When coaching meets crisis: How two credit unions are putting FiCEP to work
Three days before Thanksgiving, with a Kansas cold front moving in, Rafael Mancera-Cuellar drove to an apartment showing with a Meritrust Credit Union member who was living in a hotel and running out of money. Mancera-Cuellar, a dedicated financial well-being specialist, sat with her through the lease signing. He called utility companies alongside her. He helped her secure a $1,000 loan to cover the deposits and first utility payments she needed to move in. Three months later, she was still in the apartment, her budget was working, and she and Mancera-Cuellar were still meeting.
That kind of response is what the Financial Counseling Certification Program (FiCEP) training can make possible. The program equips coaches within credit unions to recognize genuine crisis, provide short-term support, and then guide members into the longer coaching relationship that builds lasting skills.
A program that travels
At Meritrust, in Kansas and Colorado, and Altra Federal Credit Union, headquartered in Wisconsin, FiCEP is quietly reshaping how the organizations see themselves.
“It makes every individual conversation just a little bit more personable,” said Jeri Hintz, Meritrust’s financial well-being specialist II, who recounted Mancera-Cuellar’s efforts. “You can dive a little bit deeper with your peers, with our members. It’s not just a transaction.”
The two credit unions have built very different operations around the same certification, but both describe the same payoff: deeper member relationships, stronger referral pipelines, and a cultural shift toward non-judgmental, whole-person service.
Altra: a curated cohort model
Altra, headquartered in the La Crosse–Onalaska area of Wisconsin, serves roughly 158,000 members with more than $3 billion in assets across branches in six states. It launched its financial wellness initiative with FiCEP in 2022.
Altra runs training cohorts of six or seven employees twice a year. “We really wanted our staff to be certified, to provide them more support and resources to help our members,” said Lori Horstman, vice president of member experience and advocacy. Participants get a six-month runway, protected study time each week, a private Teams channel for peer support, and a dedicated scheduler who books their proctored exam at a local library.
The approach has produced 38 certified coaches, with a waiting list of employees asking to be next.
Meritrust: a broader foundation
Meritrust, headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado (following its August 2025 merger with Premier Members Credit Union), serves more than 200,000 members and holds more than $4 billion in assets across 33 branches in Kansas and Colorado. Its approach is deliberately broader.
“We want everyone to have at least some kind of a knowledge base of helping these individuals,” Hintz said. Since March 2024, Meritrust has certified just under 125 employees, with more than 30 currently in progress. All branch managers and assistant managers are certified; member consultants and tellers follow. Frontline staff act as triage, using conversation cues to spot signals, words like budget, credit, or struggle, before escalating to the dedicated financial well-being department.
When the program changes the institution
Certification has reshaped how Altra cares for its own people, too. When leaders began the initiative, they started with employees and discovered their own staff faced many of the same hardships the program was designed to address. That realization produced an Employee Acts of Kindness fund, later extended to members. On the day she spoke with America’s Credit Unions for this blog post, Horstman had approved one such request earlier that morning: $400 for a recently widowed man in Tyler, Texas, who had believed a household bill was being paid, found out it wasn’t, and could not afford groceries. A Tyler branch employee had spotted the situation and submitted the request on his behalf.
“Bad things happen to good people,” Horstman said. “It’s definitely made us a little bit more empathetic.”
Altra took another step this year by paying coaches an incentive for every session completed. “They find they do more work with those coaching sessions than sometimes they really do on a loan,” Horstman said, a recognition that sessions can take an hour or more and that the institution values the time.
The measurement question
Both credit unions use financial health assessments from the Financial Health Network to benchmark where members stand on spending, saving, borrowing, and planning. Altra pairs it with a proprietary assessment and an action plan that asks members to commit to one step before each follow-up. Meritrust is rebuilding its program into a structured multi-session framework and layering the FinHealth scores directly into sessions so members can see their own progress.
Both are wrestling with what Horstman called “probably the hardest part” of financial coaching: measurement. Altra tracks credit score migration, emergency savings thresholds of $400 and $1,000, and session volume on a dashboard. Horstman said coached members have a credit score better than the national average.
A foundation, not a finish line
What stands out in both conversations is that FiCEP is treated as a starting point, a shared vocabulary that makes harder conversations possible, not a finish line.
“You don’t have to have fancy credentials to get the help,” Hintz said of the free service, which Meritrust extends to non-members in the communities it serves. “These institutions are there for you. So why not utilize it?”
Horstman sees a longer arc. Members who receive coaching during the hard times, she said, remember who helped them when the good times return. “They’re becoming a more loyal member to us than they were previously.”
See how other credit unions have put FiCEP to work for their members through financial literacy events and individual support and counseling.
Ready to deepen your credit union's financial wellness impact for your members? Start by getting your team FiCEP-certified.
