Professional Internship · Strategic Benchmarking
State Employees' Credit Union
Benchmarked SECU's offerings against regional credit-union competitors across multiple product, lending, and service dimensions.
The case in brief
Key insight
Most of the analytical work was in normalization: without aligning terms first, published figures create differences that are not real ones.
- The challenge
- SECU needed a clear read on where its offerings stood against regional credit-union competitors, across products and terms that are rarely described the same way twice.
- My role
- Intern analyst — I collected and validated the data, built the comparison, and presented the findings.
- Approach
- Benchmarked SECU against Truliant and Allegacy across nine categories, from membership eligibility through first-time homebuyer mortgage products, normalizing terms so the comparison held up.
- Recommendation
- A category-by-category comparison reduced to the differences that actually mattered for members, rather than the full data set.
- Outcome
- Presented competitive findings to senior executives at SECU headquarters in Raleigh.
- What I took from it
- A dense comparison is only useful once someone can act on it. Making it legible in the room was as much of the job as building it.
- Competitive Benchmarking
- Data Validation
- Comparative Analysis
- Executive Communication
- 01
Collect
Gather published product, rate, and service data.
- 02
Validate
Confirm figures against primary sources.
- 03
Normalize
Align terms so comparisons are like-for-like.
- 04
Compare
Assess each institution category by category.
- 05
Synthesize
Reduce the comparison to the differences that matter.
The final stage was presentation: making a dense comparison legible for decision-makers in the room.
Competitive benchmarking
SECU
State Employees' Credit Union — where Erica interned. A statewide North Carolina footprint with a membership base rooted in state employees and their families.
Each institution was assessed across the same categories, with published figures normalized so the comparison held up under scrutiny.
- Membership eligibility
- Minimum opening balances
- Checking accounts
- Savings accounts
- Certificates of deposit
- Personal loans
- Auto loans
- Credit cards
- First-time homebuyer mortgage products
Presented
Presented competitive findings to senior executives at SECU headquarters in Raleigh.
Skills & Functions
Primary Function
Strategic Benchmarking & Comparative Analysis
Core Skills Demonstrated
- Competitive Research
- Data Validation
- Comparative Analysis
- Synthesis
- Executive Communication
Tools & Methods Applied
- Excel Comparative Matrix
- Product & Rate Data Collection
- Normalization Framework
- Executive Presentation