BankThink

Editor's note: the following letter was written in response to "Will CRA Be Forced On US?" (April 20).

There's been a lot of speculation around our industry that all the chaos in the economy in general, and banking in particular, should be good for credit unions. Confused and frustrated bank customers are looking for financial services options that make them feel secure, and people with good credit histories are looking for institutions willing to lend for necessary expenses such as college, to replace a car, etc.

Is the worst of the housing crisis at hand - or already behind us?

After months of fighting, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities Exchange Commission appear to have won a significant victory in their battle for more authority over credit derivatives. The new plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to regulate derivatives, including the infamous credit-default swaps, gives oversight power to the CFTC and the SEC and largely ignores the Federal Reserve Board, which had been angling for a slice of power.

The idea that necessity is the mother of innovation may generally be more popular with Wall Street scions than state regulators, but in Massachusetts last week the tables turned.

This week the Senate will take up the credit card bill that the House of Representatives passed on May 1. With the stress test results now public, it´s possible that new capital raising initiatives could be announced by the banks we now know need to add to their buffers. There´s official reason for immediacy; the deadline for a capital raising plan isn´t until next month. But some would take the view that the quicker a capital raising plan is announced, the stronger the bank appears to be. We wouldn´t rule out a grand unveiling or two in the coming weeks.

There´s a reason why this week might have seemed even more surreal than usual to people in the financial world. As nervous anticipation of the stress test results gathered force, the whole earth seemed to be turning on a fixed point in time: 5pm on Thursday, May 7, the date the Treasury Department had set for its release of the stress test results. With so much attention focused on that event, it was disorienting to awake each morning to an array of major daily papers casting and recasting it with scoops, almost scoops and not-quite-news. How many banks will fail the test now? How much more capital is needed? Every morning was different and yet the format was the same, like a twisted variation on Groundhog Day.

What if you could develop a simple and low-cost method to effectively reduce robberies and fraud, and enhance the member and staff branch experience at the same time? What if a new security methodology could actually support and promote a credit union's branding and cultural initiatives and deliver higher ROI at the same time?

There are deal-breakers and back-breakers, and then there is the question raised by the Senate passage of legislation to allow NCUA to stretch out the costs of the corporate CU bailout for as long as eight years-will it be the ice breaker?

Research is an income generator. Research is an expense minimizer. And research is a key tool to help you grow. [No, I'm not smoking any funny stuff. Really] Read on.