Executive Summary
A smaller institution cannot outspend a national bank or a well-funded fintech, so it must win another way. Kevin Miller has run retail businesses at TCF Bank, Santander, BMO Harris, and Bank of America, spent a short stretch in fintech, and now leads Travis Credit Union. He has watched the same pattern hold at every size. The bigger an institution gets, the more reach it has and the harder it becomes to know what it is going after. A smaller institution starts with the clarity a large one spends years trying to recover, and it can move from an idea to a live product in weeks rather than a year of committees. Kevin builds everything Travis does on three things: value the member can measure, banking experiences that hold up against the regionals, and a real presence in the community.
None of those three is scale, and that is the point. The advantages that let a smaller institution win are structural, and a bigger budget cannot buy them. What turns them into a durable edge is unglamorous. Kevin’s answer for what makes a member relationship real is to anticipate needs, own your mistakes, and show up over and over, for as long as it takes. That consistency compounds. It also comes with a warning, because member behavior has moved to digital and the work that got an institution to good will not keep it there. If the online experience does not match the value the member already feels, the two drift apart. The honest test Kevin leaves is a simple one. Look at your digital experience and ask whether it lives up to the value you believe you deliver.
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Key Takeaways
- Scale Buys Reach, Not Clarity: The larger an institution grows, the bigger the impact it can have, and the harder it becomes to know what it is going after. Kevin’s point is that a smaller institution starts with clarity the giants spend years chasing, and it can act on that clarity fast. He can take an idea to execution in thirty to ninety days where a national bank runs it through seven committees and most of a year.
- Compete on Three Things, and None of Them Is Scale: Travis’s entire strategy rests on three dimensions: enhancing compelling value, building competitive capabilities, and showing up in the community. Kevin uses that frame to decide everything the credit union does. He is direct that scale alone will not carry him, so he leans on the three things a bigger balance sheet does not hand you for free.
- Put a Number on the Value: Kevin can state what Travis membership is worth in plain terms. He says the average member gets three hundred dollars a year more in value than a comparable bank customer would, and Travis measures and benchmarks it. The lesson for any institution is that claiming better value means little until you can quantify it and say it out loud.
- Consistency Is the Real Mechanism: Ask Kevin what makes relationship real and the answer is unglamorous. Anticipate the member’s needs, stay consistent, own your mistakes, and keep showing up. He argues that this repeated, reliable presence, built over seventy-five years at Travis, is what a competitor cannot copy with a marketing budget.
- What Got You to Good Will Not Keep You There: Member behavior has shifted to digital, so the branch-first model that once signaled care now falls short. Kevin’s warning is that a member can feel valued in person and still leave if the mobile experience does not match that feeling. The digital experience must carry the same value the institution delivers everywhere else, or the relationship quietly erodes.
- The Charter Buys a Longer Horizon: A volunteer board and decades of accumulated capital let a credit union make bets that pay off years out. Kevin points to youth banking and early investing, where the near-term return is close to zero, as exactly the kind of long-horizon move a quarter-driven public bank would stall or cancel. He frames the credit union’s job as thoughtful risk in service of the whole membership, not risk avoidance.
- Do Not Try to Out-Fintech the Fintechs: Kevin is blunt that a smaller institution will not beat a fintech by copying its playbook at triple the effort. The winning move is to get clear on who you serve, own the brand and the user experience, and partner to fill real gaps. His two live examples are a white label build to strengthen youth banking and a low-cost early investing product for younger members, both under the Travis brand.
- Talent Follows Life Stage: Kevin’s pitch to experienced people is that a credit union offers work they can feel the impact of, with a clear mission and a longer horizon. He looks for the right cultural fit and the right skills rather than trying to appeal to everyone. In his four years at Travis, he says that approach has not been a problem.
Full Episode Transcript
Alex Jiménez: Welcome to Next Best Action. My guest today is Kevin Miller, president and CEO of Travis Credit Union. Kevin has had a long career in banking, including EVP of retail banking at TCF Bank, managing director of retail segments and products at Santander Bank, and various roles at BMO Harris and Bank of America. Welcome, Kevin, and thank you for joining me.
