The financial crisis may seem like a thing of the past nowadays, but in the words of a philosopher, "those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The NCUA is obligated to position the credit union system to weather future challenges, and its determination to do so has been one of the drivers of the agency's regulatory agenda. The revised proposed risk-based capital rule, approved by the NCUA board at its January 2015 meeting, is one of the last pieces of a broad regulatory reform effort the agency launched in response to the financial crisis.

We should never forget that consumer credit union failures resulting from the crisis cost the NCUSIF $750 million. Those failures occurred, in part, because many of those credit unions did not have sufficient capital to protect against the risk in their balance sheets.