Balancing Bank Tellers and Technology

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Professional pickleball and professional banking aren’t all that different, if you ask Chad Shane. The CEO of Canvas Credit Union builds culture like a coach would: leveraging a team’s strengths and weaknesses, stressing collaboration, and finding the balance between cutting-edge technology and good old-fashioned hard work. Amid the rise in artificial intelligence, Shane is proud of the way Canvas has stuck to its values, prioritizing customer experience, a tight-knit staff and a close relationship with the broader community. On this episode of the Voices of Experience podcast, he reflects on his rise to the top position at Canvas, the skills he’s had to develop and the approach he’s taken to implement change.

Show Notes

Chad Shane

Chad Shane is the CEO of Canvas Credit Union, a position he assumed in 2024. He started at Canvas in 2011 and has held roles as chief lending officer, senior vice president, vice president of lending and AVP of lending and business development.

1:32 The view from the top
2:34 The skillset of a CEO
4:10 Sensitivity to change
Banks vs. credit unions
9:04 Balancing digitization and personalization
10:34 The toughest change Canvas has had to make
12:53 Growing a thriving future
13:55 How to stay relevant
15:41 The impact of cryptocurrency
16:15 Pickleball parallels
18:08 “Be a lifelong learner”
19:18 Show notes and credits

In this episode:

PR Newswire: Black Dragon Capital Partners with Canvas Credit Union to Explore Innovative Technologies for Fintech
CU broadcast: Canvas Credit Union’s New CEO Talks About the Power of Leadership Continuity
NerdWallet: Credit Unions vs. Banks: How to Decide
About Canvas Credit Union

Transcript

Lorne Fultonberg:
Business in this AI age seems to be a balancing act. And things in the credit union industry, of course, are no different.

Chad Shane:
You cannot ignore technology. It’s absolutely table stakes in our world. But we do believe that people still want branches.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Chad Shane is the CEO at Canvas Credit Union, one of the people tasked with finding the happy medium between efficient artificial intelligence and good old-fashioned customer service.

Chad Shane:
We want to make sure when it gets more complex and people don’t want to talk to a bot or something like that, that, hey, Canvas immediately has a human able to step in there and make the experience really good

Lorne Fultonberg:
Canvas has existed for 88 years and has expanded to 35 branches across Colorado. These days though, there’s a lot of pride in what hasn’t changed. The Canvas mission, values and commitment to community have stayed steady.

On this episode of the VOE podcast, I asked Chad about the toughest change he has had to face in his 15 years at the credit union, the skills he’s had to develop as CEO, and the parallels between this position and his professional pickleball career.

Thanks for stopping by, Chad.

Chad Shane:
Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Should I start by asking you about your pro pickleball career, or do you want to go to the Canvas stuff first?

Chad Shane:
Oh, let’s do the Canvas stuff first and then we’ll jump into Pickleball.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Perfect. You’ve held multiple positions at Canvas over the course of 13 or so years. So I imagine you were pretty familiar with things when you became CEO in 2024. Was there anything that caught you by surprise once you got that view from the top?

Chad Shane:
Yeah, the biggest thing that I noticed when I got there and having been internal and knowing the team really well, and there was a lot of great candidates that still work at Canvas that could have been CEO as well, was really trying to figure out how to prioritize your time. And there’s a lot coming at you, especially the first six months, because you’re drinking from the fire hose a little bit. So you’re trying to figure out where you want to have the most impact for your members and your employees. So it was difficult at first to figure out where to prioritize, and I was being pulled in a lot of different directions. It hasn’t slowed down a whole lot, but I definitely have done better at figuring out where to prioritize my time.

Lorne Fultonberg:

Yeah. What are some of the skills that you needed as a CEO that you didn’t need in your other roles?

Chad Shane:
A lot of the skills transfer over, honestly. If you’re on an executive team already in an organization where your former CEO was very transparent, you really learn a lot of different things, and you start to understand what it would look like to potentially be in that seat, which is good succession planning. I try and do the same thing in my job now. If I retire and walk away, I want those people to be ready.

