ONTARIO, Calif. -Stan Hollen, the former CEO of the Golden 1 Credit Union and Liberty Enterprises said he is excited to take on the top job at The CO-OP Network. Hollen steps into the office that former CEO Bob Rose occupied for 15 years. “The board of directors, assisted by executive search firm Muller and Associates, examined an array of candidates from throughout the financial services industry, and Stan Hollen topped our list for a variety of reasons,” says David Maus, chairman of the CO-OP Network Board of Directors and CEO of the $640 Public Service Credit Union in Denver, Colorado. “During his remarkable 33-year financial industry career, Stan's developed an unmatched knowledge of the credit union landscape,” Maus said. “As shown by his successes at Golden 1 and Liberty, he possesses the foresight to develop and implement strategic long-term plans and is ideally experienced to provide strong leadership for CO-OP Network and the credit union industry.” Maus explained that for two years, Rose and the CO-OP Network board have been formulating a smooth CEO transition. He added that having credit union experience was a plus for Hollen but was not one of the committee's most important search criteria. The most important search criteria, Maus said, were leadership and experience with developing and innovating EFT networks. For his part, Hollen refused to call anything about CO-OP's future a challenge, but acknowledged the cooperative has a wealth of opportunities that need pursuing. Among them the growing cooperation between CO-OP Network and the California-based Financial Service Center Cooperatives shared branch network and the potentially hot issues of what to do about credit unions that convert to banks being allowed to remain in CO-OP Network. On FSCC, Hollen noted that CO-OP had a long history of cooperation with the California shared branching effort and that he had been involved in its founding. He also served on the search committee for the current FSCC CEO, Sarah Canepa Bang. But Hollen refrained from predicting anything more specific between the CO-OP, which owns the Service Center Corporation shared branch network, and FSCC. CO-OP and FSCC signed an agreement to cooperate more on shared concerns earlier this year. He also declined to comment on credit unions remaining CO-OP members after they become banks, other than to note that under current bylaws credit unions which are members of CO-OP Network and which become banks can remain members, though he acknowledged that the rising interest in the issue almost guaranteed that the topic remained on the agenda for some time. Hollen's entire professional career has been spent in the credit union arena, first serving on a credit union board at age 19, the network reported. From 1973 to 1984, Hollen was vice president at Construction Equipment Federal Credit Union in Peoria, Ill., where he created one of the early shared ATM networks with local banks and thrifts. When he became The Golden 1 CEO in 1984, the credit union had $295 million in assets; upon his departure in 2002, the organization boasted an asset base of nearly $4 billion – and 13 executives from his management team had become credit union CEOs. Most recently at Liberty, which was purchased by Harland earlier this year, Hollen led a company-wide diversification of its product lines to be more attuned with technology. When Rose became CO-OP Network CEO in 1990, the company was the 49th largest EFT network in the country. Today, following twelve consecutive years of record annual transaction growth and nine cash patronage distributions for member-shareholders in the last eight years, CO-OP Network is the No. 1 credit union network and largest financial institution owned network in the country. -

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