DALLAS — When offering insurance to the Latino community and underserved a workshop at the conference on serving the underserved highlighted specific needs credit unions need to examine as many members of those communities have never had insurance before.

As mentioned at the 34th Annual Conference on serving the underserved and 5th Latino Credit Union conference (see Staking Out the Stats, page 14), a survey showed that insurance is one of the top financial services Latinos listed they were interested in. However, facilitator of the workshop, Maria Martinez, president/CEO of Border Federal Credit Union, pointed out that because many members of this community have never had insurance before, credit unions need to examine the way they present the service to these members.

"Because they're not used to having insurance, it's really hard to sell them the product because you have to sell them the idea of it," Martinez said. "A lot of the time you need to use real experience and say this is what happened to this person. It's different to sell insurance to the Hispanic community than to those of us who have been in the states for a while and know it's really costly not to have these products in the long run."