Program Overhaul: How Altura's Michael Kormos is revamping the credit union's investment program from the inside out.

While the largest banks all now have investment programs in place, there still are many opportunities for aspiring program managers in the nation's community banks and credit unions. Michael Kormos, now vice president and program manager at Altura Credit Union, is a veteran of small bank brokerage who walked into a perfect fixer-upper situation. Altura's brokerage program was outsourced to third-party marketer Financial Network for a few years before the credit union decided to bring it in-house. It switched to CUSO Financial Services for about a year before Kormos joined in November 2004 to helm the program.

"There was a lot of turnover because the previous program used non- Altura employees, and results were very inconsistent," Kormos explains. "Altura management decided that full-time advisers with a full-time manager would remedy that, so they hired me." In short, he had carte blanche to create a program from the ground up using the skills he had acquired on the bank side.

Taking such a program in-house is a challenge for an institution of Altura's size, Kormos says. "I was concerned that a $200 million credit union with 11 branches wouldn't be large enough to support a program manager," he says. "I was previously at California Bank and Trust, which is a $7.5 billion institution with 91 branches, so I had some trepidation." However, his conversations with management during the interview process convinced Kormos that the operation was large enough to support both a program manager and, unusually for a credit union, platform reps.

His experiences on the bank side also persuaded him that the more client-oriented life of a credit union was for him. Since credit unions are nonprofits, turf wars between bankers and brokers don't really occur, at least not to the same degree, he says. "Credit unions are very employee-friendly environments, too, and they don't reorganize as often as banks, which upsets the sales culture."

Kormos says that when he worked at Washington Mutual for five years prior to joining California Bank and Trust, the bank made a new acquisition every year, which invariably threw the sales process on its head as the new bank was assimilated into its new parent.

"Referral sources dry up because people are worried about their jobs," he says. "It doesn't happen here. There are occasional mergers, but they're friendly offers, and they're not very common." Nonetheless credit unions' investment programs are no cakewalk. Kormos says that business was "all over the place" under Financial Network-its reps, who weren't dual employees of Altura, but bolt-ons, would have a good month and then they'd leave. The relationships they had built would fall fallow.

"There was no sense of ownership because they weren't employees of the credit union," he says. "They didn't fit into the culture. Banks are very team-oriented, and that's heightened in a credit union. You have to put customer service on an equal par with sales, and that's hard to do when you're on commission."

Now, Kormos and his team of four investment consultants …