A labor of love: Serving the underserved

One of the things I admire most about credit unions is their cooperative nature. People helping people. Fortunately for me, the service-orientated nature of credit unions strongly aligns with my personal passion for economically empowering underserved communities. Recently, I watched a webinar discussing the use of secondary capital to drive financial and community impact. The webinar was hosted by the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions (“Federation”), a credit union trade association that specifically serves credit unions dedicated to the lower-income consumer market.

Although the actual content of the webinar was more of a business case analysis, it did spark my interest in exploring the regulatory implications of helping underserved communities. This blog highlights a couple of ways credit unions may be able to reach unbanked or underbanked consumers.

Background

In general, all credit unions would like to grow. According to the Federation’s webinar, there are roughly 67 million people who are either unbanked or underbanked. To put this into perspective, that is roughly 20% of the U.S. population. As a natural result, underserved consumers are also more likely to be credit invisible or credit challenged.

 

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