Dana Caragine – Princeton Federal Credit Union President & CEO

How did the Princeton Federal Credit Union start?

Dana Caragine: So let’s get into the way back machine. The year is 1972. It’s leisure suits, it’s voluminous hair. And a group of seven administrators and professors at Princeton got together and said, if you’re not a white man, it’s really hard to get credit in Princeton. And so they pulled together and they got a federal credit union charter that established us as a not-for-profit financial services provider. Adding some color to those seven helps to illustrate the picture. Two of them were African American gentlemen from here in town. One was a Tuskegee Airman. A third was a woman named Mary Vanderpool Cochran, who signed this charter two years before she was allowed to get her own credit card. There’s an element of fearlessness in this. We were diverse before diverse was cool. 53 years later, here we are as Princeton Federal Credit Union. Originally we served the employees, students, graduates, postdocs, alumni of Princeton. Today we serve the whole community, Mercer County through to Trenton and into Pennsylvania.

Where are you guys physically located now?

Dana Caragine: Our headquarters branch with the drive through is at 7 74 Alexander Road, where we’re happily settled after years spent in the Armory in New South and at Carnegie Center. Many have fond memories of this. We have fee free ATMs where you’d expect us to have them. One in Frist, another one at the Plasma Physics Lab. But that said, our members are everywhere. They live and work in central New Jersey and beyond. They’re in Trenton, they’re in Bucks County, Montgomery, they also explode like popcorn off the campus. And so someone who joins us at 18 to 22, 25, frequently is building a career elsewhere in America or elsewhere in the world. And so we have members from just about everywhere can imagine. There is longevity of a relationship here, so if you ever join us, you’re invited to be a member for life, regardless of where life takes you.

Can you explain what is a credit union?

Dana Caragine: I think of a credit union as banking with a heart. It’s member owned. We are not for profit. It’s a cooperative of people who together offer higher savings rates and lower loan rates, and so everyone who banks with us is also an owner. Our earnings every year are return to members in the form of better rates, lower fees services that are designed to serve and invest here, and not to extract from people.

So it sounds like a credit union and a bank are somewhat different animals really then. Right?

Dana Caragine: I love that analogy. I think of it even beyond different zoos. Credit unions are, I think, the best kept secret in personal finance. A lot of the people that come to realize this are some of the most financially sophisticated and progressive people in the room. We have thousands of members who are very successful Princetonians, who at some point in the past ask themselves, where can I save my cash, my short and medium term cash, where it’s gonna work harder for the people that I care about locally. And they arrived at the credit union. And we are here devoted to the municipal employees, the firefighters, the teachers, the paramedics, the people who make, the bar backs, the waiters, dining services, facilities, the people that make this a glorious place to live, but they go to bed every night stressed out about money. 73% of Americans say finances are their greatest source of stress. More than half of new jerseyans report difficulty affording major household expenses, and that’s as true as in Princeton as it is anywhere. So our mission here fundamentally is to help people in need stabilize.

So anybody could join?

Dana Caragine: The short answer is yes. We can generally find a way to extend membership to almost anyone who expresses an interest in the credit union. The longer, more interesting answer maybe, is that we have relationships with 97 very well respected organizations in and around town, some very large and prominent front of mind, others much smaller, and most of our members today find Princeton, FCU, through these organizations and the working and the volunteering in the community. But maybe a few are gonna find us from listening to a prominent local podcast.

Dana, where are you from? Where’d you grow up?

Dana Caragine: I grew up in a very small town in northern New Jersey called Boonton. And I was raised there by a single mother and maybe the blondest nerd you’ve ever met. I’m drawn to math, science. I remember a childhood in New Jersey in the eighties where I had an Apple two E computer and I took it apart. So all of this had a very formative impact in me. Community played a big role in my life too. Boonton is a little like Princeton in the sense that it’s a town that’s very heavily shaped by immigration and diversity. And my mother was a public school teacher in Newark, New Jersey. She taught special ed. And so around the dinner table, there was a lot of conversations about lifting people and access to opportunities and unconventional paths.

How about college? So where was that? How did that come about?