Kevin Miller: Alex, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. When I put together this bio, I didn’t realize you had been at Bank of America. I was there as well, though we didn’t meet then.
Alex Jiménez: Bank of America, and Chase too, become hubs for different segments of talent. The people who spend time there, whether it’s three years or twenty, stay part of an alumni network that turns out to be really helpful. What I’ve always found is how generous that network is. When you’ve worked together, or you share a friend, and you have a question or you’re trying to learn something, people show up for you.
Kevin Miller: I completely agree. Not as good as having a Harvard network, but pretty good.
Alex Jiménez: Second or third best.
Kevin Miller: I agree.
Alex Jiménez: You’ve sat in rooms at Bank of America and Santander where the budget conversations are almost abstract, with huge numbers on the table. Now you’re running Travis Credit Union. What’s the most important thing you understand about competition now that you didn’t fully appreciate when you were on the other side, at the big banks?
Kevin Miller: To the point you made, there’s always a transition from the B to the M, from billions to millions. I started at the very large institutions, went to the regionals and wore a few different hats, spent a short period at a fintech, and ended up at Travis. Each step was massively different in size and scale. The way I think about it is that the larger you are, the bigger your impact can be, once you know what you’re going after. The hardest part is figuring out what you’re going after. When you’re smaller, the clarity of what you’re doing comes much more easily, because you’re closer to the member and you can see it. You can marshal the resources. You’re tackling the same set of member problems either way, but how you get there is very different. At a big institution I would sit through seven committees and spend a year talking about something. Here we can go from ideation to execution in thirty days, ninety days, or a year, depending on the thing. Each has a real strength and a real weakness. For me the question is how you take the best of both and bring them together. That’s the big dynamic of size and scale.
Alex Jiménez: Outside of scale, the other piece is the difference between banks and credit unions. What have you seen that’s different, that surprised you?
Kevin Miller: The thing I expected, and one hundred percent see and feel, is a much deeper connection to the mission, which makes sense. You’re a member-owned cooperative. Credit unions tend to retain team members with incredible tenure, and those people live, work, and worship in the communities you operate in. It’s truly personal to them. That’s a very different feeling from how you operate as a bank. As you know, Alex, it’s easy to pick on one versus the other. Hard to pick on the credit unions, easy to pick on the banks.
Alex Jiménez: Banks do it to themselves.
Kevin Miller: The way I think about it is that there’s a place for everybody in the ecosystem. Whether you’re a fintech, a credit union, a community bank, or a national bank, each of us plays a role in the economy. Yes, there’s competition. There are also members and segments we will serve better than a local or national bank, and there are segments, particularly in the middle market and large corporate, that credit unions naturally don’t play in. Outside of the trade groups, there’s enough of the pie for everybody. Stop spending all your energy bashing one another. I’ve now sat on all three sides, the fintech side, the banking side, and the credit union side, and it’s a lot of energy wasted for nothing. Go do your job, take care of your members, and the rest works itself out.
Alex Jiménez: Where do you think community banks and credit unions excel, in how they can outexecute the big banks?
Kevin Miller: If you’re a credit union, there are three things you have to offer to be competitive. The first, by the definition of our mandate and mission, is higher compelling value to your membership base, your segments, and your communities than a national bank or a fintech offers. At Travis, our internal strategy is built on three things: enhancing compelling value, empowering talent and culture, and operational excellence. That’s how we define everything we do. Under compelling value, quantitatively, are we of better value to you in total? Better rates, lower fees. The average member gets three hundred dollars a year more in value than a bank member. We measure it and benchmark it, so I can tell you that emphatically. Second, I have to offer banking experiences that are competitive, at par with or better than the national banks. Ten years ago you and I would have said, that’s cute, no way. It’s one hundred percent possible today. Our digital banking platform is on par with any regional bank. Third, and this differs by your business model, charter, and history, is how you show up in the communities you operate in. Our platform into the community is youth education. We deliver it to high school students, and some middle school students, through a live simulation we call Generation Wealth. That’s a cornerstone of how we engage the community. Each of our team members, particularly in our physical locations, is involved in the rotaries and the chambers. So when we say we offer more value, we have the right capabilities, and we literally show up. For us, that builds a competitive moat over time. I’m not going to win on scale alone. Scale matters to deliver the value, the capabilities, and the local connectedness.
