BankThink

The government's GoDirect campaign will, no doubt, serve as a model to credit unions for receiving deposits of benefit payments from other federal programs.

Contrary to the ongoing and repeated negative sentiment about the banking industry, real banking is still a profession in which the best and the smartest can make a difference in their communities and in their country.

Groucho Marx once declared that he would never belong to a club that included him as a member. When it comes to the "qualifying residential mortgage" exception, I feel the opposite way: if I can't be a member, then the exception shouldn't exist.

Of the many reasons for dire predictions about community banks, one is receiving less attention than it deserves: Operating revenue has been declining for more than a decade.

The examination climate is the harshest in generations, and now something like this is piled on — and policy makers wonder why community banks are hunkered down?

There is and has been for decades a general view that no matter how much you beat up on banks they will just figure it out and keep on keeping on. Of course, that advice has never been true for the whole industry.

In Credit Union Land, April showers may have brought, um, warnings of higher capital standards, the shutdown of a CU alleged to be a front for online gambling, and a full-scale blitz from all sides related to debit interchange, yet of all the mail I received from readers during May the No. 1 issue was, as you most likely expected, all about Zombies.

I'd like to see our share insurance assessment reduced just as much as any other CEO, however, if it comes at the cost of the DFI/NCUA removing credit unions from their members by forcing mergers based on phony numbers — count me out.

Having accurate, standardized data will allow financial institutions to search their databases more easily and have confidence in their data integrity. It is just one simple step in a long line of changes that will need to be made as the Dodd-Frank Act continues to be rolled out.

No one seems to notice the death of small corporate credit unions in the wake of the corporate system meltdown. On Friday, April 29, 2011, Midwest Corporate FCU closed its doors forever, the victim of a hit and run when U.S. Central FCU and four other corporate credit unions had a heart attack at the wheel of the bus and ran over the small compact cars known as small, pass-through corporate credit unions.