Sarah Snell Cooke, you wrote in your October 1, 2014 ("Apple, Wal-Mart Can Teach CUs About Membership") editorial about how the 100 million U.S. credit union membership total is bogus due to the number of multiple memberships in several credit unions.
I agree with the fact that there are members who have accounts in multiple credit unions, but the reality that you are overlooking is the number of joint accounts and how the number of joint members multiplies the total number of members in all credit unions.
Although there are no statistics, an educated guess would put the percentage of joint accounts at 50% (it may be as high as 70%) in most credit unions. In credit unions, the spouse who is joint on a membership account does not normally have a membership account of his/her own. There may be separate sub-accounts, but usually they don't have separate membership accounts.
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Therefore, if we add up all of the joint members, we may in fact have 150 million credit union members (not accounts) in this country. That is a far more impressive number and could represent half of the adults who live in the U.S.
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