Tyler Grodi, President & CEO, Coastal Credit Union

Coastal Credit Union is pursuing a strategy built around digital transformation, employee-centric culture, and a disciplined commitment to its cooperative mission as it grows across North Carolina. President and CEO Tyler Grodi is focused on turning efficiency into member value, using technology and partnerships to compete with fintechs and large national banks. “We’re journey-mapping processes across the board to improve both the member experience and our employees’ day-to-day work,” he told Invest:.

What are your key strategic priorities for keeping Coastal Credit Union relevant and competitive in a fast-changing financial services landscape?

First and foremost, it starts with our digital transformation and making sure we can serve our members wherever they need us. That might be in a branch, on the phone, or in the palm of their hand on their mobile device. We’re focused on positioning Coastal digitally so that members have access to what they need 24/7.

We rolled out a new online and digital banking platform. It’s a much more modern experience with a better user interface and new features, including CashBack+, a new function that offers discounts and cash back as we build out a total rewards program. More broadly, we’re focused on digitizing the organization end to end, using automation and AI, so that everything we do is as frictionless as possible and our members encounter as few roadblocks and speed bumps as we can manage.

The other major priority is culture. We know we have to be a great place to work if we’re going to achieve our growth goals and serve members better. I look at three primary stakeholder groups: our members, our employees, and the communities we serve. Taking care of employees is absolutely central because a company is only as great as the people you get to work with every day.

How do you balance Coastal’s cooperative “people helping people” mission with the need to grow, scale, and invest in new technology?

I think about that balance through what I call my flywheel for how I operate the organization. It’s something I established more than 15 years ago, and it starts with growth, but for us to grow, we need to be efficient. If we’re efficient, then we can offer superior member value.

When I say superior member value, I’m talking about our pricing, products, and service. Running an efficient organization allows us to invest in technology and in our people. That’s something our industry has struggled with at times, and it’s why I’m so focused on our operating expense ratio and efficiency ratio. We do run relatively lean, so we can make those investments.

If we’re efficient, we can return value to members, which is what it’s all about: our value proposition. If we deliver strong value, that enables growth. That’s the flywheel I use as CEO: efficiency, member value, and growth, all reinforcing each other while staying true to our mission.

What role does digital transformation play in your vision for member services, and how do you decide where to invest?

Our vision is to become a digital banking credit union that still maintains a local presence. As we expand across North Carolina, we plan to maintain regional member advisory centers — in other words, branches — because we still believe there’s a need for that physical touchpoint, especially for bigger issues like fraud or complex questions where people may require a more hands-on approach.

We know that to compete with fintechs and larger commercial banks, we need digital banking offerings that are as good as or better than what’s in the market. Everything we do is viewed through the lens of how we can execute it digitally on the front end and how we can automate it on the back end.

A lot of people focus on the member-facing side of digital transformation and forget the operational side. You don’t want a seamless front end that creates manual, slow processes for employees behind the scenes. When we talk about digital transformation, we’re looking at the entire journey from A to Z. If a member applies for a loan, we want that application to flow automatically through our systems and be approved and funded in five minutes or less, without unnecessary human intervention. We’re journey-mapping processes across the board to improve both the member experience and our employees’ day-to-day work.

What is the biggest external risk for credit unions today, and how is Coastal preparing for it?

There are many risks in the environment right now, but if I had to pick one area we need to focus on, it would be fintech disruption. Fintechs and big tech firms are changing expectations around speed, convenience, and experience.

On the flip side, many fintechs are also looking for partners in the community banking space, including credit unions. We strategically partner with as many fintechs as we can. While we’re competing with some of the larger players, we can also use fintech partnerships to help us compete with major banks and big tech platforms.

So fintech is both our biggest risk and our biggest opportunity. It’s a risk if we ignore it, but it’s an opportunity if we leverage the right partnerships to roll out the technology we need to compete and to provide the services our members want and deserve.

How do you measure success beyond traditional financial metrics, and how does that influence your strategy?

As a former CFO, finances will always be important to me, but in a credit union, it’s not just about the bottom line. We track the number of people we impact annually, and we have modest-means strategic planning with specific KPIs. For example, we look at the dollar amounts of loans and deposits in low-income designated ZIP codes.
We’ve introduced products like VA loans, North Carolina down payment assistance, and a partnership with a fintech company called Credit Mountain that helps turn “no” into “yes” by giving people with damaged or challenged credit a plan to repair their score. A big part of our focus is serving the entire community in the Raleigh-Durham area and beyond, including underserved consumers.

We may not be everything to everyone, but we should have something for everyone that can truly improve their financial life. Our tagline is “bank better to live better,” and I take that seriously. My job is to improve lives — for employees, members, and the communities we serve. That means we sometimes make strategic decisions to roll out products that might be loss leaders but that help people improve their situation. Over time, those decisions pay dividends for both the credit union and our members.

Is there a recent initiative you are particularly proud of that reflects where Coastal is headed?

One initiative that I’m especially proud of is the renovation of our headquarters. Prior to COVID, we had planned to build a large 13-story building. We ultimately decided to scale that back and remodel our existing six-story building instead, designing it around teamwork, collaboration, and flexibility so employees can thrive.
We’re seeing more organizations bring people back to the office. We’ve moved to a model where employees come in two days a week, but our emphasis is on outputs and how we can improve the organization, not just on physical presence. The redesigned headquarters supports that philosophy and reflects the kind of modern, flexible workplace we want to provide as we continue to grow.