Executive Summary
Every credit union says it is member-focused. The claim is easy to make, because community is the differentiator almost everyone reaches for, which is exactly why it is hard to prove. Neville Billimoria has spent 24 years at Mission Fed Credit Union in San Diego, first running membership, then as chief advocacy officer, and now as CMO. He grew up between two countries, with an Indian father and an English mother, and he moved to the US at 14 with a single suitcase. The Indians called him English and the English called him Indian, so belonging became the problem he set out to solve. That thread runs straight into how he defines the work.
Mission Fed built its value proposition on member intimacy, and the version Neville pitched carried an obligation. Advocate for the member even when that means pointing them to a better option somewhere else, because the lifetime relationship is worth more than any single transaction. He traces business through four stages, from profit-first to customer-first to culture-first, and then to a model where every stakeholder in the ecosystem counts. In that model, community lives in Mission Fed’s three-year plan as a strategic pillar, named as a critical path to how the credit union grows and who it is.
The mechanism underneath is where the argument earns its keep. Neville’s case is that relationship compounds where price does not. Compete on rate, and the next lower rate takes the member. Build the relationship, and you earn a lifetime value a competitor cannot undercut. Culture is the part rivals cannot copy, so he treats it as the real product and lets marketing follow from it. What the credit union puts on a billboard must match what a member feels walking into a branch and closing that gap is culture work before it is marketing work. Employee care is the first link in the chain, because staff who feel valued carry that care outward to members almost by osmosis. Scale is the obvious threat, and at 330,000 members the danger is that people start to feel like account numbers. Neville’s answer runs back through those same employees, on the belief that people who feel valued extend that feeling to everyone they serve.
The CMO’s job, as he frames it, is to hold profit as one element of value creation, one input in a larger composition, and to defend that frame with the CFO and the COO through what he calls courage and consideration. His proof is 24 years and a membership that kept growing, and he is the first to admit it is conviction more than a clean metric. He calls it n of one, n equals Neville. The test he leaves works for any institution. Look hard at what you say about yourself, then look at what your members feel, and ask whether the two match.
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Key Takeaways
- Advocacy Can Mean Sending Them Elsewhere: Mission Fed’s value proposition rests on member intimacy, and Neville’s version carries a duty. When another provider serves the member better, point them there. He argues the credit union earns lifetime value that way, where chasing the single sale would cost the relationship. The book that shaped this, written by an MIT professor on trust-based marketing, was titled “Don’t Just Relate, Advocate.”
- Community Only Counts When It Is Built Into Strategy: Plenty of institutions talk about community. Neville’s test is whether it shows up in the strategic plan and, more to the point, in the implementation. Mission Fed names community as one of the pillars of its three-year plan, identified as a critical path to growth. He says the institutions that skip that step leave a real opportunity untapped, because they chase profit without doing the root-cause work on what earns it.
- Relationship Compounds Where Price Does Not: Compete on rate and you hold a member until someone posts a lower one. Neville’s argument is that a relationship builds lifetime value a competitor cannot undercut. In a market that fintechs and challenger brands disintermediate a little more every week, he treats genuine connection as the lever that keeps working after price stops.
- Culture Is the Part Competitors Cannot Copy: Neville quotes Drucker, culture eats strategy for breakfast, and adds lunch, dinner, and the occasional snack. A rival can imitate your strategy in a quarter. Copying your culture is far harder. He describes the first half of his career as brand as marketing and this season as brand as culture, on the logic that once the culture is right, the marketing takes care of itself.
- Member Care Starts With Employee Care: Ask Neville how a credit union keeps care consistent and he points inside first. Take care of employees, equip them, give them belonging and value, and that care reaches members almost by osmosis. He frames the whole enterprise as being in the care business, with technology as a lever underneath a people-first mindset.
- Scale Does Not Have to Mean Anonymity: At 330,000 members and counting, the obvious risk is that people start to feel like account numbers. Neville’s answer runs back through the employees, on the belief that staff who feel valued pass that feeling to every member they serve. Size does not break a personal relationship as long as the culture underneath stays intact.
- The CMO’s Job Is to Reframe Profit as One Input: Neville’s one change for every credit union CMO is to hold profit as an element of value creation, one input in a larger composition. He is clear that profit still matters, no margin, no mission. The work is defending that wider frame with a CFO and a COO who carry different numbers and doing it with what he calls courage and consideration, respecting their KPIs while adding to them.