But there are definitely some strengths and some ways that you can lean into the job. And for me, I’m a people person. I have a sports background. I know you asked me about pickleball. So it was a lot of teamwork and collaboration, and making sure that I was leaning into that. The one thing that I really knew going into the role that I wanted to focus on, that I could improve in was listening. You have to listen to your team and you have people at all levels that are really seeing member interactions and employee interactions at a much different level than you, and you need to hear about all of those to make really good decisions for the organization, and bringing that back to the executive team. So we get a really good viewpoint of what our members are thinking, what our employees are thinking on how we can better serve our members. So listening was probably the thing I really tried to improve on the most.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Well, I was listening to the credit union broadcast that you did about a year and a half ago when I was doing some research. And this is when you had just taken over, and you were talking about some of the instability that comes with any change in leadership really. And I was interested when you said something that you don’t feel like you have to come in and change a bunch of stuff immediately, being really sensitive to that change. So I wanted to ask, first of all, I guess, what are some of the things that you’ve changed since and how long did you wait to get the ball rolling on those things?

Chad Shane:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So to set that up a little bit, one of the great things about the credit union industry, it’s very collaborative, and there’s a lot of benefits to that. So I go to a lot of conferences, a lot of round tables, where I actually get to sit with other credit union CEOs, and we get to talk about what’s working well at Canvas? What can we improve on? What’s working well in their shops, and how can we take those ideas and make improvements where we are?

What I knew we did really well coming into this is we had a really good culture for a pretty big organization in December, so last month we hit $5 billion in assets as an organization. We have over 700 employees and 300,000 members, so that’s a lot of people to think about. And I really believe that we could continue to win with people and culture. To me, if we treat our employees really well and they’re happy to be there, they’re going to treat our members really well. And that shines through when you look at what the member experience looks like in some of the surveys that we do. When you look at competitors, banks, other credit unions, we all have checking accounts, we all have auto loans, but what makes Canvas different? And really it’s the people.

So first and foremost, I wanted to keep that. There still has to be some level of accountability though. If you want to protect that culture, you got to have everybody somewhat rowing in the same direction, not taking advantage of a really good culture. We really are leaning into connections and relationships. That could be with universities, that could be with our realtor partners for mortgages, different community organizations. When you build those, and you can kind of surround yourself in the community, that will allow us to be successful. We have 35 branches throughout Colorado, so a ton of convenience for our members, but there’s some overhead that comes with that as well, and you really want to have those there so they can trust us. When things aren’t going perfectly, they can walk in and talk to a real human being. And we wanted to do that, but you also have to stay competitive as well, and making sure that we have those relationships and the communities built around that at least gives us a shot to continue to grow our membership.

Lorne Fultonberg:
I think this is a good time to stop and ask, to make sure I understand the difference between a credit union and a bank. Can you explain that?

Chad Shane:
Absolutely. Both obviously great organizations. really the primary difference is we’re a not-for-profit financial cooperative, and banks have shareholders, and you have responsibility to your shareholders as a bank to continue to grow the bank, be profitable, and drive the share price.

We have the luxury of not sitting in board meetings and having to worry about profits. We can’t ignore it. You have to run financial institutions in a healthy format, and if regulators see that you’re not growing and staying somewhat profitable, then the board will have a problem with the executive team, and same with the regulators. So we still have to run comfortably, but we don’t have to worry about shareholders, which is really nice.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Yeah. When you’re talking to your board, have there ever been times when you feel like your mission has been at odds with profitability or just good business and how do you navigate those situations?

Chad Shane:
One of the things, going back to your earlier question that I also learned with the board and my executive team is being completely transparent, and a lot of CEOs and executives are scared to do that sometimes, but we’re really proud of what we do. We think we have a really good strategy, we think we can execute. And when we don’t, we’re not scared to tell the board that and tell them what’s not going well, but let them know, “Hey, here’s the plan on how we’re going to make improvements to that.” And when you have that type of relationship, your trust with the board is really high.

