The screen in front of you

Your seat has its own screen, and it is organised the same way for all four officers. Before anything else, it is worth knowing which part is which, because the names come up constantly in discussion.

• Your decisions. The sliders and toggles you control this quarter. Nothing you set here takes effect until the quarter is processed, so you can change your mind as often as you like while the round is open.
• Your intelligence panels. The information only your seat can see. This is the material you are expected to bring to the conversation, because the other three cannot look at it themselves.
• The financial statements. The balance sheet and income statement for the institution as a whole. Everyone sees these, and they are the common ground when the four of you disagree.
• The scores. How an examiner would grade you, and how you compare with real credit unions of the same size. These update after each quarter is processed.

If you would rather see this than read about it, the tutorial walks through one quarter with no account and nothing at stake. It is the fastest way to get the shape of the screen into your head.

The institution

Lakeside Community Credit Union holds about $743 million in assets. It is not a real credit union, but every number it starts with is: the opening balance sheet is built from what credit unions of this size actually reported to the NCUA.

A balance sheet is a list of what the institution owns and what it owes, on one particular day. For a credit union the shape of it is simple, and worth holding in your head, because every decision any of you make moves one of these four things:

• Members deposit money with you. Checking, savings, money market, certificates. This is not the institution’s money. It is owed back to the member, and you pay interest for holding it.
• You lend most of it out. Cars, homes, personal loans. The interest members pay on those loans is where most of your income comes from, which is why lending volume matters so much to the institution’s ability to cover its own costs.
• What you have not lent sits in investments — mostly bonds. These earn less than loans do, but you can turn them back into cash sooner, which matters when members want their deposits back.
• If you want to lend more than members have deposited, you borrow the difference, mainly from the Federal Home Loan Bank. That borrowing costs more than deposits do, so the more of your lending it funds, the more expensive your growth becomes.

What is left after you subtract everything you owe from everything you own is your net worth — the cushion. Regulators watch it more closely than anything else, because it is what absorbs losses before members are exposed to them.

Why the score is not profit

You already know the structural answer: nobody owns a credit union except its members, so there are no shareholders waiting on a return. What that changes in practice is what you are optimising for.

Earnings still matter a great deal. An institution that loses money is eroding the cushion that protects its members, and it cannot invest in anything — branches, technology, staff — without first covering its own costs. But earnings are the means here rather than the objective. A quarter that makes unusually good money by taking on risk the institution cannot carry is not a good quarter, and the exercise is built so that shows up before the end rather than after it.

What each seat controls

Four officers, one balance sheet. Each seat has its own controls and its own information, and no seat can see everything. That is deliberate. It is also the reason the conversation between the four of you matters more than any single decision one of you makes.

Where the seats collide

The four seats are not four separate jobs. They are four roles that affect the same balance sheet, and most quarters each one can pull that balance sheet in a different direction if the team is not careful. These are the arguments that come up. None of them are settled by one seat being right.

Deposit pricing. The CMO watches members move their money elsewhere when deposit rates fall behind the market, and the institution cannot operate without members and the deposits they bring. The fix is to pay more for deposits. But the CFO has to watch the cost of funds, and the CFO is measured on margin, because margin is what covers the net cost of running the institution. Nobody is wrong. Somebody has to decide how to balance growth against efficiency this quarter.

Funding the loan book. The CLO can write more loans than the deposit book covers, and writing more is not greed — lending is where the income comes from. But every loan has to be funded by something, and when deposits do not cover it the difference is borrowed at a higher cost. Arranging that is the CFO’s problem and it lands in the CEO’s capital position. A lending plan that nobody has funded will either shrink when it meets reality, or be paid for with borrowing the team never discussed.

The capital target. The CEO decides how much net worth to hold in reserve. Holding more is the safer choice and no examiner will ever fault you for it. It also means that money is sitting still rather than being lent or invested, which quietly limits what the other three can do. That constraint often goes unsaid, which is how a team ends up arguing about lending volume when what they actually disagree about is capital.

Growth that arrives later. The CMO spends this quarter on members who will not matter financially for several quarters. The CFO pays for that spending now, in a quarter that is scored now. Whether it reads as investment or as waste depends on how far ahead the team is willing to look, and that is a conversation worth having in round one rather than round five.

Teams that talk before they submit tend to notice these. Teams that work in parallel usually discover them a round later, in the results.

