CO-OP Financial Services will return millions of dollars to participating credit unions from its 2013 operations,  announcing a patronage pool of $30.5 million on Monday.

That figure is 17% higher than the $26.1 million in patronage from 2012's operations, and brings the total of monies returned to the CUSO's members to $284.1 million since it began in 1996.

“The year 2013 was a good one for the credit union system, with membership, loans and earnings up in aggregate for the industry,” said Stan Hollen, CEO of CO-OP Financial Services. “At CO-OP, we had record sales and earnings, enabling us to provide our nearly 1,200 member-shareholder institutions with a healthy increase in patronage for the year.

CO-OP heralded increased operational efficiencies, which it said helped make the increase  possible, including zero downtimes on the EFT switches the CUSO uses for its ATM, POS and shared branch transactions for the past two years, along with a record 2.8 billion transactions processed and an overall. customer satisfaction rating of 8.7 out of 10.