Dana Caragine: So I had the Fred Hargadon moment back in 1998. And so I applied to Princeton University thinking there was no way that I was possibly gonna be able to go to this place, even if I could get in. I couldn’t afford it. And so then the mailbox revealed a yes letter and I became a member of the Princeton class of 2002. I wanna be super open about how this happened. Financial aid made this entirely possible for me.

Does the credit union actually help folks in that area (financial aid/college)?

Dana Caragine: I love that you’re asking about this. This is something we think about a lot. We do offer scholarships. We offer them to incoming freshmen regardless of where they’re going. Princeton or anywhere else, locally or nationally, so long as it’s accredited. Our application deadline this year is April 18th, so I’m so happy to be here at this time. That’s such an apropos moment for applying, seniors from all over the region are encouraged to apply. We’re finding something unusual in the last few years, which is that home equity now is helping many families in this community pay tuition in a lower cost way than traditionally student loans have offered. And so we find ourselves underwriting many real estate based loans now that are paying for education, paying tuition bills. And they’re at a lower rate than any capital that you can access almost any other way. So it’s the benefit of the rising tide of the housing economy in this area. We are at the total opposite of a predatory lender. We have no interest in offering high interest rates student loans to anyone private or federal. We like to help families work through the best ways to get tuition bills paid. And I’m a mother of three, I have three teenagers, and this is the thing that’s keeping me up at night.

Prior to coming to the Princeton Federal Credit Union, where else have you been? What else have you done?

Dana Caragine: Alright, so the nerdiness that I mentioned before led me into a career in finance and in wealth management. So I spent 20 years at Wall Street Banks and at private lenders. I worked mostly with high net worth clients. Institutional assets, gave me a technical fluency, sense of strategy, stabilized me financially. So I got to a point in my mid forties where I could think about giving back. And so I have these little girls, they have me thinking about presence in their lives. I was ready to get off the train Mark. I was so ready to get off the train and an opportunity at Princeton Federal Credit Union emerged and I realized I can serve this community that gave me what is the biggest break of my life. And it’s a place I adore, I can help people in need. And one of the things I aspire to is helping people of privilege see there’s a very cool way for your savings to help other people open doors here while you still make money, you still make interest and dividends on your savings.

How long have you been at the credit union now?

Dana Caragine: I think this episode might launch on my second anniversary. I joined PFCU in April, 2024. I was originally the senior director of lending and marketing. I worked for an absolute lion of a CEO, Sam Peselli. Had a couple of years of big growth. We’re guided by an astonishingly talented board of directors. They’ve got roots in the university predominantly, but also in corporate and policy work at places like Mathematica. Sam has retired. He’s loving retirement. I stepped into this president and CEO role in November of last year, so I’m pretty new to this seat. But I’ve had a chance to learn the organization from the inside out. We got a good look at each other. And this team genuinely cares. A team of 30 very locally based team that knows your name when you walk in, and we’re all collectively excited for a lot of growth and intentionality ahead.

Being part of the community appears to be important to the credit union’s mission. Maybe you could chat about that a little bit too?

Dana Caragine: You mentioned Megan. She is our very gifted Megan Peterson. She leads our marketing department. She makes appearances on our behalf at dozens of community events each year. Many people locally may have also met Lou Rivera and Glaymi Hierro. They lead our bilingual community outreach where we have grown incredibly in the last two years. But yeah, we love getting out there and meeting other organizations. I was listening to a podcast that you did last year with Rodman, who did an astonishing job talking about dozens of community organizations and nonprofit organizations that all kind of collectively weave the support network and the nets of Princeton. We see ourselves as quality partners to them. We aspire to not duplicate work that’s already being done capably by another institution. But what we can do is bring a lot of institutions’ good advice to life. So if you say, for example, are participating in the municipality’s affordable housing program and education and teach-ins related to that, this is a place where you can bring some of that advice to life. So we aspire to be a complement to our nonprofit partners, and Megan gets out there and with Lou, with Glaymi, with others and has those conversations to open the doors.

You guys got a pretty important award recently, right?