- Hyperlocal Focus Is Its Own Advantage: Mission Fed calls itself the largest financial services organization serving San Diego and only San Diego. Neville treats that narrowness as a strength. Every dollar of give-back stays local, which lets the credit union know its members and show up where bigger, everywhere-at-once competitors cannot. He points to the same instinct in fintechs like Nubank, SoFi, and Chime, whose users tend to describe a relationship more than a technology.
Full Episode Transcript
Alex Jiménez: Welcome to Next Best Action. My guest today is Neville Billimoria, chief marketing officer of Mission Fed Credit Union in San Diego, California. Neville has spent more than two decades at Mission Fed, most of it leading the credit union’s membership and community relations work, and this spring he stepped into the CMO seat. Beyond the credit union, Neville serves on boards across San Diego and has taught martial arts, yoga, and meditation at UC San Diego for more than four decades. He was recognized by the San Diego Business Journal with its 2022 Nonprofit and Corporate Citizenship Award and its 2023 Asian Pacific Islander Leaders of Influence Award. Welcome, Neville.
Neville Billimoria: Thank you. Who’s that guy you’re talking about?
Alex Jiménez: I wanted to talk to you about what it means to be a community-first credit union, and given your career and your focus, I think there’s no one better to have that discussion with. As we talk to many credit unions, every one of them says they’re member-focused, but I want to delve into what that really means to you. You spent most of your 24 years at Mission Fed as chief advocacy officer, a title I don’t find anywhere else in the industry. What was that title about, and what were you trying to be that a normal marketing title wouldn’t let you be?
Neville Billimoria: When I first got there, my title was SVP of Membership. A couple of years in, the board of directors tasked me with developing a new value proposition for the organization. At the time, I went to Harvard Business Review and looked at three basic pathways forward. There was operational excellence, like a Walmart and just-in-time manufacturing. There was an innovation option, like Nike, just do it, but do it better, smarter, faster. And then there was member intimacy. Vanna White, I took member intimacy for 200, because operational excellence and innovation were not exactly the credit union jam. Part of that, we got written up in an academic book at MIT, by a professor there, on trust-based marketing. The name of the book was “Don’t Just Relate, Advocate.” His argument was that you need to advocate for your member-owners, even if that means redirecting them to a different enterprise if that’s what’s in their best interest, because you’ll earn their lifetime value as opposed to just the transaction on a particular product or service.
So, I pitched that, and it was accepted, and it came with an expectation that you need an advocacy officer, someone who’s going to sit in the asset-liability committee meetings, sit in the strategic conversations, and hold space for the member-owner’s perspective. I started out as SVP Membership. It migrated to chief advocacy officer, then to membership marketing and communications, and most recently CMO. But fundamentally, the song remains the same. It’s about doing right by your members. It’s about people, not profits. Yes, you need profits to support the mission, no margin, no mission. But your reason for existence as an enterprise, unlike the for-profit organizations, is actually to drive value for your membership.
Alex Jiménez: That’s great. At one point in my career, I was voice of the customer for one of the top four banks.
Neville Billimoria: Okay.
Alex Jiménez: That was my most frustrating job.
Neville Billimoria: Because you got pushback?
Alex Jiménez: Oh yes. I kept saying, I’m the voice of the customer, and they would say, yes, but we’re looking at our numbers and they don’t look good.
Neville Billimoria: At some point I need to flip the script and interview you, because I’m sure there’s some there there as well.
Alex Jiménez: Exactly. You ran an ad agency and marketed dot-com startups before you landed at a teacher’s credit union in 2002. What were you looking for that the commercial world wasn’t giving you?
Neville Billimoria: I ran my own agency and did a bunch of consulting work at a time when it was BC, before children. Once I had my first child, I realized I needed something more. When we had a great month, I would do well. If we had a hard month, I wouldn’t lay off people, I would just absorb it. I was able to navigate the financial ups and downs of an entrepreneurial organization, and I was good with that. That was part of my value system. But once I had kids, I wanted a little more stability, and I wanted to work for a values-driven organization. Driving value to the members, but having the same shared values. In our case, that’s trust, integrity, service, commitment, communication, teamwork. We, not me. We’re better together.
The credit union space I frankly hadn’t really been familiar with, besides having a car loan on an old Isuzu Trooper a million years ago. A recruiter called, and apparently they didn’t know the difference between a bank and a credit union. They said there’s a bank looking for an SVP, are you interested? I said, look at me, do I look like a banker to you? And then the follow-up was, but I’ll talk to anybody. So here I am 24 years later, because the mission, the value we provide, and the values we embody are all resonant and consistent with who I want to be when I grow up.