Alex Jiménez: The other piece I’ve seen from credit unions is that their planning horizon runs longer than a bank’s. That may sound counterintuitive. Having worked in banks, we might have had a five-year plan, but if there were issues that quarter, we could delay everything to address them. A technology project that was supposed to take eight months would stretch to a year and a half because of the quarter-by-quarter thinking, particularly at public banks. At credit unions I see people looking two or three years out. The roles of the boards are different too. So credit unions have an advantage they sometimes haven’t fully used.
Kevin Miller: Correct. There’s a unique nature to the charter, and the charter ties back to the mission. We play a longer-term horizon. In California, where our charter sits, our board is a volunteer board of directors, and what they want is for us to be competitive, relevant, and thoughtful with the risks we take. Not risk avoidance. Remember, we’ve been accumulating capital for seventy-five years. We can’t go to the market, though technically you could do some subordinated debt now. Generally you’re okay taking risks to serve certain member needs, always with respect to the implication for the total membership pool. At first you think, okay, I get it, and then you really sit with it. If someone defrauds the credit union, they’re defrauding another member. That could be your grandmother. We’re very well capitalized, so there’s no issue there, but it’s a different way to think about what you’re solving for. Part of our mission is building lifelong relationships. When you think that way, I’m willing to invest in youth relationships. We know what the data says now, but we were doing that well before it was trending, because it’s the right thing to do. We hear from members, I wish my kid had a great education about managing money in a way that wasn’t selling them anything, that was engaging and relevant. Great, we should do that, and do it really well. It’s a fun place to be, where you can use the skill sets and tools of the broader banking and fintech ecosystem but play a much longer horizon, and your members are happy about it.
Alex Jiménez: One challenge I see is how you attract talent and compete against the big banks. The big banks have a brand. Everybody knows Bank of America, Chase, Wells. Compensation is generally higher, or at least we think it is. So how do you recruit and retain people who could work anywhere, and get them to stay within the credit union?
Kevin Miller: Great question. It varies by role. Take the more technical roles, and I don’t mean technology specifically, say a digital banking or product role, things more common at a larger institution. For those people, the appeal of a credit union is almost directly tied to life stage. You go to a larger organization and get great experience. You learn what good looks like, and what really bad looks like. You experience a lot of rigor. Then, continuing your career, a number of people reach a point midway through where they want to come to work and be happy. They want to know the work they do leads to something bigger, and they want to feel the impact. Credit unions are the most perfect place to do that. When I talk with a leader of a function, or an emerging leader, the conversation is straightforward. You also talk about whether they’re clear on what they’re solving for. There’s a different incentive structure, and a much longer horizon in how we think about things. If someone tells me, Kevin, I want to work really hard, and this team works really hard, but I want to feel good about my work, I want to like the environment, I want to measure what I’m able to do, and in the long term the money works itself out, which it always does, then it’s a pretty easy conversation. We’ve seen really good progress on that. We’re not going to be for everybody, and I don’t need to be. I need the right cultural fit, people with the right set of skills. That hasn’t been a problem for us in my four years with Travis.
Alex Jiménez: Among my banking and fintech friends, I always chuckle when I ask people what makes their bank or credit union different, what the secret sauce is. The answer is almost always the same. It’s always relationship. Whether you’re at Bank of America or a community bank, that comes up. What does it really take to make relationship real? I know you and the team at Travis do a great job, so I want to hear how you think about it.
