During today’s NCUA Board Meeting, the NCUA Board issued a proposed rule on public unit and non-member shares (which we summarized here) and also received updates on the agency’s new Office of Credit Union Resources and Expansion (CURE) and the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund.
Martha Ninichuk, Director of the CURE Office, reported that CURE has established a new portal for Low-Income Designated Credit Unions, is providing credit unions with technical assistance on cybersecurity and other issues, and is also working on modernizing NCUA’s credit union chartering process to make it more streamlined and transparent. NCUA Chairman Rodney Hood said that he applauded CURE’s cybersecurity initiatives because cybersecurity is one of the biggest threats to credit unions today.
NCUA Board Member Mark McWatters said that chartering a credit union takes money and stated that the agency should consider establishing a supplemental capital regulation that could help newly chartered credit unions have start-up capital. Credit unions in Canada, Australia, Great Britain and other jurisdictions already have the regulatory authority to issue such capital shares.
The Share Insurance Fund, which distributed $160 million dollars in dividends to federally insured credit unions earlier this week, currently has total assets of approximately $16.2 billion dollars. In the first quarter of 2019 the Fund had net income of approximately $16 million dollars after $39 million dollars in insurance loss expense.