The greatest advice Chris Catliff ever received came from Stephen Covey, the international bestselling author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Simply put, it’s to have a mission statement. And for the past quarter-century or so, Catliff’s mission statement has involved the pursuit of better credit unions and memorable family moments.
“If it doesn’t fall within those two categories, then I probably won’t do it,” said the president and CEO of North Vancouver-based BlueShore Financial.
In his mission to build better credit unions, Catliff looks everywhere. Alongside industry partners that include Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) and Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT), he looks ahead to how technology, such as artificial intelligence, is going to shape lives.
He also looks back at the four years he spent travelling the globe from 1979 to 1982.
“I think about it almost every day because of what’s happening to our city in terms of the investment and everything,” he said.
In 1979, Catliff left the Vancouver of yesteryear – a “small little hick town” as he put it – and embarked on a worldwide search for interesting hot spots, from places he thought would be beautiful places to live, through to war zones. That journey placed Catliff in Bangladesh during a coup; in Kenya – which also ended up grappling with a coup; in Tripoli, Lebanon, when it was bombed; and working in a kibbutz in Israel during the 1982 Lebanon War.
“In the end, I was searching for something and it was already happening back at home,” he said. “And the lesson there was that instead of Chris Catliff going to the world, the world sort of came here.”
The year it came was 1986, and since Expo, Catliff has taken pride in seeing Vancouver grow into a cosmopolitan city.
With a background in international affairs, and a clear penchant for travel, Catliff had always imagined he would one day become a diplomat. To date, he’s travelled to 76 countries.
But a job three decades ago changed his career path. Serving as special assistant to the CEO of a credit union persuaded him that his true calling was going to be at a much more locally oriented venture.
“I knew instantly that I wanted to be a CEO of a credit union,” said Catliff, explaining that it was the unique positioning of a credit union that held the appeal – it’s not a for-profit bank, nor is it a non-profit charity. “We’re kind of in between. And it’s a really cool place to be.”
As a special assistant, Catliff said, he went out of his way to make things look good for the corner office.
“[That] really helped me figure out and get to where I wanted to be.”
He carried that lesson through a variety of different roles over the next 14 years, including serving as president of Vancity Enterprises Ltd. and senior vice-president of Vancity credit union.
At the latter, he completed the first Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. mortgage-backed security. It was a brush with history, and one that could have led down a much different path. At that point in his career, Catliff was offered a job to start up mortgage securities with Shearson Lehman in New York.
“God, just imagine where that could have ended up for me,” said Catliff, who landed at BlueShore in 2000. For a time, he’d questioned whether he made the right decision. There was little doubt after 2008, when the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers helped deepen the growing economic crisis of that period.
“The point of it all is that there’s different career paths you can take, and you just have to forge ahead on kind of what your mission statement is, and not worry about the location and things like that,” he said.
Despite what Catliff calls a “traumatic” period for the financial services sector, BlueShore has expanded eightfold since he started at the organization 17 years ago.
Part of that has come from his focus on retooling what he described as a blue-collar credit union that woke up in a white-collar world, and across the water from an increasingly globalized city.
He called the credit union a “West Coast, agile, cognitive financial institution” that focuses on deep client strategies. Even as it has grown, the institution has kept the same number of customers, with a renewed focus on the affluent.
Catliff is also pioneering algorithm development in-house – they’re called “Blue-gorithms” – which he said will be married with artificial intelligence to offer clients additional services.
Transforming what was a 65-year-old, traditional, community credit union into a branded financial boutique that’s pushing the boundaries of innovation has been his biggest challenge, but it’s one he’s proud of.
As the man leading the institution’s change, Catliff says his leadership style has been influenced by his previous bosses. From 1992 to 2006, the BlueShore CEO had six bosses in the proverbial corner office, and all of them were women.
“It’s extremely unique to have that many bosses who are women. [I’m] kind of proud of it,” he said. “They were also really good at motivating me, and they all had in common that they would let me do what I needed to do, support me, and empathize when I had problems. And I really learned a lot, and I think that’s made me a better leader.”
Join us to celebrate this year’s honourees at the 2017 BC CEO Awards November 8, 2017, hosted at the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel. For tickets and event info, visit www.biv.com/ceo.
