WASHINGTON — If nothing else, the furor over the Treasury's "Blueprint" proposal for financial reorganization has pointed out a glaring fact: No one is applying for credit union charters, Washington attorney Bruce Jolly said Tuesday.
"It's a lot more difficult to argue for a separate agency when no one is beating down your door to come in," he stated.
"Isn't it ironic that here we have this discussion about future credit union charters and a single regulatory agency while over the last year there were 100 bank charters granted but only a handful of credit union charters," observed Jolly, a former Washington counsel for CUNA.
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Jolly, a partner at Venable LLC who has been advising a New York police group since last year on starting a broad-based and multi-service Manhattan CU to serve law enforcement, said the fact there are few applications for new CUs speaks volumes about the industry's plight.
Yet, he said, the national CU leadership can move ahead with sparking public and business interest in supporting CUs if newly formed institutions provide a mix of valued deposit and loan services "that members truly want." Too often, the new CU is shortchanged by making the CU charter less than attractive, he said.
"NCUA," he stressed, "understands the importance of this issue and has been very supportive of our efforts," said Jolly citing the application filing last year for The Finest Federal CU of New York serving patrolmen and law enforcement.
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