Kevin Miller: This is going to sound boring, because you’ve lived in this space. Some people won’t like me for it. From a member’s perspective, you’re supposed to anticipate their needs and deliver on them, and otherwise be a little boring. Nobody wants to be surprised about their money. That doesn’t mean new features and new capabilities every week. So the answer is, again, boring: anticipate, then be consistent. The feedback we get about why people pick Travis is that we’re consistent, we own our mistakes, and we show up and do it over and over, and we keep getting better. Whether you’re talking about SoFi, which is a little different, or Bank of America, or Regions, all great organizations, it comes down to the sum of those things, and to the brand, meaning how you’re perceived in the community. You might ask, great, Kevin, but how did you get there? What happened at Travis, and at many credit unions, is that we consistently showed up in the community. We took care of people and did it over and over for seventy-five years. What’s changed is that member behavior has shifted pretty dramatically. What got you to good doesn’t get you there anymore. If your model was built branch-only and you have a terrible mobile experience, you’re not showing up for that member. That’s where credit unions and community banks have had to make massive changes in member experience. You may feel valued by Travis, but if my online experience doesn’t match that value, there’s a disconnect. Credit unions have put in a massive effort to make sure that, across member segments, we provide experiences and capabilities that fit the need. It all started with the old-school, boring part: being consistent, reliable, and honest, and showing up over and over. That ends up being the secret sauce, because anybody can play a rate-only game. Everyone’s tried it. You end up the one-trick pony, and when you can’t use that pony anymore, you’ve got nothing.
Alex Jiménez: You mentioned fintechs like SoFi that are competing well with legacy banks and credit unions, winning at the edges. Where do you think community institutions are most exposed, and what’s the honest answer for how to respond without trying to out-fintech the fintechs?
Kevin Miller: We’re not going to win the fintech game with a fintech strategy tripled. You can’t win all use cases. You have to be clear on who you’re serving. We serve three broad member segments, and getting into what they really need, where we’re not delivering, and how we fill those gaps is what wins over and over. I will never win on rate by itself. We have very competitive rates, but if SoFi wants to play the rate game to cross-sell into its student loan population, that works to a degree, and it’s a great model for them. In our case, we’re about relationships with our members. I need to make sure we have money in and money out. Are we helping the member handle their life’s financial needs, and can we consistently deliver capabilities that stay current with those needs? Let me give you a real example. We’re having a discussion right now about two things. One, we do great work serving youth, but if you asked me how our youth banking capabilities compare to where they could be, I’d say they need work. So we’re talking about whether we partner with a white-label fintech to raise those capabilities and serve that member better, while keeping it under our brand. That matters to me, because ultimately it’s our name attached to the thing. The second area, much more common in the market today, is that younger people are more interested in investing at a younger age. The business case ROI at the start is almost zero, but you’re making a long-term bet. Instead of trying to track them down once they have money, what if we offered a low-cost solution early and began that journey with them? Those are examples where we can fully deliver on the capabilities. I don’t have to build it all myself, but I’m owning the user experience, and I’m clear on who owns the member, what we’re contractually obligated to, and how we protect everybody. You’ll see that evolution on those two things over the next year, as we fill some of the feedback gaps our members have raised.
Alex Jiménez: That reminds me of talking to a fintech maybe twelve or fifteen years ago. They said they were going to put the banks out of business. Five years later they were selling their services to banks, white-labeling them, because it’s much easier to scale with partners than with a brand nobody knows.
Kevin Miller: Yes. I have a distinct memory from Money 2020, one of the years, though I don’t remember who I was working for at the time. The message was, the bankers are going down. Three years later it was, we’re all best friends, let’s partner. There’s always truth in the middle with these things. What makes the US financial services ecosystem unique, and at times frustrating for someone running a company, is that we have so many players, and that continually forces you to up your game. For listeners less familiar with other countries, there were historically two or three dominant players, and unless you had money, they didn’t serve you. That’s the reason you’ve seen neobanks come out of Latin America and parts of Europe. In Latin America, unless you had money, you couldn’t even use a branch. Each of these capabilities appears because there’s some imbalance in the system. The US is an anomaly. When I worked for multiple international institutions, the US was always an anomaly to them, because we have so many institutions and so much fragmentation, and somehow you’re able to find niches to win at. That’s what makes it fun.
