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I found them excellent. I use the online process. It has worked well for me. Assiniboine is merging with Entegra Credit Union. They are the parent companies.

Just wondering, do you actually do any significant business with CUs, AltaRed? It seems to me you are extrapolating from the bank model.

Loonie said
Just wondering, do you actually do any significant business with CUs, AltaRed? It seems to me you are extrapolating from the bank model.  

I no longer have any personal business with CUs but the business model applies as importantly, and perhaps more so, with CUs than with banks that are mostly associated with larger entities, e.g. Home Capital Group, Equitable Group, Manulife, Motive, etc. with customer base spread over multiple regions, almost nationally. HCG is one of the smaller ones and has about $20B in assets, and would rate 4th in assets if a CU. https://www.desjardins.com/ressources/pdf/f05-o00107-ccua-top100.pdf One could argue only the top 10, and at most the top 20 in that list can survive on their own and be competitive long term.

The few small CUs I know something about back in Alberta have pretty amateur executives and management, inexperienced (amateur) Boards, and who knows what for business controls and risk management. Membership doesn't always have the collective expertise to know better either. They are like amateur condo boards.

If it sounds like I am denigrating 'some' CUs, that is not the intention. It's just a fact of life that many of them don't have the resources or size to serve their members well. Members should be pushing their 'regional CUs' to consolidate for a variety of common sense reasons.

In the BC Interior, I wouldn't touch #24, #38 and #48. They need to get their shite together like Prospera did and merge, maybe taking one or more of #14 and #23 on the coast with them to spread loan risk across disparate regions.

Point being, #24, #38 and #48, all within ~200km of each other will lose ground on their own and still may too close regionally.

I have dealt with a number of CUs and I agree with Alta Red that there is an "amateurish" tone and approach in the way some are governed and in the way they operate.
Reading all the posts in regard to Pace CU and the way they serviced and advised clients - for sure, a very amateurish and unprofessional operation.
While banks are not perfect, it is those amateurish vibes at CUs which I have picked up more quickly in my own experiences dealing with CUs and I am referring not to my dealings with just the front line "associate" but with the Supervisor and Manager levels.

Yes, I knew you'd object when I mentioned Bernie, but he did borrow from big banks when he could. RBC was actually one of the few that refused him in his final months. You can't say it's irrelevant to retail banking because big banks certainly do wealth management and portfolios.

The point is that being a big FI does not mean you won't have incompetent managers, no matter how "professional" they are.

You got into this conversation for a particular reason, but you have made these points numerous times, and I got tired of reading them, so it was time to put out another point of view.

You have now switched to your usual excuse as to why small CUs won't survive, which is not to do with management professionalism or amateur board members but rather that you think they won't be able to handle the regulatory stuff and new product. (Personally, I have found that new banking products usually favour the house and that's why they invent them.)

An advantage of CUs is that they are not , as far as I can see, involved in that "other" side of the banking business that big banks do deal in. A large bank with international presence deals in a lot more than mortgages and GICs, with associated risks.

I know you're out of touch with CUs right now, but most of them do offer etransfers, bill payments and credit cards. The credit cards, as far as I can tell, are all offered through Collabria, and are provided through Mastercard or Visa, so you should get the same service as any other CC holder if you happen to be in Nepal, bearing in mind that the vast majority of people never get to such exotic locations and that phone and internet connections in Nepal can be iffy. Your level of suspicion is unwarranted.

Like everything, some CUs are better managed than others. I can clearly see that from the ones I deal with. I don't mind if they join up with another one or two others, but if they start imagining themselves being Meridian or Coast Capital, that will be their undoing for sure. From what I have seen, most of them are growing annually as more people understand that the big banks don't really serve their needs.

I got a phone call the other day from a friend in Alberta who had some cash to put into GICs and wanted my advice on where to put it. He said he and his wife have always dealt only with their local credit union in the past. These people are both retired professionals with good pensions and they travel all over the place. Obviously doing all their banking with a CU has not impeded them, and they intend to continue to do most of their banking with that CU. I didn't ask which one it was, but AB doesn't have the largest ones.

Something else worth remembering is that CUs don't siphon off profits to pay out large dividends to non-members.

As for "competitive and relevant", I get that much more frequently from my small CUs than anywhere else because they are more likekly to have good promos. I am keeping my acounts at CIBC , TD and Meridian for now, but they don't offer me anything I need that I can't get at a small CU. Meridian occasionally has some good GIC offers but they normally save them up for RSP season.