Lorne Fultonberg:
You were talking about the importance of being available for your members to walk in, have face-to-face interactions with tellers or whoever is there. The banking industry feels so digital right now. I mean, everybody has an app, and every app has a chatbot that you can get answers. What’s the balance between digitization and making things convenient from your phone and getting that personal touch?

Chad Shane:
Yeah, you could get a lot of opinions on this. I’ll tell you my opinion and kind of how we think, a lot of us at Canvas. You cannot ignore technology. It’s absolutely table stakes in our world. With the Amazons of the world and the people that have made that digital consumer experience really strong, they’re expecting that in all areas. So we have to try and deliver on that as well. But we do believe that people still want branches, and they want to see human beings, especially for those more complex transactions where they’re not just checking their balance or transferring a little bit of money. They want to be able to come in and talk to a human. So we’re going to leverage both. We’re going to make investments on both sides to make sure that we can meet our members where they want to be. And some of them never walk in a branch, and some of them prefer to go into a branch half the time. So we’ll make investments in both and try, and win in both of those areas.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Canvas seems pretty open to innovation and change in general. I mean, I saw on your website, the sentence on the about page that, “While the colors, name, and technology have changed over the years, our mission never will.” What is the toughest change that you feel like Canvas has had to make over the 13 or 14 years that you’ve been there?

Chad Shane:
Yeah, I came in right after the Great Recession, so I started in 2011, and that was really the last big economic event that we’ve had. We’ve been pretty lucky with a pretty stable economy for a long time, no huge recessions. COVID was obviously a little bit scary, organizations, when things are performing really well in your industry or in the economy can all do pretty good. It’s in those difficult times like COVID where there’s a lot of unknown, or the Great Recession, where things weren’t going well, that’s where teamwork and collaboration really shine.

And if your team is not operating in silos, they can be very honest with each other, very professional in how they interact, and you’re making decisions with several people rather than just one person in a vacuum, you’ll be much more successful. And COVID was a great example of that for us. We didn’t have all the information because things were moving so quickly to know that we are making the right decisions. PPP loans were a great example of that. It was, I think, very much needed to keep a lot of industries going, restaurants to still pay employees even though they were shut down.

But as we went into that, it was going to be backed by the government, but we weren’t 100% sure if that was going to happen or not. But we knew it was the right thing to do for our business members. So we got involved in that, and ended up funding a whole bunch of those loans. And it worked out, the government came through, everything was great, and we helped people through a really difficult time. So we felt good about that. And again, our team just came together to try and adapt very quickly. And I think if you have an organization that doesn’t have that collaboration, they struggled more during those times than we did.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Tell me a little bit more about the work that you do in the community, the partnerships that you have.

Chad Shane:
Yeah. We have an executive who’s in charge of community. So he has marketing, community, and business development. That’s how important it is to us, because we know, ultimately, we want to help communities. That’s why we’re here. We can serve people. We bring in deposits specifically to lend that money back out into the community, so people can afford life and buy cars to get the work, get their kids to school, homes to raise a family. So those community partnerships have been really important. You have to pick the right ones. We do a lot in education, whether it’s at the university, college level, or high schools, and even younger, because it’s something that everybody can get behind, everybody wants to see the young people that are going to grow America into the future, thrive.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Any other challenges that you see on the horizon for credit unions and community finance?

Chad Shane:
I think for all of us, we’re just trying to stay relevant, and there’s a lot of things coming our way. Technology is really important. It’s not cheap either. So you have to really do your due diligence and figure out who are the right technology partners. AI, it’s going to be really important to banking. And one of the ways that we keep our rates really good, so our deposit rates high and our loan rates lower is to run efficiently. And if AI allows us to run efficiently, we’re going to have to do that. It’s just like the table stakes for our technology versus branches that we were talking about earlier.