Alex Jiménez: Nubank did such a great job. I think it took them only five to seven years to go from a brand-new brand to the leading bank in Brazil. It’ll be interesting to see what happens now that they’ve come into the US.
Kevin Miller: I’m not as bullish as some people on how well they’ll do here, for exactly the reason you said. It’s a different market. On the other hand, we have a lot of consolidation in the space. I forget the exact number, but it’s something like eight thousand banks and credit unions, and that used to be double, fifteen or twenty years ago.
Alex Jiménez: Is that a concern for you, or is it right-sizing?
Kevin Miller: The force of the world is the force of the world. With all things in life there’s creation and destruction, or if you don’t like the word destruction, renewal. I think it’s healthy, because it keeps everybody honest. If you can’t deliver value to whoever you’re serving, you’re not going to be in business. It’s hard to be mad at that. The question is how you figure out who you serve, how you win, and what you play with, and then you get to make decisions. This is where it gets interesting in the credit union system. You don’t have to be massively big to be successful. There are niche players that serve very specific segments and communities and do outstanding work. We should celebrate them, and the same goes for community banks. But they have to build an operating and financial model that lets them carry a small amount of overhead to keep serving that member set. That isn’t a negative, though their future income growth can be limited, because they’re capped on other capability investments. So the next conversation in the credit union system is what an appropriate amount of scale is, and this is where lawmakers need an honest conversation. Whether you’re a traditional banker, in the credit union space, or in fintech, you can’t say regulation doesn’t matter. Of course it matters, and it has a massive implication for the size and scale of an institution. Dodd-Frank proved to everybody that the rules created half-a-trillion-dollar institutions. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but after Dodd-Frank you had to be a hundred billion in assets, and once you got there you incurred an exorbitant amount of cost, and then a hundred billion wasn’t good enough, it became three hundred fifty billion, then half a trillion. The same thing is happening in the credit union system. The economics today mean you get up to nine billion in assets, and then you basically need to be sixteen billion to make the economics work, because of the Durbin Amendment and additional regulation. So people get upset about a decision a credit union is making, but member expectations only get higher. They want to see the institution they’ve had a lifelong membership with prosper alongside them. We have members who’ve been around for seventy-five years. Credit unions are going to keep making investments and decisions to deliver on that mission. In the banking world it’s a very common conversation, and in the credit union world it’s becoming more common, though it’s more sensitive, because part of the identity is, that didn’t need to happen. Which is kind of true, but there have been mergers in credit unions since they were created. It’s just a much bigger dialogue than it was ten or fifteen years ago.
Alex Jiménez: Let’s switch gears and do a lightning round. I’ll just ask questions, and you answer with whatever comes to mind. What’s one book every banking leader should read?
Kevin Miller: Not specific to banking, but the McKinsey CEO book. It’s fantastic, it’s short, and it’s organized by chapter. I highly recommend it whether you’re an aspiring CEO or already in the role.
Alex Jiménez: Coffee or tea?
Kevin Miller: Iced coffee.
Alex Jiménez: Iced coffee. You and my wife. What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?
Kevin Miller: Generally, read the news.
Alex Jiménez: What’s your number one leadership mantra?
Kevin Miller: Win as a team.
Alex Jiménez: I love it. If you were not in banking, what would you be doing?
Kevin Miller: At one point I thought I wanted to be a ship captain. I love being on the water. I’m not one, so it’s better for everybody. Honestly, I don’t know. I’m an accidental financial services person. I never thought I’d do it, and I’ve loved it ever since.
Alex Jiménez: Same here. What’s the one skill you believe every leader should master?
Kevin Miller: How you approach a problem and work through it.
Alex Jiménez: Last question. If you could change one thing in banking, what would you do?
Kevin Miller: People need to have a sense of humor.
Alex Jiménez: I love that. Thanks, Kevin, for joining us. I appreciate the time. This could have gone two hours.
Kevin Miller: It’s my pleasure, Alex. Thanks for having me.
Alex Jiménez: I may have you on again.
Kevin Miller: Happy to. Thanks.