, relevant, and tailored to their specific needs. With the right tools, your credit union can deliver exactly that, boosting member satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term growth.
Why Personalised Communication Matters
We’re living in an era where consumers expect individualised experiences across every sector, including financial services. For credit unions, personalised communication is a powerful way to show members they are understood and valued. It builds trust, enhances engagement, and drives action, whether that’s opening a new account, applying for a loan, or recommending your services to others.
When messages are relevant to a member’s life stage, financial goals or recent behaviours, they’re far more likely to take notice—and take action.
Use Data to Understand and Serve Your Members Better
Personalisation starts with insight. Holmes enables credit unions to unlock the power of data analytics, offering a clear picture of who your members are and what they need. By analysing behavioural trends, demographics, transaction histories and engagement patterns, you can develop highly targeted campaigns that resonate on an individual level.
For example:
Members approaching university age? Promote education loans with flexible repayment options.
Households investing in their property? Share tailored content about home improvement loan offers.
Car seekers? Highlight competitive motor loan rates.
Holmes turns data into a direction, so your marketing isn’t just smarter. It’s more meaningful.
Craft Messages That Truly Resonate
With Holmes, once you’ve identified your target segments, you can craft messaging that speaks directly to them.
Young adults may appreciate financial advice about their first car or managing a student loan.
Familiesmight respond better to campaigns focused on savings plans, mortgages, or home upgrades.
Older members may value retirement planning content or community-focused services.
Your visuals should support this message—show real people living real moments, like buying their first home, enjoying retirement, or celebrating a financial milestone. Sell the dream, not just the rate.
And don’t forget tone. Use warm, inviting language and address members by name to foster a genuine connection.
Deliver with Precision Using Technology
Holmes simplifies the delivery of personalised campaigns through seamless integration with your CRM or member database. You can segment members based on actions like opening an account or browsing loan information and trigger the right message at the right time.
This level of automation ensures scale, consistency, and accuracy without placing a burden on your internal teams.
Track What Works and Optimise
Holmes gives credit unions the ability to measure the success of every campaign. With built-in KPI and financial reporting tools, you can track:
Conversion rates
Engagement levels
Campaign response rates
Geographic performance insights
Use these insights to refine your strategy, shift focus to high-performing segments, or course-correct where campaigns underdeliver.
Holmes’ campaign builder also supports testing, allowing you to trial campaigns with small member segments before investing in a broader rollout—saving time and money while maximising effectiveness.
Unlock the Power of Targeted Outreach
With Holmes, you don’t just send messages—you create member experiences. Our platform helps you:
Understand your common bond and potential member opportunities
Build profiles that reflect real member needs
Run small-scale pilots to validate your approach
Launch powerful, data-driven direct mail and digital campaigns with confidence
You can now access pooled data from all Holmes users—allowing benchmarking and opportunity analysis you won’t find anywhere else. And with new visual reporting tools like bar charts and graphs now live, identifying areas of opportunity has never been easier.
What’s Next?
In 2025, we’relaunching our Holmes User Forum, a real-time community for credit unions to share best practices, ask questions, and collaborate.You’ll also receive our Holmes eZine, packed with marketing tips, success stories, and data-driven strategies designed specifically for credit unions.
Ready to personalise your member experience with Holmes?
Explore the possibilities at www.holmescudata.com or get in touch with our team to request a demo.
Discover the potential your credit union could reach by integrating Holmes, a premium data analytics tool designed for Credit Unions!
Understanding Holmes and its Capabilities
Before we dive in, let’s discover what Holmes is and how it was created.
Holmes was created from listening to our Credit Union customers and identifying an information gap they had. Their data was accessible, but what Credit Union had the time and the resources to pull useful information from it? This is where Holmes comes in!
The Holmes team has worked hard to develop a platform that helps Credit Unions maximise their common bond. The software includes a Report Builder, a Campaign Builder, and a Community Forum.
Build Reports & Better Understand Your Common Bond
Holmes allows credit unions to build detailed reports that analyse their common bond. The Report Builder consists of hundreds of charts, categorised based on different areas (Membership, Loan Performance, Demographics, Savings), showcasing your individual Credit Union’s performance considering different time periods, demographics, areas, and loan products.
Holmes customers have used the report builder for marketing, board, and financial reporting for the past two years.
Marketers use Holmes to analyse the behaviours of current members and borrowers, and create campaigns to target underperforming areas within their common bond for both membership and borrowing. The side-by-side comparison tool gives Credit Unions the ability to compare performance before and after marketing campaigns.
CFO, COS and CEO use Holmes to gather information for financial/board reports in a timely manner. Instead of spending hours gathering information from various sources about current members and their loan and savings balances, everything is now accessible in one place, significantly reducing time and workload. Like marketers, CFO, COS and CEO can present performance comparisons from different financial years at board meetings.
