Peer Group Inspiration & Strategy Guide
How to design targeted peer groups to maximize your analytical insights.
When building a custom peer group, "The Who" of your analysis, it is important to identify credit unions that are like yours in ways that matter for the metrics you’re evaluating. For example, if you’re a low-income designated credit union, you may want to evaluate your loan balances and delinquency data against other LICUs. On the other hand, you may also want to evaluate your branch footprint against all credit unions of a similar asset or membership size. Therefore, we encourage you to make multiple peer groups based on your benchmarking goals.
Below are some ideas to get you started:
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Size Characteristics
Other than geographic criteria, specific size metrics are the most popular way to refine your peer group. You can use account codes directly off the Call Report or use our Callahan “Defined Facts”! Defined Facts are essentially keywords or shortcuts that work with numerical values in the Min and Max columns of Peer Suite's peer group builder.
Peer Group Pointer!
- Defined Facts are not case sensitive.
Popular metrics include:
| Numerical | Ratios |
assets members loans branch count uninsured_shares |
ROA efficiency net_worth |
Peer Group Pointers!
- Numerical abbreviations: K = thousands, M = millions, B = billions, T = trillions.
- The range of values for ratios can be written as a percent (5%) or as a decimal (.005).
Use Cases using "Size Characteristics"
If you would like to create a peer group of all credit unions with at least 10,000 members, you would put "members" as your account code and "10K" in the minimum field.
If you want to create a peer group that includes CUs that offer a specific product or service, credit card lending for example, you would put “1” as the minimum value for EITHER the # or $ account code associated with that product. So, for credit cards, you would use a396 as the account filter and 1 as the minimum value. For SBA loans, you’d use aLN0050 min value = 1.
Peer Group Pointer!
- Refer to the 5300 Call Report for the complete list of codes available.
Attributes
You can use several filters to identify CUs that share a common characteristic (Ex: CDFI status or MDI). These fields use numbers to designate yes and no: 1 in Min column = yes and 0 in the Max column = no. Many of these codes can be found on page 12 of the Online Profile.
Popular Attributes Include:
| Selected Attributes | Account Code |
| Low Income Designation | lowincome |
| CDFI Status | CDFI |
Minority Depository Institution: -- Black American -- Hispanic American -- Asian American -- Native American |
MDFImembersBA MDFImembersHA MDFImembersAA MDFImembersNA |
Use Cases Using "Attributes"
To include low-income credit unions, put our defined fact lowincome as your account code and 1 (meaning yes) in the minimum box. To exclude all LICUs, instead put 0 in your max field (this will exclude all those with 1 = yes as their characteristic)
Peer Pointer!
The below demonstrates an example of how to use account codes to create a peer group with the below criteria:
- Assets: $100M-$300M
- Institutions that have a low income designation.
Other Peer Group Scenarios
If you would like to exclude credit unions that have undergone mergers from your peer group you can do so by using our hsum (historical summation) function. Callahan stores the number of mergers in any quarter under the code Merger. So, hsum(merger, X) means “the sum of all mergers over X number of years”.
Peer Group Pointer!
Learn more ways to use functions in your analysis and peer group creation using our Functions Manual.
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