Most teams work this market from a static list and an educated guess. CUSignals puts all ~4,300 U.S. credit unions in one place and updates daily. It shows three things: who is running short of funding, who is likely to merge into another credit union, and which platforms each one runs today. The first two are predictions. We tested both against what credit unions actually did next, and both held up. The third is a record of what is installed, not a prediction. We also tested a buying-intent score. It failed, so we pulled it, and we show that result below.
Two tested scores, one record
If you read credit unions from the outside, as a funding desk, acquirer, advisor or vendor, this is built for you. (A credit union studying its own numbers already has a core system for that.) Two of the three products below are tested predictions. The third is a record of what each credit union runs. Each card tells you which it is.
Deposit brokers · FHLB · whole-loan desks
“Who is running short of funding, and who has cash to put to work?”
Acquiring credit unions · advisors · investment banks
“Which credit unions are likely to merge into another, and what is each one worth to an acquirer?”
Fintech and CUSO vendors · Sales and RevOps leadership
“Which credit unions use my competitor, since when, and when is the contract up?”
How it works
Anyone can download the filings. What you pay for is what happens next: the cleanup, a daily news layer that keeps the data current between filings, and the evidence shown on every row. When someone asks why an account is on your list, you can answer on the call.
Collect
We gather data from several sources and match each record to the right credit union. We remove duplicates and map every line item to one checked set of account codes. The result is one clean dataset covering every credit union, rebuilt each time new filings arrive. You never have to reconcile two lists that disagree about the same institution.
Derive
We work out capital, funding, growth and credit-quality ratios, and track how each moved over the last quarter and the last year. Then we rank each credit union against its peer group and asset tier. Size alone tells you very little. Rank against peers is what makes an account worth a call.
Score
Each score is built from documented financial measures with published weights. It is not a black box. Every score breaks down into the few factors that built it, so the answer to “why is this account on my list?” is on your screen, not in somebody's notebook.
Act
Every day we add news from industry channels: leadership changes, vendor announcements, mergers and regulatory actions. Each item is dated and tied to one credit union. Scores are rebuilt each filing cycle, and the movers view shows what is new since last time: whose merger risk moved up a band, whose funding just turned stressed, and who switched from buying loans to selling them. That list is where next week's calls come from.
Tested, not claimed
Anyone can claim a score predicts something, so ask how it was checked. Each score below was taken as it stood at the time, then compared with what those credit unions actually did next.
How to read these numbers: picture pairs of credit unions, one that went on to merge or borrow and one that did not. Each figure is how often the score ranked the first one higher. 50 in 100 is a coin flip. 100 in 100 is perfect. Roughly 70 and up is a list worth working. Below about 60, you are better off sorting by asset size. (Statisticians call this measure AUC and write it from 0.50 to 1.00.)
Work the top of this list and you are about five times more likely to find a credit union that later merged under pressure than if you picked at random.
Only mergers a regulator put down to the credit union's own condition count here, not two healthy credit unions choosing to combine. Given one credit union that merged that way and one that did not, the score ranked the merging one higher 86 times out of 100. The test used a later period than the one the score was built on, so the score never saw the answers. The top 10% of scores caught 55% of these mergers, 5.5 times what a random list of the same length would catch.
Where it stops: No credit union above $500M in assets merged under pressure during the test period, so above that size the score is untested. It is a tool for smaller credit unions.
The credit unions this flags as short on funding are the ones that went on to borrow. It is the strongest signal on the site, and it beat every simpler way of building the same list.
Given one credit union whose borrowing rose over the next one or two quarters and one whose did not, the stress score ranked the borrower higher 76 to 83 times out of 100, across three different starting quarters. It beat simpler rankings (recent borrowing growth, loan-to-share ratio and asset size) in all 18 combinations tested. Flagged credit unions borrowed at two to three times the overall rate.
Where it stops: The test could only see borrowing, because the filings do not report brokered deposits separately. A credit union that filled the gap with brokered deposits counts as a miss, so the measured hit rate is a floor.
All of this describes a past period. It is evidence that the ranking worked before, not a promise about any single credit union next quarter. The disclosures set out the limits on reading these figures.
Questions
The answers an evaluator needs before a first conversation, stated plainly.
Read the full FAQ — buying and billing, day-to-day use, security and compliance.
You pay for how many credit unions you can see and export, not for seats or searches. The data updates daily.
