Credit union strategy · product design · fintech
I design credit union products members actually talk about. Fifteen years inside the movement, leading strategy and transformation, building an innovation function, launching a CUSO, and creating deposit, lending, and education products that reached members.
Blake WoodsWaterford, Michigan
Most credit union products get designed around internal priorities and a competitor's rate table. The opportunity is to start from the member instead: find a moment they already recognize, and build something they can explain to somebody else in one sentence.
About
I have spent more than fifteen years in financial services, starting with a credit union internship while studying at Michigan State University. Since then I have led enterprise strategy and strategic transformation as a senior credit union executive, served as president and CEO of a credit union service organization, chaired a credit union foundation, and advised institutions nationally as a senior advisor on TransUnion's credit union team.
My work sits where product creativity meets growth. I have built innovation functions and an innovation lab, launched and led a CUSO, developed fintech and vendor partnerships, and created deposit, lending, and education products that reached members and earned national attention. I hold an MBA and the Credit Union Development Educator designation, write for the industry trade press, and speak at national credit union and fintech events.
This site is personal. It collects a few frameworks and tools I have built over the years and made freely available. The views here are my own.
Frameworks
All three are free to use, cite, or argue with. They work best when a room debates them out loud rather than reading them alone.
The mechanic
Most credit unions will not run a 6.10% offer, because 6.10% looks reckless on a rate sheet. It is reckless at scale. That is what the cap is for. The rate is the marketing and the cap is the budget. Set the cap so the whole campaign is a marketing line item, then be genuinely, memorably generous inside it.
For a product
For a target
Notes
Not a blog and not on a schedule. Short entries about product design, member behavior, and how the movement got where it is.
August 2026
The 1934 Federal Credit Union Act permits three kinds: occupation, association, and a well-defined community. When Congress reaffirmed it in 1998, the language was that "a meaningful affinity and bond among members" is essential to the public mission of credit unions. Affinity is not a marketing idea layered on top of the movement. It is in the statute. Most institutions expanded their charter and never replaced the focus they traded away.
August 2026
AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving put family caregivers at 63 million Americans, nearly one in four adults, up 45 percent since 2015. Almost half report a major financial impact. Here is the design problem: every savings product ever built punishes you for taking money out, and caregiving money has to come out unpredictably at the worst possible moment. So nothing fits, and it sits in checking earning nothing.
August 2026
A generous headline rate on a small maximum balance costs less than most marketing line items and gets repeated in a way no campaign does. The mistake is building the cap as a rate tier on a larger account, which forces a range of disclosed yields and kills the single clean number. Build it as a standalone account with a maximum balance and the cap stops being fine print. It becomes a feature.
Tools
Start here
Your field of membership is a legal boundary, not a target market. Size a real community inside your footprint using published federal data, and see what capturing a share of it would be worth.
Size a community →Then this
Build a deposit concept around something your members actually do, with the economics attached. Or put your own product idea through the four tests and see what grade it earns.
Open the studio →60 seconds
Real industry data, one minute, and a grade at the end. Find out what you actually know about your counterpart across the table, whether you run a credit union or you are building for one.
Take the challenge →Colophon
The three tools here were built over a few weeks, working alongside AI as a genuine collaborator rather than as an autocomplete. I did the thinking about what to build and why. The model did a great deal of the writing, the arithmetic, and the arguing with me about whether a claim held up.
The most useful part of that partnership was not speed. It was being told no. A concept I liked got flagged for describing a bonus the cost model never counted. A regulatory assumption I was confident about turned out to fail on a single clause about equal chance. A participation figure I had repeated came from a methodology that double-counted. Every one of those would have shipped if I had been working alone and moving fast.
Everything sits on published federal data. Participation and employment figures come from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the USDA Census of Agriculture, the CDC, AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, and the National Ski Areas Association. Every community in the Target Finder names its own source and tells you where to get the local number instead of relying on a national rate.
Three static HTML files, no framework, no build step, no tracking. They load fast and they will still work in ten years.
Get in touch
If something here is useful, or you want to argue with it, LinkedIn is the best way to reach me.