WASHINGTON — Pete Snyder of SCS Consulting and Callahan and Associates has formulated a benchmarking program to gather and analyze data on retail credit union investment programs. For the first time, global information will be provided by the nine major broker dealers that work with CUs that, combined with the 931 credit unions across the country that have one or more financial consultants in branches, promises to give the first detailed picture of the size and breadth of the business.

Because "What Gets Measured Gets Done" is a basic element of engineering/project management/best practices, there can be no standard without a yardstick of comparison, said Snyder. While guru Tom Peters may have coined that phrase, it is widely accepted as common sense business 101, and there has never been such a measurement for CU investment programs. But if a practice works as advertised, it should be possible to see, define, and measure the results. That will enable CUs to change their practices to get the results they're looking for, said Jay Johnson of Callahan's, who joined Snyder in a teleconference on the launch of the program with Credit Union Times.

The broker dealers offered unanimous cooperation on the pledge that any proprietary data remain confidential. "They are all highly competitive, so we promised that the information they provide will never be shared with competitors," Snyder said. "All the data will be combined globally and it will be anonymous. What we're trying to see and show to others are the trends that emerge. From the broker dealers we'll get total revenue, the number of CUs served, the number of accounts and the number of reps. Their cooperation is invaluable and nobody's gathered this information before." Similarly, data from participating CUs will not be identifiable.