Security in retirement is both an appealing enticement for senior executives and a powerful tool for credit unions looking to retain, recruit, and reward top talent. By establishing a Supplemental Executive Retirement Plan (SERP) for selected executives, D. Hilton Associates can assist your organization in establishing a strong senior management team. This non-qualified deferred compensation agreement can provide retirement income to select credit union executives in return for the attainment of agreed-upon objectives, such as a specified number of years of service until retirement.

What are the advantages of using a SERP?

As margins continue to shrink and operating expenses increase, credit unions are faced with the growing challenge of funding competitive employee benefits that ensure strong retention and employee satisfaction. Over the last ten years, employee benefit expenses have grown an average of 6% each year. Benefits prefunding allows credit unions to direct a portion of their excess liquidity into investments to cover certain benefit expenses. Benefits prefunding is permissible by the NCUA and can provide the needed financial support for your employee benefits.

D. Hilton can examine your credit union’s current benefit expenses and establish a benefits prefunding investment strategy that will support robust benefits packages for your credit union’s most important resource: the employees. D. Hilton Associate’s benefits prefunding process includes:

For more than 20 years, D. Hilton Associates has provided the credit union industry with research and data on compensation and succession planning trends through its SERP Survey. The largest study of its kind in the credit union industry, the SERP Survey collects data from over 900 credit unions and has a response rate of over 50%. By examining what peer organizations are doing to ensure employee retention through SERPs, credit unions can implement competitive compensation and retirement packages to retain their executive team.