SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The newly appointed Financial Institutions Commissioner on Friday announced the state regulator is adding new benchmarking data for credit unions and banks to better monitor the condition of California’s state chartered institutions, many of which have plunged into difficult straits.
The new data is being monitored and disclosed publicly as part of “my own due diligence to get to know the condition of our licensees,” reported William Haraf, who was appointed commissioner of the state’s Department of Financial Institutions in March. The new data will include an analysis of key industry ratios, such as equity to assets, return on assets and delinquencies, by quintile, as well as by size. “These data offer a useful measure of the dispersion of outcomes for our bank and credit union licensees, unlike the simple averages we previously reported,” said Haraf.
The presentation of the new data comes as credit unions in the Golden State are facing their most difficult time in decades.
Data presented two weeks ago by the DFI to the state’s CU Advisory Board show that return on assets for California credit unions declined sharply in 2007 and fell into the negative for the first quarter of 2008. At the same time, loan delinquencies rose to a higher rate than the national average, while net worth declined below the national average.
The DFI Commissioner said he plans additional reporting for state charters in the coming months.
