A credit union's service is tested in renewal season, at two in the morning and on the day the power fails.
Members judge a credit union on the few days when they cannot wait: the week a mortgage renews, the night a stranger empties an account, the morning the storm takes the power.
Contact-centre capacity for peak demand / Service in two languages / Round-the-clock fraud operations / Continuity when systems fail / Rural branch network design
I plan a credit union's branches, telephones and fraud desk around the days members cannot wait, and I put the cost of that readiness in front of the board.
I am chief operating officer of Brayloche Credit Union, a member-owned credit union headquartered in Moncton, New Brunswick. We hold C$2.2 billion of assets and serve about 96,000 members through 21 branches and a member contact centre; 37% of our members choose to be served in French. I lead 352 colleagues across the branches, the contact centre, card and payment operations, fraud operations, lending fulfilment and business continuity, with an operating budget of C$41 million. Credit decisions, pricing and investment of our funds sit with other executives.
I grew up in Rivière-du-Loup and came to Moncton in June 1997 to answer telephones in two languages for a card issuer. My first lesson was that the average wait on the wallboard said nothing about the farmer whose card had been declined while his order was being loaded. Since then I have planned contact-centre schedules, run mortgage servicing in Montréal, managed payment disputes and overnight fraud monitoring for a merchant processor near Toronto, and finished turning two merged credit unions into one service. Each step asked the same question at a larger scale: who is waiting, for how long, and why?
Three decisions on this site show how I answer it. We hired bilingual advisers in the province's northeast rather than send French-speaking renewal callers to an English-first overflow vendor. We brought overnight fraud monitoring in-house after a long weekend of losses. And during a storm outage we let branches pay out limited cash without their systems. Each choice cost money or accepted a risk that a colleague argued against, and I set out both sides.
French callers stopped waiting longer
In spring 2023 French-language callers waited 9.5 minutes on average against 3.8 in English. Eleven home-based bilingual advisers and renewal calls booked 120 days ahead brought the French wait to 4.1 minutes by the fourth quarter, at C$910,000 a year.
Someone answers a fraud alert at night
A seven-person overnight desk, approved after a February 2022 weekend cost members C$287,000, helped reduce annual fraud losses from C$1.38 million in 2021 to C$590,000 in 2025. It also produced complaints about calls at two in the morning.
Cash during a four-day outage
With nine branches cut off in September 2022, staff paid out C$538,000 in 1,640 offline withdrawals capped at C$400 a day. Reconciliation left C$1,850 unrecovered, a loss I reported alongside the decision that created it.
Current focus
I am rewriting our continuity procedures so that the limits we improvised in 2022 are approved by the board in advance, rehearsed twice a year and available in both languages at every branch.
Conversations I welcome
I would welcome a first independent board appointment outside New Brunswick's credit unions, with about twenty-two days a year available, subject to my board's consent and a review of our suppliers and members.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
In the boardroom
Centre d'alphabétisation PeltrevauxVolunteer director; finance committee member · 2019–present
Formation
Bachelor of business administrationCollège universitaire Vallandière · 1997
When Oliver wanted home-based advisers in the northeast, I told him I did not know how to supervise them. He did not overrule me; he gave me six weeks and the budget to find out, and he stood beside me when the first schedule went wrong.
Josée DoucenvalDirector, member contact centre, Brayloche Credit UnionThe full record ↗
Contact
I would welcome a first independent board appointment outside New Brunswick's credit unions, with about twenty-two days a year available, subject to my board's consent and a review of our suppliers and members.
