CUNA to FCC: Credit Unions Don’t Annoy Members With Phone Calls

The Federal Communications Commission should not place new restrictions on “informational calls” that credit unions place to their members, Damon Smith, CUNA’s senior director of advocacy and counsel, told the commission this week.

“Credit unions value the long-term relationships that they have with their member-owners and would not engage in wide-spread conduct that their members find annoying,” Smith told the FCC in a letter commenting on the commission’s proposal to require that informational calls include an opt-out mechanism that would automatically place a person’s number on a do-not-call list.

Financial trade groups, such as CUNA and NAFCU, have been battling the commission over restrictions on so-called robocalls.

In his letter, Smith said the FCC does not have the legal authority to require the creation of do-not-call lists for informational calls.

He went on to ask the commission to recognize the “unique cooperative structure” of credit unions, adding that credit union members play an active role in the governance of the institutions.

“There is no reason to assume that informational calls to residential lines result in enough sufficiently egregious consumer harm to justify the additional burden imposed by establishing new opt-out and do-not-call requirements or imposing arbitrary call limits,” Smith said.

However, a coalition of consumer groups applauded the FCC’s effort to rein in recorded informational calls.

“We urge the Commission to place numerical limits on these calls, particularly those that it terms transactional calls, which would include debt collection calls,” the groups, including the National Consumer Law Center and the Consumer Federation of America wrote in a letter to the commission. “Consumers object particularly strongly to unwanted, prerecorded calls.”

They said among the calls that consumers find to be the “most invasive and annoying” are prerecorded debt collection calls. The groups said creditors and debt collectors make more than a billion calls to consumers each year.

The groups also asked the commission to place a numerical limit on the number of informational calls a company may make to a consumer each month.