If regulatory demands get so out of control that they kill off smaller businesses, then we're in trouble. A well managed economy allows them to grow and thrive and doesn't snuff them out.

I could say a lot more but that's probably enough.
Well, maybe one more thing, and that is that it's unwise to assume anything is inevitable. Boxing oneself into a corner like that makes one less able to see what you didn't anticipate.

Loonie said

I got a phone call the other day from a friend in Alberta who had some cash to put into GICs and wanted my advice on where to put it. He said he and his wife have always dealt only with their local credit union in the past. These people are both retired professionals with good pensions and they travel all over the place. Obviously doing all their banking with a CU has not impeded them, and they intend to continue to do most of their banking with that CU. I didn't ask which one it was, but AB doesn't have the largest ones.
 

So what advice did you give them re where to put their extra cash - I am always looking for places to put extra cash, GICs included if attractive, so wondered what your recommendation was. Thx.

The CU model does serve the community well. That has never been an issue. CUs sprang up because banks were serving so many communities poorly, or not at all.

Loonie made a comment about the relative lack of CUs in AB and that may well be true, but if it is, it is because the AB government a long time ago got fed up with Eastern Canada based banking centroids ignoring the west and they established Treasury Branches (now ATB) to serve Albertans province wide. Many smaller communities had no broad based banking except via ATB.

I still see CU consolidation happening over time. Perhaps as few as 3-5 in BC total. The whole southern interior of BC could be served by one large regional CU with the critical mass, e.g. $15-20B in assets, to be competitive in the digital world that knows few boundaries.

I've read that 99% of Canadians have a bank account, lots of business for the relatively few banks to share. There are about 6 million credit union members for the 230 or so credit unions to share, and not sure how many of them use CU as their primary banking source (e.g. spouse and I are still nominally members of a bunch because we once bought a gic or opened a high interest account there). Pretty clear, especially with concentration of people into cities, there will be more CU mergers, perhaps especially involving the many small, rural-located ones. CU's in cities will probably do quite well (lots of hipsters) going forward.

canadian.100 said
I have dealt with a number of CUs and I agree with Alta Red that there is an "amateurish" tone and approach in the way some are governed and in the way they operate.
Reading all the posts in regard to Pace CU and the way they serviced and advised clients - for sure, a very amateurish and unprofessional operation.
While banks are not perfect, it is those amateurish vibes at CUs which I have picked up more quickly in my own experiences dealing with CUs and I am referring not to my dealings with just the front line "associate" but with the Supervisor and Manager levels.  

They're not all amateurish any more than all banks act professionally. The beauty of CUs in part is that there are real choices whereas the big banks are basically all the same.

In my own CU experience, I have dealt with the CEO at one of the small ones and he is excellent. At another, the rep I deal with is a CFP, several notches above the average rep (salesperson) at the banks. It's a matter of shopping around and seeing which ones are well run and really meet your needs. I have the advantage of living in Toronto where there are a number of CU choices.

That said, in general, the bigger they get, the less responsive they are to member needs. For example, yesterday I had to call DUCA because of issues with their website. It was the second time I'd had to call about the same problem. Only after about a half hour of conversation did she finally respond to my initial request. I also requested that she inform their tech dep't about the problem (which, although I now have a workaround, remains unresolved) but she was very reluctant to do this and I doubt she will. I wouldn't get that sort of canned response from my small CUs and it doesn't make me feel like a valued member-owner, which is key to a successful CU.
I strongly urge CU members to attend AGMs where possible; you can get a real feel for how the place is run and it helps you develop good questions to ask of the others.

canadian.100 said

Loonie said

I got a phone call the other day from a friend in Alberta who had some cash to put into GICs and wanted my advice on where to put it. He said he and his wife have always dealt only with their local credit union in the past. These people are both retired professionals with good pensions and they travel all over the place. Obviously doing all their banking with a CU has not impeded them, and they intend to continue to do most of their banking with that CU. I didn't ask which one it was, but AB doesn't have the largest ones.
 

So what advice did you give them re where to put their extra cash - I am always looking for places to put extra cash, GICs included if attractive, so wondered what your recommendation was. Thx.  

My recommendation was specific to their circumstances and there is nothing about it that you don't already know.