BankThink

Pentagon FCU CEO Frank Pollack doesn't see a charter change as a panacea (CU Journal, Oct. 18). I respect his opinion but wonder how much due diligence he conducted.

An observation was made once that unlike school, in life the tests come before the lesson. Given the economy of the past few years, one wonders just how big a dose of "reality" kids are getting these days.

Welcome to the new world of financial services. Frugal is in. Accumulation is out. Conservation-in. Frivolous-out. Return to values-yes. Return of employment-no.

With such a large turnover in Congress this is a great time for the bankers in America to reach out to their members and work with them to understand the challenges of banking today.

Which way do you prefer your roll of toilet paper to hang? You might wonder what that has to do with banking, but I bet you thought a few seconds about your preference. That's the genius behind a New York start-up called Hunch, which bills itself as a way to personalize the Internet by making smart recommendations about what you might like based on a series of questions.

If you're just trying to survive the assessments, scrape together some change-in-the-ashtray net income, and hang on until the economy and markets bounce back, you probably shouldn't pick up a copy of "13 Bankers" by James Kwak and Simon Johnson.

In a demanding, rapidly changing, competitive financial services environment, credit union managers are strapped for time, diminishing their opportunities to supervise lending staff or review credit applications.

It is an indisputable mathematical fact that compared to a credit union with an equal amount of net worth a mutual can make more loans, accept more deposits, open more branches, and hence, by these measures better serve members and the community.

If you haven't seen any of the numerous consumer surveys by now (or the credit union associations pointing them out) regarding how consumers and big bank customers prefer credit unions, you probably haven't heard of that faddish Internet thing, either.

What is extremely unfair to the FI is that this previously profitable accountholder will do what most do when they get mad at their bank or credit union: they will look for another institution that will treat them better.