Sandwiched between the Gotham of the Lone Star State–Dallas and Fort Worth–stands the $753 million Texas Trust Credit Union, which recently launched an aggressive growth plan in one of the nation's largest and most competitive marketplaces dominated by big banks.

In August, Texas Trust announced that it has purchased a 78,660-square-foot office park in Arlington that will eventually become the credit union's new headquarters. Currently, it is based in nearby Mansfield. The big office space is going to be needed to accommodate the credit union's ambitious goals, which is to increase its membership from 58,000 to 100,000 and reach $1 billion in assets by 2016.

Texas Trust is no stranger to rapid growth throughout its 76-year history. By 1970, 34 years after it was founded, it became the largest credit union in Texas and the 15th largest in the U.S. Though Texas Trust continued to steadily expand its footprint and services throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the state's population exploded, adding more than six million new residents. Texas added more than 5 million people between 2000 and 2010. In the same years, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex (as natives call it) grew from 5.1 million to 6.3 million.