Holmes’ multi-purpose features have proven to be extremely beneficial and essential across various departments within credit unions.
Create High-Focused Marketing Campaigns
The second stage of Holmes is the Campaign Builder.
After analysing performance and identifying current strengths and weaknesses, Credit Unions can build marketing campaigns based on that analysis, targeting specific member demographics using multiple characteristics.
Campaigns are built using several different filters, including demographics (age, gender, etc.), loan issue performance, affluence, property, family, and transport. These filters allow you to target not only specific demographics but also potential and current members based on their behaviours and life stages.
You can make your mailing campaigns as highly focused as you like. This allows marketing materials to be personalised to truly resonate with the audience you’re trying to reach.
After running a mailing campaign, credit unions can easily check their performance by turning the specific campaign into a report. This report will include all the data previously used in that campaign.
Share Ideas and Engage with Fellow Credit Unions
In the early months of 2025, Holmes launched its Community Forum. This platform was designed for users to connect with fellow Credit Union professionals and share ideas and past successes. Within the forum, you can subscribe to discussions on Marketing, Strategy, and more.
This gives Credit Unions a fantastic opportunity to interact with other credit unions of similar sizes and share what practices work best.
Holmes’s features are crucial for credit unions of any size that want to better understand their current members and attract new ones through reporting and building highly focused mailing campaigns.
Do you want to learn how you can successfully analyse your common bond?
Contact us on 045 895 000 or info@rwpierce.com.
Leveraging data analytics can be a game-changer, offering insights that drive more effective and personalised marketing campaigns. Today, we will explore how credit unions can leverage the power of data analytics to enhance their marketing strategies and build meaningful connections with both current and potential members.
This segmentation allows marketers to create specific mailing campaigns that target the unique needs and interests of each group, resulting in more relevant and influential mailing materials.
For example, younger members, perhaps Gen Z, within a common bond, may prefer car loans or education loans, while older members may prefer home improvement loans. Credit unions can enhance member satisfaction and loyalty through these data analytics findings.
Through Holmes’ recent partnership with CUFA, capabilities have been enhanced to visualise arrears, prepayments, and risk across various regions and demographics, enabling a much deeper level of analysis across your common bond. This allows credit unions to benchmark themselves both regionally and nationally.
Data analytics through social media is one thing, however data analytics in direct mail marketing is a whole other challenge. Integrating Holmes allows credit unions to access the same level of insights as they would with social media marketing – if not more.
Imagine a scenario where a member annually takes out a loan to cover motor expenses. Holmes can identify this behaviour and trigger a direct mail campaign, allowing a credit union to promote its competitive motor loan rates. This offers a relevant and timely option that is likely to catch the member’s eye. Personalisation not only improves engagement rates but also fosters a sense of connection and understanding between the credit union and its members.
Optimising Campaign Performance
Data analytics is significant in monitoring and enhancing the performance of marketing campaigns. When it comes to direct mailing campaigns, credit unions can track key metrics such as number of new members, number of specific loans taken out, and much more, to assess the effectiveness of their campaigns.
By continuously analysing these metrics, credit unions can identify what’s working and what needs adjustment. With Holmes, credit unions can access these metrics and compare transactional data before and after mailing campaigns using the visual compare tool. This will give you a side-by-side view of how well your campaigns have performed.
For example, if a particular campaign is underperforming, Holmes can help pinpoint the issue, whether it’s the timing, age demographic, specific member affluence and much more. This valuable feedback loop allows credit unions to refine their strategies, ensuring that each campaign iteration is more successful than the last.
Enhancing Member Acquisition Strategies
Reaching potential members is a critical objective for any credit union, and the Holmes platform can significantly boost these efforts. By analysing data from various sources such as social media, website visits, and membership trends over different time periods, credit unions can identify potential leads and tailor their marketing strategies accordingly.
A credit union may notice that a significant number of website visitors are interested in mortgage products but do not complete an application. This may match up to analysis of their loan transaction and membership data. By understanding this trend, the credit union can develop targeted marketing efforts, such as offering webinars on purchasing a car or creating content that addresses common barriers or misconceptions when applying for a car loan. Such targeted initiatives can convert interested and potential members into new members more effectively.
Conclusion
While data analytics might not be a magic solution that can solve all marketing problems, it certainly provides credit unions with a powerful tool to enhance their campaigns and truly understand their members.
By understanding member behaviour, personalising engagement, and optimising performance, credit unions can create marketing campaigns that are not only more effective but also more aligned with their members’ needs. In an industry built on trust and community, data-driven insights from Holmes allow credit unions to maintain their personal touch while navigating the complexities of modern marketing. As credit unions embrace analytics, they position themselves not just as financial institutions, but as trusted partners dedicated to empowering their members along their financial journeys.
