Carrie Iafrate was born and raised in Midland. She went to school and earned her marketing degree and worked at a bank initially. Friends and others in the community kept telling her about a job at Members First, but as she put it, she "politely ignored" their encouragement.

Eventually, as she admits, she gave in and applied. Twenty years ago she stepped inside the credit union after being hired by its CEO, Eric Brubaker, to run the credit union's marketing programs.

Twenty years later she became the CEO.

Since taking the helm in January 2022, she has revamped the credit union and its leadership to include the first all-female executive team in the credit union system. Her enthusiasm for her credit union is infectious. "I love my team! I love this credit union! I love what we're all up to," she exclaimed.

CU Times spoke with Iafrate about the challenges and opportunities she's experienced during her first year leading the credit union, and how Brubaker, who is now retired, helped her learn on the job. Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

CU Times: You've said "time and experience" brought you to this moment as the credit union's CEO. What do you mean by that?

Iafrate: Of course, my original intent and focus was on marketing and growth of the credit union, but that led to leading us through a couple of mergers. So, learning how to navigate that. Opening and building branch locations is part of a growth strategy and deploying ATMs back in the day. Learning all of those types of growth strategies that go along with credit unions and financial institutions, and wanting to serve and just putting that time into gaining that knowledge and experience – and having the right CEO and executive team that allows for you to navigate through the opportunities.

You know, when I started it was a 40-something employee credit union with two branches and maybe $120 million in assets. Now I have 11 branches and 240 team members and their families, 60,000 members, and we're across the state of Michigan. So I've just had a phenomenal opportunity to be able to help us grow in that way and serve more and more members in the state of Michigan.

CU Times: What's been your focus during your first year? Iafrate: First and foremost, the importance of the credit union getting used to a new CEO, right? Even though I've been here 20 years, going from a male CEO to a female CEO, and his longevity and experience came up through being a CPA in finance. I came up through marketing and organizational behavior and I always put my asterisks of "with an accounting associate's degree" in there too. I get the numbers! [laughs]. Just onboarding the team and the board and the membership to me as the CEO had to be first and foremost really. I'm being purposely intentional with sharing my vision and what I want for the credit union – talking about why the board felt this was a really smart transition for myself and the team, our communities and our members.

CU Times: What are your intentions as CEO?

Iafrate: Specifically, I have shared with my team that putting that intention into my leadership, I let them know that my brand intention of how I want to show up every single day is to be a ­confident, heartfelt leader who inspires. I focus really hard on those concepts and what they mean to be that leader for them and then working directly with them. Vibrant, healthy growth for this credit union is kind of my "number one" that we've been talking about and working on – that we're never going to grow for the sake of growing, that it needs to be healthy growth and sustainable for our credit union and team. Change can be hard, but change will never be for the bad. It will always be for the good. I'm really exploring what healthy, vibrant growth means to them and some of our specifics on how we're going to get after that.

CU Times: Can you explain your thoughts behind building an all-female executive team?

Iafrate: I really put my thought into how I wanted to align that leadership intent. I really thought in our organization it was important to have that Chief Financial Officer [Tamara McGovern] and that Chief Operations Officer [Amy Garver] and that Chief Strategy Officer [Marcie Long], and that was going to work for us; and then I really could have that vision under each of those areas and those teams working together under that one leader – and what that leader brought to that strength. Then what I could do was say, "OK, now who in my organization has those strengths to fulfill the roles that I'm looking for?" And I was very thankful to have three phenomenal women in our organization who could fill those roles and lead those teams. And that's the other hard work that we've been doing this year, is then that created other opportunities under them. We were able to lift up a new vice president team and really round that team out. And then we have a director role under that. So we just have had a lot of promotions and opportunities for growth for many people in the organization, as I got to rise up too.

CU Times: Your entire frontline staff is now FiCEP certified from CUNA. Why?

Iafrate: So they can really sit down and talk with members and understand what's happening for them and their lives, and help them either get back on track, or set up budgets, or get them in the right loans that are going to help them thrive rather than, you know, be predatory and hurt them. We have a really big initiative behind serving as many people as possible and getting them out of predatory situations, whether it be with products and services or lending. It's very important to us in our communities.

CU Times: This year we've seen an incredible rise in rates and inflation. How are you planning for the future in this economic environment?

Iafrate: It's very important for us to ensure that we really do understand the impact of this inflation and the rising rate environment, coupled with the possibility of a recession, and how all of those are not only currently impacting our members, but in the future could be doing that. As you can imagine, we're all deep in scenario-planning for next year.

We have maybe a dozen scenario plans we're doing because no one knows what's going to happen. All of these past three years have been unlike any other. And so it's just being as prepared as possible, setting ourselves up for success as a financial institution so that we can have that longevity to serve our members; and not only that, but our team members as well. That's just so important to us – equally as important.