Mary Cunningham

While many companies talk about globalization, USA Federal Credit Union is global by necessity. In fact, most of its members are in San Diego long enough to sign up and receive their military training before becoming long distance members in Iraq or at a base in the Far East.

CEO Mary Cunningham says maintaining connectivity and data lines in outposts such as Japan or Korea can be expensive and "fraught with challenges," but that hasn’t prevented the $700 million credit union from being 100 percent loaned out.

"It’s a wonderful problem," she says.

Cunningham attributes the high loan demand among customers to her military affinity group and the fact that many of her members are in the household formation part of their lives. "We do a lot of mortgage loans and home equity loans," she says. "The membership field we serve are typically not high net worth individuals and are in the credit mode of life."

One of USA’s most successful loan programs is for manufactured housing, which gives military families the opportunity to own their homes in expensive San Diego County.

"The program is going great guns," she says. "Loans for manufactured homes are sometimes considered high risk, but we’ve had virtually no losses or defaults."

USA also has become active in business lending, including SBA loans, though these are typically smaller amounts of up to $100,000. "The reason we got into it was we got requests from military people starting on second careers, people who wanted to go into business for themselves."

Cunningham got into the credit union industry more than 30 years ago, starting as a receptionist in an Oklahoma City credit union where she says she made $350 a month and "was proud of it."

She was running a credit union in Madison, Wis., when she was contacted by a headhunter to become the CEO of USA Federal. Her first day on the job was the Monday after 9/11.

Cunningham says she loves San Diego, though the current interest environment puts a squeeze on credit unions that must pay higher interest on deposits while collecting interest on loans made when rates were lower.

Real estate loan demand, she says, reflects a "leveling off" of activity in San Diego, and car loan demand has improved in recent months.

But the CU’s largest task is keeping up with its far-flung membership. "When they join, their chances of coming back to San Diego permanently are very slim," she says. "They are shipped to the four corners of the earth, and you have to be able to serve them remotely."