The loop

Each round is one quarter of the institution’s life, and every round runs the same way:

• Read the position. What the economy is doing this quarter, and where last quarter left you.
• Decide, in your own seat. Set your levers and save. Nothing is final until the quarter is processed.
• Talk to the other three. This is the part teams skip when they are short of time, and the part they later wish they had kept.
• The CEO processes the quarter. All four sets of decisions go into the engine together, which is why one seat changing its mind late affects what everyone else gets.
• Read what happened — the statements, the scores, and the summary that points at what is worth a closer look.
• Debrief, then the next round opens.

Expect about 75 minutes a round: roughly 30 to 45 minutes of decisions and discussion, then a half-hour debrief.

How you are scored

Your Apex Score combines two things, each of which a real board would recognise.

The regulatory half is CAMEL, the five components a credit union examiner grades: Capital — is the cushion thick enough; Asset quality — is the lending sound; Management — is the institution run efficiently and consistently; Earnings — does it make enough to sustain itself; and Liquidity — can it reach cash when it needs to. If capital falls far enough, a hard floor caps your score no matter how well everything else is going. That is also how it works outside the exercise: below certain capital levels a regulator restricts what an institution is allowed to do, whatever the rest of its performance looks like.

The peer half compares you with what credit unions of the same size actually reported in the same quarters. It is not a target somebody invented. It is what the filings say happened.

There is no single right answer, and you should not expect to find one. Reasonable teams approach the same scenario differently and finish within a few points of each other by quite different routes.

Your first round

Your first round will feel like you have either too much information or not enough. That is not an oversight. As you play, you will learn how to ask your teammates for the information that helps you make your decisions, and you will learn which of the things in front of you are genuinely valuable and which are noise.

Two habits help more than anything else. Ask the other three what they are seeing. Their panels hold information yours does not, and asking is the intended mechanic rather than a workaround — the exercise is built on the assumption that you will. And do not change everything at once. If six levers move together, nobody learns which one did the work, and the next quarter is harder to reason about than this one was.

Next: how to play well →

Almost nothing happens in the quarter you decide it

This is the single most common surprise. A team changes a lever, sees very little, changes it back, and concludes the lever does not work. It usually did — the effect had not arrived yet.

What cannot be undone

Loans you have written. Every quarter's lending stays on the books and ages out slowly. A loose quarter generates delinquency for years, and tightening afterwards does not remove it — it only stops adding to it.

Duration you have bought. Extending is fast and shortening is slow, by design. A book that went long in a falling-rate quarter cannot be unwound quickly when rates turn.

Unrealised losses. AOCI sits in equity, invisible to earnings, until you sell. Selling does not create the loss — it was already there — but it does make it real, immediately, on the income statement.

Members who left. Attrition is not reversed by spending more next quarter. Acquisition and retention are different mechanisms.

What the market will not let you do

Hold every deposit in a rising cycle. Members move money when certificates pay materially more than the account it is sitting in. Retention is not the achievable outcome; recapture is. Judge yourself on how much stayed with you, not on how much never moved.

Price above market and keep volume. Borrowers shop. Pricing well above market shrinks your pipeline, and the borrowers who still accept are the ones with fewer options — so the credit quality of what you write gets worse as well as the volume getting smaller.

Buy members with marketing alone. Marketing amplifies a pricing advantage. Where you have none, spending more achieves very little.

Sell a loan pool whenever you want. Buyers appear when they want a pool, and appetite thins as deposit competition rises. The quarter you most need to raise cash is usually the quarter nobody is bidding.

Decisions that cost more the longer you wait

Terming out wholesale funding. An advance holds the rate it was drawn at until it matures. In a rising cycle, terming out early saves roughly a million dollars over six quarters; terming out late costs more than staying overnight would have. This is the sharpest single decision in the simulation and the easiest to miss.

Shortening the investment book. The glide is asymmetric on purpose. Deciding to shorten after the marks have moved means paying for a repositioning you could have had cheaply.

Tightening credit. Because policy applies only to new lending, tightening late protects only the small slice you write from that point on.

How you are scored

Apex is a standing, not a running total. It is where you sit right now. A strong quarter does not bank anything, and a weak one is not permanent.

Seventy per cent is regulatory — your CAMEL composite, plus hard floors if capital falls into prompt corrective action territory. Thirty per cent is peer: how you compare to real credit unions of similar size over the same historical period.

The peer half can move without you doing anything. If the peer group's delinquency worsens faster than yours, your percentile improves while your absolute number gets worse. Both readings are true and they answer different questions.

The institution you inherit is below peer on cost. Operating expense runs above the peer median from the first quarter. Reaching median takes genuine improvement, not merely competence.

Where the roles collide

Each seat sees intelligence the others do not, and the interesting decisions are the ones where two roles are pulling in opposite directions.