Brian Harrington
Vice President of Finance and Treasury, Merrimack Valley Credit Union
Age: 36
Industry experience: 14 years
Brian Harrington joined Merrimack Valley Credit Union at an intriguing time.
The credit union is preparing to launch its rebrand, to BrightBridge Credit Union, at the same time as the institution also continues to expand. MVCU currently serves more than 115,000 members and 19 retail branches. The rebrand is slated to go into effect this year.
The credit union has also been active in the merger and acquisition arena – a deal with Waltham’s RTN Federal Credit Union made it suddenly one of the five largest credit unions in the state, with $2.19 billion in assets. It now has over 1,100 employer groups in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island and its branches are spread across two states.
Harrington started his community banking career at Newburyport Bank, where he worked as a senior financial analyst, assistant vice president and vice president-director of financial planning and analysis. He most recently worked as vice president of financial planning and analysis at Lighthouse Credit Union in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Q: How do you approach strategic planning, especially when you have a credit union rebranding?
A: I’ve lucked out enough that this is actually my third rebrand, believe it or not. When I joined Newburyport Bank and then Northeast Credit Union – now Lighthouse Credit Union – they were both going through rebrands at the time. Our strategic planning process here, it’s very inclusive. There’s a lot of people that are involved, whether it’s the board of directors, the executive team, different levels of leadership. We’re getting a lot of input from different people about what the needs are within the business, where we’re heading into the future and what the plans are as we transform into BrightBridge Credit Union. I think the fact that we’re involving that many people, it really brings out more of a sense of ownership in terms of what our strategy is, getting the buy-in from all those different levels of leadership and other employees throughout the organization.
We’re always looking at the next three years as part of the strategic planning process, and trying to understand what the business needs are, what the needs of our members are. Obviously, we’re trying to do everything we can to provide our members with the best experience they can have. We’re trying to prepare ourselves for the future, more than we ever have in the past, now that we’re bringing all these credit unions under one umbrella, under one name, one new look and feel, heading into the future.
Q: How important do you think community banks and credit unions are to a community, and what might be lost out when you have a community that’s mostly served by larger institutions?
A: I think with the recent mergers that we’ve done, whether it was in 2023 or the smaller merger that we just completed, effective on Jan. 1, with Cabot Boston Credit Union, we’re really trying to work together to better the members in the communities. I think there’s not necessarily the same kind of competition between credit unions that you see between banking institutions, because we’re not-for-profit so everything that we’re trying to do is really to better our members and the community. Obviously, as banks and credit unions continue to merge over time, they’re recognizing cost savings and things like that, being able to scale their operations to better serve members or customers in the case of banks. I think for us, as a credit union, it’s really in how we join forces to be able to provide a shared membership base the best experience that they can get.
Obviously, the bigger you are, the more power you really have in terms of being able to scale, so to speak, and to be able to actually provide better services to the members, and be able to have a bigger impact on the community. The more money that we make, the more that we try to give back to the community, whether that’s through being able to offer better rates on loan products or deposit products, or even just directly giving back to the community in forms of donations and sponsorships and things like that. I think when you get to just having the big banks in a marketplace sort of takes away from that because there’s not that same level of connection to the community, per se.
Q: Considering the high cost of deposits, how does that impact your strategic planning for the future and how do current market conditions play a role in strategic planning at MVCU?
A: So in terms of the strategic planning process, we’ll look at different scenarios in terms of the financial impact that our current existing financials have. Whatever the rates are that we have as of now, we’ll run a process that maybe we have a static rate environment that we use as our baseline for budgeting, strategic planning and whatnot. Then we have different “rates up” and “rates down” scenarios. We’re sort of planning for everything. We try to make sure that no matter what kind of interest rate environment we’re in, that we’re going to be able to be financially successful, so that we can keep supporting our members and our communities.
Obviously, rates can change at the drop of a dime, so it’s something that we’re always thinking about and constantly monitoring, but we’re not necessarily letting the interest rate environment dictate exactly what we’re planning to do in the future. We have certain goals, products that we want to offer and things that we want to be able to do as a community and for our employees. We let that take the driver’s seat and the other stuff is really more secondary.
Q: This is your second time working at a credit union. What stands out to you as the biggest difference between those institutions and community banks?
A: There’s two, really. I think there’s the level of service that we strive to provide. I think a lot of employees at credit unions do tend to bank with those credit unions, so they’re also members, so, it seems like they have a lot more personal investment in what is going on and how they’re supporting members. It’s similar in the community banking side, but it wasn’t always necessarily quite the same level of tie-in to the bank.
In terms of deposit rates, since our members are technically the owners, at the end of the day, we try to do whatever we can to help them out the best way we can from an interest rate perspective. In the community banking space, at the end of the day, they’re still really focused on the profit – like, very, very laser focused on the profit, increasing their margins on loans and paying out a little bit less on deposits than maybe a credit union would do just because we, at the end of the day, report back to our members because they’re the owners.
Harrington’s Five Favorite Restaurants
- Ulicious Smoothie and Juice Bar, Lawrence
- Blue Moon Kitchen and Bar, Amesbury
- Wise House Coffee, Amesbury
- Port Tavern, Newburyport
- The Coffee Factory, Newburyport