Alex Jiménez: So clearly they spoke to you. That’s fantastic. You’ve written that feeling like an outsider growing up made you want to build places where people belong. When you walk into Mission Fed, where do you see that belief showing up in how members get treated?
Neville Billimoria: Wow, that’s a heavy question, and I’ll tell you why it’s heavy for me. I grew up in India. My dad’s Indian, my mother’s English. We moved here with one suitcase each to start our lives over when I was 14 years old. I was hyper-attuned to in-grouping and out-grouping, with the Indians saying I was English and the English saying I was Indian. So what was I, and where did I fit? That was tricky enough as a young adolescent, and it got even more complicated getting transplanted to an entirely new country.
Part of my aspiration was to turn my stumbling blocks into stepping stones, and make sure that other people felt that they belong, they’re included, they’re valued, where difference is the only thing we have in common. That’s why it’s heavy. At Mission Fed, it’s not quite that heavy, in as much as we’re an inclusive organization and we’re attentive to our community. We have ERGs, employee resource groups, that ensure whatever your stripes, whatever your affinities might be, you know that you matter, you belong. The most interesting way I’ve heard this explored is the uniqueness-belonging continuum. On the one hand, we’re all individuals and different. On the other hand, we all have this deep need for connection. In this digital-native world, with the anxious generation and all the challenges we’re experiencing, now compounded with AI, how do you feel connected? Who is your community? What is my tribe?
We’ve chosen to be hyper-local. We’re the largest financial services organization exclusively serving San Diego. There are way bigger banks and other organizations, but they’re all over the place. All of our give-back, all of our focus, is local. The short answer to a long question, which I made more about me than about Mission, for which I apologize, is that we want to be there to serve our member-owners. That’s who we’re beholden to. There are no stockholders. We’re super attentive to everybody. Everybody matters, everybody belongs, and everyone’s welcome.
Alex Jiménez: When my family moved to the US, our suitcases got lost.
Neville Billimoria: Oh jeez.
Alex Jiménez: We came with nothing.
Neville Billimoria: Almost nothing.
Alex Jiménez: I understand that, and that’s been my experience as well. But I never landed at a credit union. I landed at a community bank at some point. Being in that space, when you talk to community bankers, they always say we’re all about the community. Having spent a fair amount of time working with credit unions for the past eight years or so, there is a difference between the organizations. And for my banking friends, please don’t @ me. But you’ve spent a career acting like it’s the whole business, that the community matters. What do you understand about the tie between community and growth that most marketers miss?
Neville Billimoria: Being hyper-local, it’s know that customer. All of our give-back in time, treasure, and talent, which are the three T’s everyone talks about in philanthropy, but there are actually two more, ties and testimony. How do we tie ourselves and anchor ourselves deeply? And how can we provide a voice for those who may not have a voice, or ultimately how can they be the voice for us, when they’re talking to their peeps on a weekend and saying, where did you get your car loan? And they say, this group doesn’t treat me like a number, they treat me like a person. They know me, I know the people, they know my kids.
Community is integral if you understand the evolution of business in society. 1.0 was profit at any cost, Friedman’s economic model. Sell tobacco to kids, deforest, who cares, as long as you’re driving profit, you’re golden. Profit first. 2.0 added a human to the equation, which is fantastic, customer first. But that comes with some baggage, like the customer’s always right. Well, no. You can’t walk into one of our branches and treat our people like crap and think that’s okay. But at least the predicate was, you take care of the customer, that’ll take care of the profit. 3.0, which many organizations including Mission Fed are fully embracing, is you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers, that’ll take care of your profit. Culture first. So from profit first, to customer first, to culture first. 4.0, which is really where you’re taking this conversation, is that all the stakeholders in the ecosystem matter. If you’re in education, it’s not just student success that matters, it’s taking care of the parents, the teachers, the administration, the janitor, the PTA, the local chambers.
In our context, a purpose-first model is what allows you to demonstrate, quite literally model, your commitment to your community. And if you do that legitimately, not lipstick on a pig, not performatively, then people know you care and are going to give you top-of-funnel consideration. As a result, you have the ability to earn trust, more members, and drive more value. In a hyper-competitive marketplace, how does one differentiate? That’s the evocative question. You can do it by price, but then it’s transactional, not relational. You can do it by other dimensions, but in our case, and in the credit union movement rightly applied, in my opinion, n of one, n equals Neville here, community really is a powerful lever for growth and success.
