Member Spotlight: Telhio Credit Union

Member Spotlight by [Telhio Credit Union]

Provide us with a brief summary of your business’ services

Telhio Credit Union is a member-owned, not-for-profit financial cooperative that has served central and southwest Ohio since 1934. We offer full-service personal and business banking solutions, as well as insurance, and wealth management.

As the top SBA lender among Ohio credit unions, we also have a robust business banking division, built for Ohio’s small and mid-sized companies. For business members, that means business checking and savings, Small Business Administration (SBA) 7(a) and 504 loans, commercial mortgages, equipment loans, lines of credit, business credit cards, and treasury management solutions. We also offer a free Workplace Banking service for business owners, helping them extend valuable financial benefits to their employees while strengthening financial wellness across their workforce.

We’re proud to serve more than 68,000 members through our 13 branches. Membership is open to anyone who lives, works, worships, or attends school in central or southwest Ohio. We take your banking personally: decisions get made here, by people who live in the same communities our members do.

Describe your company in three words

Local
Personal
Member-Owned

Share a recent project, client success, or example of your work in action.

This fall, we launched ESSENTIALS, our treasury management platform for business members. It came directly out of listening to business owners tell us where their time was going: reconciling accounts, chasing payments, worrying about fraud exposure. All necessary, none of it the work they started their business to do. ESSENTIALS bundles e-statements, bill pay, ACH origination, positive pay, mobile deposit, and multi-user credentials with dual authentication into one flat-rate package that pairs with a business checking account. The point isn’t the feature list. It’s that an owner gets hours back and gets real fraud protection at a price a growing company can plan around. Also, because the platform scales as the business does, our members aren’t forced into a disruptive system change down the road. That’s the thread in everything we build: automate the routine, and keep a real person on the other end of the phone for everything else.

How do you stay engaged with trends that you see in your industry?

Mostly by staying close to our members. Our commercial relationship managers and branch teams are in conversations with Ohio business owners every day, and those conversations surface shifts in the market long before the data does. We pair that with the national picture, including SBA lending activity, credit union industry research, and the regulatory and fraud-prevention landscape, as well as our involvement in the chambers and business organizations where our members already gather.

If you had to start over from scratch, what’s the first thing you’d do differently?

We’d tell our story sooner. For much of our 90 plus years, we let the work speak for itself, which is a very Midwestern instinct and not a bad one. But it meant a lot of people who would have been better served by a credit union never knew we were an option. This is especially true on the business side, where owners assume a credit union can’t handle commercial lending or treasury management at the scale they need. We can, and we have for years.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received as a business owner?

“Decide who you’re for, and then actually be that.” No financial institution can be everything to everyone, and trying to be is how you lose the thing that made you worth joining in the first place. We’re for the people and businesses of Ohio. That focus is what lets us say yes to a local company a larger institution might pass over, because we know the neighborhood it’s operating in.

What makes a successful partnership at your company?

The partnerships that work best are the ones with regular and proactive communication with our members. Those connections help us identify opportunities early. Whether it’s the slow quarter, the equipment that’s about to fail, the expansion they’re nervous about, we respond with a straight answer instead of a product pitch. That’s possible because our members are also our owners. We’re not answering to outside shareholders, so their success is the only return we’re measuring. A good partnership with Telhio should feel less like a vendor relationship and more like having a partner who picks up the phone when you call.

What makes Columbus such a great place to do business?

Scale and accessibility at the same time, which is a rare combination. Columbus is big enough to support major employers, a deep talent pipeline, and a genuinely diverse economy — insurance, healthcare, logistics, retail, tech — so no single downturn takes the whole city with it. But it’s still a place where you can get a meeting. People here show up for each other’s openings and answer each other’s calls, and that short distance between people is worth a lot to a growing company.

What do you want people to remember about your business five years from now?

That we were the ones who said yes. We want a business owner to point to the loan that let them buy the building, hire the crew, or open the second location, remembering that it came from our credit union, not a call center or online platform. Ninety years in, that’s still the measure.

Social Media:
X: https://x.com/@telhiocu
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TelhioCU
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/telhio-credit-union/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/telhiocu/
Website: http://www.telhio.org/