This past year has been another busy year for the Alaska Air Group Credit Union (AAGCU). We added several things this past year including Banzai, a financial wellness center which offers a real-world financial game as well as financial calculators and articles covering many helpful topics. The credit union also added a text alert service for debit cards to increase card security. We also reach out to you, our membership, and conducted our first annual member survey. The response from the survey was fantastic, we received over 600 responses including very positive responses in regards to our service, convenience, and great rates.
We continued to support Alaska Air Group at various community and employee events. Our staff volunteered at Aviation Day, the American Heart and Stroke Walk, Northwest Harvest, Treehouse, and attended various picnics and events hosted by Alaska and Horizon. We continued our commitment to visiting stations across the country and completed over 15 station visits during the year. We hosted 13 seminars educating members about credit, budgeting, auto and home buying, as well as retirement planning. The credit union also chose 6 scholarship winners awarding a total of $5,000 and we look forward to supporting this program again in 2020.
Over this past year, the credit union continued to provide all types of loans to our members with more than 800 new loans totaling over $16 million funded throughout the year. We also saw significant membership growth with over 800 new accounts opened, which helped to increase deposits by over $5 million.
We are looking forward to 2020 and promise to continually provide excellent members service coupled with low loan rates, higher returns on deposits, free checking, and low fees. Our membership can also look forward to the launch of our new online banking and mobile app in the new year. The online and mobile systems will be user-friendly and offer convenient features such as mobile check deposit. I want to thank our membership, and the Board of Directors for a fantastic year and I look forward to serving everyone in 2020.
