NCUA Calls On Corporates To Submit Business Plans ASAP
ALEXANDRIA, Va.-NCUA last week urged corporates to submit their business plans "as early as possible" in order to help natural-person CUs "undergo a smooth transition and ensure no disruption in member services." The letter reminded there is a March 31, 2011 deadline for undercapitalized corporates to provide recapitalization and business plans to members.
Included in the NCUA letter was reference to the planned process for requiring corporates to maintain escrow accounts for accumulated capital. "If a corporate raises enough capital by Sept. 30, 2011 to meet NCUA's new capital standards, which take effect Oct. 20, 2011, the pledged capital in escrow will be converted to regulatory capital," the letter notes. If the target isn't met, pledged capital will be returned to CUs.
Federation Asks Agency To Ensure Training For Examiners
NEW YORK-In a letter to NCUA last week, the National Federation of Community Development CUs called on the agency to place greater emphasis in training new examiners to understand the unique operations of CDCUs and low-income CUs. The letter was in follow up to an NCUA announcement it will be hiring more examiners. Federation CEO Cliff Rosenthal told NCUA that over the past 10 years "agency staff has confirmed that new or less experienced examiners are often assigned to small and low-income credit unions, presumably because these are less complex institutions that represent a smaller degree of material risk to the NCUSIF. Because low-income credit unions and CDCUs often do not fit the mold or demonstrate the ratios and operating characteristics of other credit unions, the examination process has often been a rather rocky one... [and] As some of our CDCUs have put it, they have needed to 'educate the examiners [themselves].'"
Gift Cards OK'd As Incentive
ALEXANDRIA, Va.-NCUA has cleared CUs to offer gift cards and other cash inducements to help draw members to the sparsely attended annual meetings. Earlier, NCUA had expressly approved the use of raffles and other incentives to boost annual meeting attendance. NCUA reminded that the cost of such cards must be reasonable and should not be used to influence votes.
CU Village, HRN Mngmt. To Merge
SOUTHFIELD, Mich.-CU Village and sister company HRN Management Group will merge under a new name, CU Solutions Group, effective in January. Both are subsidiaries of the Michigan CU League, but the new company will also include 36 other investors, including state leagues, CUs, and CUSOs, the firms announced last week.
Patelco Sells HQ For $10M
SAN FRANCISCO-Patelco CU, which is in the process of moving to suburban Pleasanton, Calif., has sold its south financial district headquarters to New Urban Properties for $10 million. The sale included two buildings totaling 50,000 square-feet of space. One of the buildings was completed in 1909; the other was constructed five years later and went through a two-story addition in the 1980s. Both will be vacant when Patelco completes its move at the end of February.
CUSO, Cloudworks In Partnership
HAGERSTOWN, Md.-Ongoing Operations, a disaster recovery CUSO, is partnering with Cloudworks, a provider of hosted applications, virtual desktop solutions and hosted exchange, to create a new suite of production-grade IT offerings specifically for CUs. The new Cloudworks powered by Ongoing Operations solutions suite will initially include Hosted Exchange and Virtual Desktop products. These fully managed solutions will allow credit unions to reduce their Total Cost of Ownership, shift large capital expenditures into predictable monthly service fees, and improve the end user experience, the companies said.
$10K In Mo. Savings Projected
HOUSTON-JSC FCU is the latest to move its item processing from a third-party provider to an in-house environment. The $1.5-billion CU cited streamlined workflow, ease of use and the projected savings as the primary reasons for selecting Bluepoint's ImagePoint item processing platform. Based on the credit union's current volume of 14,000 checks per day, Bluepoint estimated total cost savings of more than $10,000 per month, or $600,000 over 60 months.
