Corporates Showing Cooperation With Primary Financial

COLUMBUS, Ohio – It’s very rare in the credit union industry to get 100% agreement on anything, but corporates are showing they’re all on the same page when it comes to Primary Financial. With the mergers of Mid-States and Minnesota Corporate and PacCorp and WesCorp, only 31 corporates remain, and many believe 30 is a more accurate number given that the $6 million LICU FCU Corporate (established for IBM CUs) is not a traditional corporate and doesn’t have the product menu offered by most corporates. Primary Financial announced recently that it now counts 30 corporates as member owners, with LICU FCU being the only omission. The latest to join were Corporate America CU, Midwest Corporate FCU and EasCorp. Each corporate purchased one share for $50,000. The CUSO is designed so no one corporate can be a majority owner. The maximum number of shares a corporate can purchase is eight. Primary Financial’s core product is SimpliCD, a brokered CD program originally created by CorporateOne. In a cooperative move, CorporateOne agreed to sell SimpliCD to Corporate Exchange, a mutli-corporate owned CUSO. Corporate Exchange eventually bought Primary Financial and decided to change its name to Primary Financial, a name which already had good recognition in the industry. Currently SimpliCD outstandings are approximately $3.2 billion. “There is really no more fitting finale for a year that has been marked by an extraordinary degree of cooperation among corporate credit unions,” said Greg Moore, president/CEO of Georgia Central CU and chairman of Primary Financial. Many credit Moore with getting this concept of a widely-owned corporate CUSO off the ground.