Peer Group Inspiration & Strategy Guide

Creating a custom peer group, “The Who” of your analysis, is key to making meaningful comparisons and drawing strategic insights. To maximize your benchmarking efforts, start by identifying credit unions that align with your institution in ways that matter for your specific metrics.

Different metrics reveal different stories, so it’s important to tailor your peer groups based on your specific objectives. For instance, if you're a low-income designated credit union (LICU), consider these two strategies:

• Loan Performance: Compare your loan balances and delinquency rates to those of other LICUs.
• Branch Footprint: Evaluate your branch strategy by comparing institutions with similar asset sizes or membership bases.
• Grant & Program Participation: Identify LICUs that leverage programs like the CDFI Fund or secondary capital to support growth and member services.

Because different metrics tell different stories, we encourage you to create multiple peer groups based on your specific goals.

Financial Characteristics

Beyond geographic criteria, financial metrics are the most popular way to refine your peer group.

1. Smart Codes: Prebuilt shortcuts to call report codes and formulas designed and maintained by Callahan analysts to simplify your reporting.
2. Data Dictionary: A reference for common metrics, ratios, and formulas to guide your analysis.
3. Account Codes: You can use raw 5300 account codes, adding an “A” in front to ensure Peer Suite recognizes it.
   • Ex: 5300 code 730a (Total Cash on Hand) becomes A730a for use in Peer Suite.

Popular Financial Metrics

Use Cases

Example 1: Adding Size Limitations

To create a peer group of all credit unions with at least 10,000 members, use “members” as your account code and “10K” in the minimum field.

Example 2: Filter by Product or Service Offering

To include credit unions offering a specific product or service, such as credit card lending or small business loans enter “1” as the minimum value (this works for both “#” or “$” account code associated with that product).

• For credit cards, use a396 as the account filter and 1 as the minimum value.
• For SBA loans, use aLN0050 with a minimum value of 1.

If you created a peer group using both attributes, it would include only credit unions that offer both credit cards and SBA loans.

Attributes

You can use several filters to identify credit unions that share a common characteristic (Ex: CDFI status or Minority Depository Institution (MDI) designation.

These fields use numbers to designate yes and no: 1 in Min column = yes and 0 in the Max column = no.

Popular Attributes

Use Case

• To include low-income credit unions, use lowincome as the account code and enter 1 in the minimum field.
• To exclude LICUs, enter 0 in the maximum field

Alternative Peer Group Ideas

Excluding Merged Institutions

Mergers can impact asset size, membership, and financial ratios,. Filtering out recently merged credit unions helps create a more stable comparison group or allow you to focus on identifying potential merger partners for your own institution.

To create a peer group excluding recently merged credit unions, use Callahan’s Smart Code, merger with the HSUM function:

To apply this in your peer group criteria:

• hsum(merger, X) – Sums the total number of mergers over the past X years.
• Enter 0 in the max column – Ensures only credit unions with no mergers in that period remain in your peer group.

This will remove institutions with any merger activity within the selected timeframe, allowing for a more accurate and strategic peer comparison.