Keith Stone, president and CEO of The Finest Federal Credit Union in New York, N.Y., testified about the constraints of the credit union chartering process and how the overall regulatory burden is hurting credit unions and their communities during a House subcommittee hearing Tuesday.

Stone, whose credit union serves the state’s law enforcement community, testified before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit on the “de novo drought” and why new credit unions and community banks are increasingly rare in the years since the Dodd-Frank Act.

“As we learned, chartering a credit union is not quick or easy,” Stone said about the process his credit union completed in 2015.

He said the biggest obstacle for new credit unions is to find the funds to open and to balance the costs of “running day-to-day operations and keeping up with the ever-changing post-Dodd-Frank regulatory environment.”

 

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