Alex Jiménez: When you get together at your level and look at strategic initiatives for the credit union, is community included in those descriptions? I’ve sat in boardrooms of both banks and credit unions, and generally the revenue and the employees are included, the impact to the customer, but community as a whole is not always discussed. How does that look in the boardroom for Mission Fed?
Neville Billimoria: We’re running a three-year strategic plan that just launched this year. Prior to that, we had an 18-month plan because of all the dynamics of COVID and various other externalities, geopolitical and economic uncertainty. In our current three-year plan, community is one of the strategic pillars. It’s unapologetically identified as a critical path to our collective success and who we are as an organization. For those organizations that have not included it in their strategic planning, or more importantly in their implementation strategy, they’re leaving a huge opportunity untapped, because they’re maybe chasing profit but they haven’t done the root-cause analysis, the begats, like Genesis chapter one. Don’t just go to the punchline. Do some analysis and reflection, maybe more reflection than analysis, frankly. There are a lot of left-brainers, but it takes a little bit of self-reflection, organizational reflection, to say this is a powerful lever, particularly to the point you made earlier that we’re wired for connection. If you’re not taking care of connection, you’re just building a transactional brand, and the next guy who offers you a lower rate, you’re going to jump ship. Whereas if you built relationship, that’s lifetime value, and that’s a different kettle of fish.
Alex Jiménez: It’s interesting when you look at successful fintechs that are direct-to-consumer. A lot of them have in some ways connected with a community, and generally they have not done that in the US. If you look at Nubank in Latin America, they’ve really focused on the consumer, on the community, whereas the banks down in Latin America just haven’t done a great job of connecting. They’re like, well, we’re banks, people have to do business with us. But certainly in the US, there’s a subset of people that love SoFi, a subset that love Chime, and when you talk to them, they generally talk about relationship, which is interesting, because those of us in the credit union or banking space are puzzled, because we think it’s all about technology, and it’s really what you just said. Back to the hyper-competitive marketplace, it’s not just the banks and the credit unions. Why do people rob banks? That’s where the money is. But now we’ve got the challenger brands, the fintechs, the disruptors. So yet another argument for why you need to differentiate eloquently and thoughtfully, and community might be a special lever in that mix.
Neville Billimoria: The people who are more focused on the financial end and the growth end are probably thinking right now, yeah, but that’s nice for a credit union. But those of us who know Mission Fed, the growth of the credit union has been significant through the years, and it’s been because of that hyper-local focus.
Alex Jiménez: You have over 300,000 members right now?
Neville Billimoria: 330,000 and counting.
Alex Jiménez: So what’s your answer to keeping something that big from making people feel like a number?
Neville Billimoria: It’s back to that third leg of the business hierarchy I talked about. Take care of your employees, treat them like people, equip them, upskill them, give them that sense of belonging and connectivity and value, and that, by osmosis, automagically, extends out into whoever they reach and meet and touch and care for. Care is the name of the game. We’re in the care business. We’re not healthcare, and even that’s managed cost, not managed care in many cases, but let’s not go there today unless you’ve got another hour. It’s not about size. It’s about personalization through technology, because technology is a huge lever, but at the end of the day, it’s human-centered. If you’re looking for all the hacks to minimize the expense of human beings by using technology, whether that’s AI or whatever the du jour fad or evolution is, and I’m not minimizing the technological opportunities, I’m just saying at the end of the day it’s a people-first mindset. Privileging all the people in that system is what’s going to help you make each interaction count.
Alex Jiménez: That makes a lot of sense. If a marketer at a small credit union called you tomorrow with no budget and no foundation, and asked how to start doing what you do, what would you tell them?
Neville Billimoria: Our conversation today has actually taken them through that journey. Begin with why. Why do you exist? What’s your purpose? We all have missions, visions, and values, but what’s the purpose of your institution? And if you think your purpose is just to maximize profit, you get a second goal. You said there’s no budget, and I get that you need the profit, but why are people paying you? Why would they choose to do business with you? If you don’t have clarity about that, then you’re not mission-minded, you’re not purpose-driven, and you’re going to have a hard time in a very busy market that’s getting disintermediated every week.
