NCRC Report Appears to Have Had Little Impact; Data Supports CU Progress, Critics Point Out

WASHINGTON – Credit union trade association executives and analysts doubted this week that the National Community Reinvestment Coalition’s most recent study and call to include credit unions under the Community Reinvestment Act will end up having much of an impact and maintained the report documented how credit unions are making progress in some of the very areas that the NCRC said credit unions need CRA. “In our view, it just didn’t have any traction,” said Pat Keefe, spokesman for CUNA. “For example, we really haven’t seen any coverage of it in the press which would seem to have been the point of releasing it at a press conference.” On May 19 the NCRC, a long-time critic of credit unions’ efforts to serve members of modest means, released its report Credit Unions: True To Their Mission which alleged that credit unions with over $100 million in assets have forgotten their social mission and need to be included under CRA in order to be forced into serving minorities, women, and other people of modest means. NCRC is the umbrella group of more than 800 groups and institutions, including the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions and a few individual credit unions. The organization previously sued the NCUA over how the agency revoked its Community Action Plan regulation which would have imposed a rule similar to bank Community Reinvestment Act regulations on credit unions. Echoing previous reports, the NCRC study looked at data reported under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, data which it said proved that “large” credit unions (credit unions over $100 million in assets) were failing to live up to their mission to serve people of modest means. But Bill Hampel, chief economist for CUNA, said that between the years of 2001-2003, the years the report studied, credit unions were still “hobbled” by restrictive field of membership requirements, requirements that many CUs around the country still must live within, Hampel noted. But credit unions have been steadily opening up areas where they can serve new members, Hampel pointed out and predicted that the positive trend lines that the credit unions have begun to see on serving these areas will only continue into the future. “The big news of these reports, and this report in particular, is that they indicate how much progress credit unions are making on their own, without CRA, as they get used to working in these areas and incorporate more of these members.” Hampel particularly took issue with the way he said that the report played fast and loose with some of the HMDA data by making comparisons between the rates at which credit unions reject mortgage applications from low-income and high-income members instead of comparing those different rates between banks and credit unions. If you compare only the rates at which the study says credit unions reject mortgage applications from low- and middle-income members versus the rates at which the study says credit unions reject the mortgage applications of high-income members, Hampel explained, it looks as though credit unions reject their low-income members mortgage applications three times as often whereas banks only reject the applications of low-income borrowers twice as often. But if you compare the rates between banks and credit unions, Hampel pointed out, you will see that banks reject almost twice the percentage of low-income borrowers than credit unions do and that, all things being equal, a low-income borrower is still going to have a better chance of receiving a loan from a credit union than from a bank. Murray Chanow, director of the political affairs, said that he has received some calls from Capitol Hill about the report and what it means but doubted whether the document will have much play among lawmakers. Even though John Taylor indicated at the press conference that the organization would be interested in having CRA be included as some sort of condition to passing CURIA, the organization had no lawmakers willing to offer legislation to that effect and Chanow doubted that they would find any. “I think we are going to have to keep an eye out for it in different areas,” Chanow said, but I don’t think its going to be a big deal.” Keefe agreed, pointing out that since the whole point of CURIA is to reduce the regulatory burden credit unions carry that would make it a poor vehicle to use to introduce the CRA to credit unions. [email protected]