6 Takes on NCUA's New CUSO Registry
April 8, 2016 3:00 PM
Just days after the deadline for credit union service organizations (CUSOs) to register with the National Credit Union Administration, Credit Union Journal asked NACUSO conference attendees about their experience with the new requirement.
David Weed, chief operations officer, Service Financial Advisors, Portsmouth, N.H.
There were some challenges. We have a holding company CUSO that has different requirements than the subsidiary CUSOs. Also, depending on risk definitions, there were different requirements on the financial statements for the different CUSOs. When we registered, we did not show up as registered, so I had to call NCUA and talk with their IT folks. Then there was the acknowledgement issue. Messick & Lauer had to intercede to change the wording of the acknowledgement.
Valorie Seyfert, co-founder and CEO, CUSO Financial Services, San Diego
There were some issues that were not addressed, such as state-chartered credit unions that are privately insured. There was uncertainty about what is recorded. We provide services to a credit union, which then provides services to another level, so how should that be done? We tried our best to stick with the letter of the law, and then put follow-up information in the notes in case an issue came up later. Overall, I thought the registry was an unnecessary allocation of resources that we could have spent doing something else. It increased our costs with no addition of safety.
Kirk Drake, CEO, Ongoing Operations, Hagerstown, Md.
I did not personally do the registration, but our CFO said it was a big challenge because the registry was based on uploading individual records. We provide services to hundreds of credit unions, so that was a lot of work. The process needs to be improved to give CUSOs a way to do bulk submissions of records.
Sara Ott, SVP, Centennial Lending, Longmont, Colo.
It was easier than we thought it would be. We offer services to a number of credit unions, so listing those and the types of services was somewhat cumbersome. But now that it has been created I don't think it will be difficult to update going forward.
John Theobald, president, CU Appraisal Services, Dayton, Ohio
It was incredibly easy. I got one e-mail back from NCUA about our federal tax ID because there was some confusion with another entity. Once that question was answered, I got through the registration process in about 20 minutes.
Judy Sandberg, president, Mortgage Liquidity Solutions, Washington, D.C.
It was harder than I thought it would be. We had to go back and gather a lot of information on our customer lists. It was not necessarily difficult to do, but we did not have a lot of the information readily available, so we had to look it up piece by piece.
