ORLANDO – NCUA Board Vice Chairman Rick Metsger told credit union industry executives he received only one question on the agency's controversial Risk Based Capital proposal in three weeks of speaking to credit union groups.
"I have been travelling for about three weeks so I need to check and make sure where I am," Metsger said to chuckles from the audience at NACUSO's Annual Conference in Orlando on April 15.
"This is a good example of the distance there can be sometimes between what is talked about in Washington and what they talk about in credit unions around the country," Metsger added.
NACUSO held its meeting at the Disney Yacht Club Resort through Thursday.
Metsger said the agency was reading the comments it had collected on the RBC rule and noted that were not as many analytic comments. He would not predict how the rule might change, but said the agency was reading the comments carefully and that he believed the NCUA board would vote on and publish the next version of the rule sometime in the fall.
He then moved on to other topics that he said had gained the agency's focus, including changes to streamline member business loans regulations for federal credit unions, changes to make it easier for federal credit unions to add associations as groups to their fields of members and looking at easing federal credit unions' field of membership generally.
On changes to MBL rules, Metsger said the agency wanted to get out of the waiver business and that, while the regulations are complicated and difficult, the agency wanted to move to a principled approach to MBL regulation versus a prescriptive approach where the rules would say what credit unions could or could not do.
The changes to the rules by which federal credit unions add associations to their field of membership might move to adding to the types of associations that credit unions can add automatically to their fields of membership.
"We looked at the data and noticed that there were certain types of associations which are almost always added to a field of membership even though it takes them six months to do it," Metsger said. "We decided it shouldn't take that long."
The final change, the move to modernize the agency's rules for field of membership generally, will take longer, Metsger said, but he added that he has set the goal of having the agency make significant progress on the topic by the end of year.
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