Warning: This post is not strictly about payment systems, but about the credit union industry. That’s what you get with a guest author…

Community is something credit unions talk about all the time – our involvement in the community, our interest in serving the community, the connection with our communities. Yet do we ever stop to examine what our community is?

In the “olden days,” you could point to a community. If I worked at the John Deere factory, I belonged to the John Deere Credit Union. If I was a teacher, I belong to the educational credit union. As CUs evolved to community charters, those communities became larger, if less homogeneous, because “we serve everyone living or working in Polk, Story, Jasper, Marshall, Dallas, Guthrie, Madison and Boone counties,” is a well defined community of people beyond the people at the Census Bureau.

My posit is that today credit unions still serve “their” community as if it was the 1960s plant floor or the main office of the local school district. Yet, communities have evolved around us. Prosper and Zopa, all the buzz in the financial services industry because of their peer-to-peer focus, are creating communities. Prosper has a couple of groups of University of Wisconsin alumni who came together online to lend money to other UW grads – sounds a bit like the UW Credit Union. Facebook and MySpace have redefined what it means to be my friend. I think you get the picture. Yet credit unions are focused on getting regulatory approval for one more county FOM expansion.

Look around. Communities are everywhere. I think we can serve them better as credit unions if we changed our thinking about what our community is. Just maybe if we decided that communities weren’t made up of the “original” field of membership or some arbitrary geographic lines, we could push our average member age below 47 and our market share up a few points.