The way we’re looking at that though is we want to do it with a human touch. Again, we want to be able to set ourselves apart from other financial institutions. So we want to make sure when it gets more complex and people don’t want to talk to a bot or something like that, that, hey, Canvas immediately has a human able to step in there and make the experience really good, so they’re never frustrated when they’re doing business with us.

The other big thing that I think the whole industry’s trying to figure out is what’s going to happen with digital assets, crypto, Bitcoin, Stablecoin. That’s a very large industry, actually. There’s more assets in that asset class than the entire credit union industry now. So you’re taking kind of money out of the system, and putting in an area that looks like it’s going to take off. You have the Genius Act that’s been passed by Congress now, and we’re looking at ways that we can be involved in that as well. And if people want to have their assets there, how can we hold those safely for people? And I think you have all financial institutions out there right now trying to figure that out.

You had really big banks that were completely against it originally. So it’s really shifted. And so financial institutions need to be paying attention. They need to have a seat at the table, and start figuring that out. And we’re having conversations with a lot of people when it comes to that. And hopefully, that’ll allow us to be relevant in the long run.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Is it time to talk about pickleball?

Chad Shane:
Sure. Let’s do it.

Lorne Fultonberg:
You’re a big pickleball player, big sports guy in general.

Chad Shane:
Yes.

Lorne Fultonberg:
What about your position at Canvas makes you a good pickleball player and vice versa?

Chad Shane:
I think it’s the teamwork. Generally, you can play three different ways and you can play singles, which is more of a younger person’s game generally.

Lorne Fultonberg:
So your game.

Chad Shane:
Yeah, sure. Doubles or mixed doubles. So I focus on men’s doubles and mixed doubles generally. But the teamwork that my entire sports backs around and my leadership style at Canvas is bringing the team together, making sure that we’re collaborating, and leveraging strengths and weaknesses on that team, and then for their teams below that senior pro pickleball is no different. I am somewhat known for having quite a bit of power on the pickleball court, fast hands. I’m fast for an old guy, but I might be a little inconsistent at times. So sometimes, my partners are very consistent. They just never miss. I mean, they just have that patience. They can attack and put points away as well. So that can make for a really good team because if you have two gunslingers making too many errors, it’s hard to get wins when it comes to that.

So that’s where I would kind of draw some comparisons from business to pro pickleball or any kind of sport that people are playing out there.

Lorne Fultonberg:
I played a bunch of tennis growing up also, and I remember I had a coach that said, “The key to being good at doubles is picking a good partner.”

Chad Shane:
Yes. Yes.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Same thing picking a good team in your office.

Lorne Fultonberg:
The last thing we ask all of our guests here is, as a voice of experience on our podcast, what’s one other piece of advice that you would want our listeners to know?

Chad Shane:
“Be a lifelong learner. When you come into a position, be curious, learn more.” When I first came into the credit union industry 23 years ago, I dove into their financials. I picked somebody that could really teach me how those worked initially and I just got curious, and I dug in. And even today I listen to a lot of podcasts when I’m driving on economics, banking, digital assets, whatever it might be. And nobody’s perfect. We can all get smarter, we can all get better. So lean into your current position if you got a career going already, but make sure that you’re trying to learn and get better. And normally, that’ll work out well for you in the long run.

Lorne Fultonberg:
That’s Chad Shane, the CEO of Canvas Credit Union, and a pretty dynamite pickleball player. Thanks so much, Chad.

Chad Shane:
Thank you so much for having me.

Lorne Fultonberg:
As Canvas works to balance tech and people, it’s turning to an investment firm called Black Dragon Capital, which is focused on making the most of the digitization of financial services. We have the details of their partnership on our show notes at daniels.du.edu/voe-podcast.

The VOE podcast is an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the Daniels College of Business. Iruka Nwosu and Patrick Orr are our sound engineers. Joshua Muetzel wrote our theme. I’m Lorne Fultonberg. We’ll see you next time.

Show Notes

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DANIELS COLLEGE OF BUSINESS AT UNIVERSITY OF DENVER