Overdrafts Bring New Opportunities for Credit Unions, Survey Finds
New survey by Michael Moebs finds overdraft volume is down at banks but up at credit unions.
When it comes to overdraft services, banks are getting out, but credit unions are stepping in.
That’s according to a recent study by Moebs $ervices, an economic research firm, which found that overdraft volume was down 28.7% at banks but up 20% at credit unions since 2007, just before the Great Recession of 2008.
Moebs surveyed more than 3,000 depositories. The larger ones, or those with more than $250 million in assets, are moving toward the overdraft market, while banks are leaving.
“They have a strict adherence to disliking unsecured credit of any kind,” said Michael Moebs, of Moebs $ervices in Lake Forest, Ill., about the banks, which have maintained a $500 limit on overdrafts since 1998. But, since 2018, several credit unions have jumped into the market. “That’s when we saw a group of these mid-sized credit unions saying, ‘Hey, there’s a door here that’s just opened to us,’ and, in some cases, the larger community credit unions, also. And, that is, people need short-term credit use.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a mixed response but, for some credit unions, new opportunities, he said. Several credit unions and community banks are lowering their fees, but only for three or four months.
“It’s a sunset provision,” Moebs said. “The lenders, both credit unions and larger community banks, who are in this, have basically said this is a way to get business.”
Moebs $ervices found that more than 50% of checking account users never overdraw, while 25% do so occasionally. Another 25% do it often.
In the past two years, credit unions and banks both charged an average and median overdraft fee of $30 per transaction, Moebs said.
“The credit unions, in the last half of 2018, started raising their prices on overdrafts to match banks,” he said. While banks have charged the same amount since 2009, credit unions previously had fees of $25.
“Overdraft transactions are still probably the most expensive transaction in any depository bank, or credit union, but they’ve brought the cost down and, with that, some of the more advanced thinking on this has been on the credit union side,” Moebs said.