Dana Caragine: Sure. Thank you. Yes, we did. We recently received, it’s called the Juntos Avanzamos designation. It translates to together we advance, we are incredibly proud of this. It’s national recognition that gets granted to credit unions that demonstrate a commitment to serving Hispanic and immigrant communities. Princeton FCU is only the second credit union in New Jersey to hold it. It’s not a credential, it’s not a rubber stamp, it’s a promise. It reflects real work. So we’re doing bilingual services. The website’s fully bilingual. We do international outreach, and we have a genuine belief that everyone deserves a seat at a financial table. In the US this is democratized access to financial stability. And so when we go out and we talk about this with other credit unions, they often ask us, how did you get started in this? You know, how did you get started in serving a community with different language needs or people with different types of documentation? We say completely accidentally. We didn’t even realize that was a controversial thing because every September this community sees an influx of people from all over the world, many of whom are here trying to create an American financial identity for the first time. And our system from the outside in looks pretty strange. Credit scores. The way that we do tax certifications, the way that people get their legs under them so they can get a car so they can get to McCaffrey’s. All of this is a new language for many new arrivals, and so the credit union from its very beginning has been helping international people get on their feet and become successful from all walks of life. So we developed an expertise and a core skill in it before we had any idea that it was controversial. And now that it is controversial, we’re as committed to it as we’ve ever been. But it’s an accidental story of something we’re quite proud of.

It seems to me that the credit union offers a pretty robust online capability. Maybe you could get into a little more detail?

Dana Caragine: Can I tell you how much this shocked me? I came from Big Bank World and I thought that the barrier to entry for small community banks and for credit unions would be the apps. It would be the technology, like how can anyone possibly keep up? And then what happened was the rise of the fintechs, so private equity, Silicon Valley, the West Coast, small companies that said, wait a second, there’s a niche. If we develop systems that work well for credit unions to be able to offer digital services to people, there’s 4,600 credit unions in the United States that can help do that community by community. And so we offer a full suite of digital banking that is on par with anything that you’re going to get at a major bank. We’ve got face id, we’ve got 18 months of statements waiting for you. We can communicate through secure messaging in the app. So that’s all here. You can apply to manage your accounts, the loans, transfers. You can handle virtually everything. But again, the onsite team is always around to help. So no one should feel left behind by this. Every Friday afternoon for the last three months, McCaffrey’s is one of our employer groups that we’ve partnered with in the community. So we host Cozy season. We have tea and scones. Come on in, get your cash for the weekend, have a good chat, and if you need help with anything, we’re here to help you. We have no desire to offboard you into an anonymous virtual world, we wanna be your people. We’ve also deliberately kept some of the old fashioned fun, so we do offer piggy banks. If you have little people in your life, swing on by. And we will send a lollipop through a drive through tube. We still have that capability. They’re not coming out of ATMs, but there’s always hope.

How about the future? Anything future plans coming up that you wanna share or tell us about?

Dana Caragine: I feel sometimes like I look out the window and I see this overloaded apple tree of incredible opportunity and I just wanna grab a giant basket and pick every opportunity for the credit union. But I would say there are some that really stand out as opportunities for us. One is that we’ve historically been pretty quiet. And we know that the more people hear about what Princeton Federal Credit Union can offer, the more impacts we can have in the community. In a way that’s essentially like a figure eight. If we can attract people to come in and bring savings, federally insured savings you’re gonna get a great rate on. We’re gonna loan that money out to the teachers, the firefighters, the waiters, people locally who are gonna then stabilize here. Put down the roots, build families here, come back again multi-generationally, save money with us again. And so this figure eight just repeats and repeats. And we want that to continue in a very healthy way. Another part of being quiet is that we knew there were a lot of not-for-profits in the area and community causes that could benefit from having us as a partner where they can bring some of their advice to life. Where they can also help their own employees. You think about people doing social work in Princeton, an opportunity to build up some savings, save a couple thousand dollars, have that emergency fund very calming, and a calm social worker is able to do magnificent work that expands like gas to fill gaps in the community. The more we can help people stabilize here and stay here, I remember getting here at 18, I had $50. I had two pair of jeans. Now granted I had gone to Catholic school, so I’d been mostly in uniform, but I got to Princeton feeling like I was gritting my teeth financially, like I had my student job and I knew when I could go to New South and get that check. I remember very acutely what it was like to be here and to feel like I was just making it and it was different, certainly different, but I think a lot of us have those memories. And we remember what it felt like to go to bed stressing about this. And the desire to help people in this community who feel that same way is real and profound. And you can do that without a whole lot of work. Just save some money here.