Once you’re clear about who you are and what you want to do, then what’s your theory of action? How are you going to drive value to whoever your stakeholders are? Then I’d go to good old Peter Drucker, founder of management by objectives. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I’d go so far as to say culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and sometimes even snacks, because you can easily imitate somebody else’s strategy, but it’s really hard to fake or imitate the culture and the culture work. You referenced 24 years at Mission Fed. The whole first part of my career, even before Mission Fed, was brand as marketing. This whole season of my career is brand as culture, because if you get the culture right, the marketing takes care of itself. What we say in our social media or ads or billboards is congruent with the experience people have when they show up. But to get that right, you’ve got to work on the culture. You can’t just hire Hollywood talent and hope you dazzle them into thinking, that’s cool, I want to go there, and then they get there and go, wait a minute, this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife, oh my god, what have I done. Sorry, Talking Heads reference.
Alex Jiménez: That’s fantastic. I want to switch it up and ask a couple of rapid-fire questions. Just tell me the first thing that comes up, no need to explain. Number one: karate or drum kit, which clears your head first?
Neville Billimoria: Oh, you dog, I hate you for this. Percussion kit. Faster hack to dopamine and release. But I hate you for this, you’ve given me a Solomon’s cat problem here. All right, I like it. Play on.
Alex Jiménez: I’ll buy you lunch at some point. What did your friends in India call you growing up?
Neville Billimoria: Billy, because my last name is Billimoria. So my nickname was Billy.
Alex Jiménez: That makes total sense. You’ve signed your Friday letter “Love, Neville” for 15 years, and it’s also how you sign your emails. Why those words?
Neville Billimoria: I believe that at the end of the day, love is what will help us all be who we need to be and save us from our most destructive selves. It’s a bit of a stretch to say “Love, Neville” every single time, and HR sometimes might lose their spit about it, but so far I’m good.
Alex Jiménez: That’s great. Finish this one: San Diego becomes the kindest city in America when what happens?
Neville Billimoria: When we attend to our humanity, are more inclusive and collaborative, and protect the planet. People, planet, profit, and purpose, the quadruple bottom line.
Alex Jiménez: Fantastic. And San Diego is an awesome place.
Neville Billimoria: It is. We say “finest city.” I prefer kindest, the kindest region. Finest has a little bit of imperious “ain’t we something” to it. Kindest region would be pretty cool. A kindest-driven region, how’s that?
Alex Jiménez: That’s fantastic. I was just in San Diego about a month ago, and everywhere I went, I saw Mission Fed. Last question. Forget about Mission Fed for a second. If every credit union CMO in the country changed one thing about how they think about community, what would you want it to be?
Neville Billimoria: One thing: reframe the profit imperative for value creation. Because if you better understand that profit is only an element of the total value creation, you’re going to play on a different playing field.
Alex Jiménez: And how does a CMO do that and advocate for it when you may have the CFO asking for something else, or the COO focusing on operations and costs?
Neville Billimoria: You referenced it in your own lived experience with the banking world. You’ve got to stay the course, hold that space, make the argument rationally, but more importantly, in how you show up. It’s a non-negotiable if you’re playing it right. But it’s not to be mean-spirited. It’s courage and consideration. You completely respect their agenda, perspectives, lived experience, accountabilities, and KPIs. You’re not diminishing any of that, you’re just adding. You’re not saying you don’t need profit, that’s ludicrous. You’re recognizing that profit is just an element in the complete composition.
Alex Jiménez: You have to show empathy for their goals as well as your own, your community, and your members. I second that. It’s fantastic.
Neville Billimoria: To your point, the results speak for themselves if you do it long enough. If you have happier employees who stay longer, the loyalty effect, if you outperform the rest of the credit union in member growth, if you have a safe, sound, stable enterprise, and you’re beloved by your community, then what is it you’re having a difficulty with? Help me out, I’m a little confused. I’ll do a Columbo on you, I’ll scratch my head.
Alex Jiménez: Right, exactly. I bet you have a lot of lifers in the back office and in the branches. That was always one of the things I loved when I was at a community bank. At some point I managed three generations of the same family. That was amazing.
Neville Billimoria: We have two generations for sure currently that I can think of. I don’t know if we have three, but we have 40-year, 30-year, and 25-year employees. We have a longevity award, an event where we celebrate their longevity and appreciate them, because I know the modern data would say you want to maximize income, just keep jumping ship every three years. So apparently I’m not that smart, I’m still here 24 years later.
Alex Jiménez: Well, Neville, thanks so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure. And I owe you a lunch and anyone that’s listening
Neville Billimoria: They will hold you to it.
Alex Jiménez: That’s right. Thank you so much.
Neville Billimoria: Thank you, Alex. I really appreciated this.