By Randy Karnes, CU*Answers

There is a trap for anyone responding to the NY Times article that was published Oct. 11, in which Marriott Employees’ Federal Credit Union was criticized for its fee structure. The reporter cites credit unions as having been “long considered a way to democratize banking… meant to serve workers who lacked access to the same financial services as middle managers and executives.” He assets this remained largely the case into the 90s, but that “in recent decades, many [CUs] have subtly shifted their approach” to capture income from fees due to falling interest rates. The insinuation here is that credit unions have lost their roots.

The trap comes from the weakness of our industry’s central planning – industry thinking, speaking, and designs of the past. We are an industry of independent consumer-owner organizations with the opportunity to build cooperatives to serve our communities and their agendas. While the article generalizes about an industry agenda, it does not really speak to the promise in the idea that consumers, as the owners, fight for their agenda locally and distinctly as individuals. The government made a deal to inspire consumers to act and build institutions – it provided communities with opportunities but didn’t mandate that anything be done about it.

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On the way to the future the agendas of consumer-owners changed, the way they reacted to the marketplace evolved, and the hopes that they expressed for their cooperatives matured, yielding new scorecards for the value of a credit union in their lives. Acting on the rights to build and shape those institutions for their own use, these owners pushed forward to build organizations for the future, still focused on the agendas of their communities whether that be price, access to more services, or just continuing to inspire community entrepreneurship that can drive better situations forward.

Granting and inspiring consumer entrepreneurship as a community for banking functions is now the far bigger value, the far bigger vision for democratizing banking than what is cited in the NY Times attack.