Business View Magazine May 2023

187 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 5 BOW VALLEY CREDI T UNION dollar mortgage and can’t afford their car, a vacation, or a Friday night pizza. We’re unwilling to do that to our members.” Bow Valley Credit Union has positioned itself as an institution that emphasizes the importance of its community rather than selling a product. After all, the community is at the center of everything the company does. As a community company, each branch engages in its own outreach and non-profits, as they have literal boots on the ground. These employees also understand what programs need assistance. Bow Valley Credit Union is engaged with organizations that include food banks, local festivals, sports teams, and much more. Regarding internal technology assets that many companies adopted to streamline processes, Bow Valley Credit Union has taken the road less traveled and steered away from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software systems. CRM systems allocate automatic responses to clientele, whereas at Bow Valley Credit Union, these members have names, and everyone knows who those individuals are. But at the end of the day, Oland believes that some technology systems are not needed, “We found that technology’s gotten to a place where you can spend a large lump sum of cash to make things only incrementally better, which doesn’t help people..” While the company offers online banking and other selected services that are found to improve members’ processes Bow Valley Credit Union is providing a stable service for its local community and is invested in keeping them financially safe. This being said, the company could adopt these new technological tools for individuals to apply for mortgages but has decided that venturing into the global market arena is too risky. “In the future, for the banking industry, you could have applicants apply for a ‘vanilla mortgage’ with a T4 and tax returns, which would be automated. But eventually, larger multinational tech companies would swoop in and undercut all the banks,” says Oland. The majority of members at Bow Valley Credit Union run businesses, have side hustles, as well as different types of jobs, and can provide