Middletown credit union marks anniversary, expansion


MIDUSA CREDIT UNION INC.

What: Member-owned, nonprofit financial cooperative

Main office: 3600 Towne Blvd., Middletown

Other branches: Kettering, Liberty Twp., Middletown, Trenton and Vandalia

Phone: 513-420-8640

Chief Executive Officer: Jim Miles

Website: www.midusacu.org

Assets: $195 million

In 1934, a group of 50 Armco Steel employees came together to form a credit union, “looking to help each other obtain low-interest loans in times of sickness, death, or emergency.”

At the time, the credit union was started as the Armco Employees Credit Union. Now the same nonprofit financial cooperative that traces its roots to the original group of Armco employees, the predecessor to Butler County steelmaker AK Steel, is named MidUSA Credit Union Inc.

MidUSA, which in 2014 celebrates the 80th anniversary of its founding, represents today about 16,000 members.

“Eighty years of doing anything is an incredible milestone and then for us, when you think about how we have helped families and individuals for 80 years with just life’s journey from buying cars, to buying homes, to financing college education… it’s really something special,” said Jim Miles, president and chief executive officer of MidUSA. Miles has been CEO for five years, and has worked at the credit union for 15 years.

Over the decades, the original 50-member Armco group continued to add members, enlist organizations and grow in size, according to MidUSA. In the late 1990s, the credit union obtained a “Community Group Affiliation” from the state of Ohio. This allowed the credit union to serve anyone who lives, works, worships, or attends school in Butler, Warren or Montgomery Counties.

The name changed in 1994 to MidFirst Credit Union Inc. “to better represent the diversity in the membership.” It changed again in 2010 to MidUSA Credit Union.

At the end of 2013, Miles said MidUSA expanded its field of membership to four counties, adding Miami County.

After opening a branch office in Vandalia in recent years, “what we found was that a lot of people in Miami County actually work in northern Montgomery County and actually work in Vandalia. So there were a lot of membership opportunities that were becoming available in Miami County,” Miles said.

There are “no plans for branches in the immediate future, but we certainly have other thoughts about expansion in Miami County.”

MidUSA has approximately $195 million in assets and operates six branches in Middletown, Kettering, Trenton, Liberty Twp., and Vandalia.

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