The non prophet: true believer Jim Blaine builds the nation's second-biggest credit union and the state's fifth-largest financial institution.

• Author: Murray, Arthur O.
• Position: State Employees Credit Union - Cover Story

Jim Blame needed a job. After flunking out of the UNC Chapel Hill's MBA program in 1973, he hauled bricks on construction sites. That was not, he quickly decided, a way he wanted to make his living. So he went to the Employment Security Commission office in Raleigh. "The lady there took one look at me and said, 'You look like somebody who would make me a loan.'"

She didn't have a bank job in mind. She sent him to State Employees Credit Union, which had an opening for a loan officer. Nothing in his background suggested he was qualified. Two years earlier, he had graduated from Carolina with a bachelor's in Russian history and politics. He got the job anyway. "It was the best offer I had," he recalls. "It was the only offer I had."

He didn't really know what a credit union was but quickly learned. Six years later, he was president and CEO of SECU, which he has turned into the nation's second-largest credit union, with $9 billion of assets June 30. Only the Navy Federal Credit Union is bigger. With $542.9 million in revenue last year, Raleigh-based SECU was fifth, behind the state's -- which include some of the nation's -- biggest banks, in BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA'S annual ranking of financial institutions, expanded this year to include credit unions -- which are nonprofit financial institutions owned and operated by their members.

Blaine has become an evangelist for what he insists on calling the credit-union movement, as if it's some kind of religious cult. He'll preach its virtues to anyone who will listen, even bankers, many of whom try to demonize him and his ilk as little better than tax cheats. Even so, Blaine, who's 53, looks and acts like someone you might see frowning over a loan application on the other side of a big oak desk. He's tall, broad-shouldered, balding, confident, even intimidating. He asks pointed questions and doesn't accept evasive answers. On his resume, he admits he "can be testy, has been known to argue and has at least one opinion on everything."

He doesn't play golf. Too bankerly. His hobbies, he says, are provocation and inspiration. Proteges praise his intensity. Bankers admit he's smart. He's not impressed by their flattery: "Bank, by the way, is a four-letter word." His populist message to consumers is simple: "We're in this for you." It's winning converts -- and deposits. When he was hired, SECU had eight branches and $75 million in assets. When he became president, it had 25 branches and $300 million in assets. It now has 148 branches in 80 of the state's 100 counties and more than 900,000 members. That's 75% penetration of his market, which Blaine estimates as 1.2 million teachers and state employees -- present, past, retired -- and their families.

The SECU branch on the first floor of the nonprofit's headquarters on Wade Avenue looks like a bank, with tellers, loan officers and stand-up counters for filling out deposit slips. But don't dare suggest to Blaine that banks and credit unions are alike. "That's equivalent to saying there's no difference between Palestinians and Israelis. Their appearance is similar, but there's a world of difference between the...