Dr Vern Harvey is one of the most influential individuals in the modern era of mutuals. He assisted Reg Elliott and his team on Project Renewal which led to the dissolution of the state credit union leagues and the creation of Cuscal as the new national peak body.
He took over the leadership of Cuscal in 1993 and held the reigns until the year 2000. In our recent oral history interview with him, we discussed his education and incredible experiences advising the fledgling Papua New Guinea government, his move into banking and eventually his time at Cuscal. Below is an excerpt from the interview where Dr Harvey discusses the early days of Cuscal.
It was all practical things, getting a new company up, putting a new board up and operating effectively in a corporate market. The strategy that was behind Project Renewal initially was a very practical thing of getting a payment system built around ATMs and those practical things. But essentially, the strategy with it was we develop more at the board level, the strategy that I had as a CEO was to convince the public that credit unions were a legitimate competitor with banks. And three key ways of doing that was proving a deposit with a credit union was as secure as a deposit with a bank. Now, the banks as we started to grow and develop played that card rather mercilessly against credit unions. So that was a challenge. Number one. The second one, again, was answering the banks’ criticism that we only had a limited range of retail products. Because we're only in the retail market. You can get a car loan with the credit union, but if you're looking for real banking, you've got to come to a bank and we had to change that perspective.
To convince people of this is, this is our positive response that we have a better service than the banks will give you. Because we have member owners, not customers. Over the seven years that I was there with a key management team, who were fully committed to these goals, and by and large so were the board over those periods. The first one was to convince the credit unions that what we were building was going to be better for them than the state associations were. Because not all the credit unions at the highest level of the state associations agreed to be amalgamated. Not all credit unions thought that this was going to be a good idea. My first push was very hard on communication directly to the credit union leaders, to the boards of the credit unions themselves. I put a lot of effort into communications and communicating directly with credit unions. The first step I did was to say ok to credit unions, I will be available every Tuesday morning between 11 and 12 on my phone sitting here waiting for you to call me. Any issues or any concerns, every Tuesday morning, I'm sitting in my office on the phone, here’s the number, give me a ring.
