Plain vanilla is just fine thank you

Mike Welch's February 23, 2000 column on change or die was not only patronizingly offensive but wrongheaded in its inference that you can't survive without share drafts, credit cards, risk based lending, indirect lending, ATMs etc. You can survive as a plain vanilla operation - not only can you survive you can do well by the credit union, your members, your staff and of course by yourself. My staff salary structure is about 20% above national average. We have one employee per 925 members as compared to a national average of one employee per 365 members. Our weighted average rate on loans is 7.8% and we pay a flat no minimum dividend rate of 4.25%. Sixty-eight per cent of our loans reprice quarterly. Our capital to risk assets ratio is 11.5% but more importantly only 6% of our outstanding loans are on an unsecured basis. We no longer enjoy significant growth but it isn't because we don't push affinity services. It's because we won't violate conservative lending policies for the sake of growth alone. To buttress the discredited theory that you can't survive unless your growth rate is exponential, Mike infers that credit unions that failed to adopt the all things to all men (full service) approach make up the majority of credit unions that have "disappeared." In point of fact the majority of credit unions that failed to continue as legal entities in the past 30 years did so due to sponsors going out of business and their attempts to become full service providers, not because they choose to remain plain vanilla niche marketers. In short Mike you've got it just backwards. Attempts to ape commercial lenders' strategy and tactics have caused more failures and concurrent losses to the NCUSIF than our imputed myopia in sticking to basics. And the best (worst) is yet to come. Your mega buck credit unions and their wanna be contemporaries will bankrupt the NCUSIF with their growth at any price lemming-like rush to failure. Mike, somebody, NCUA examiners, my peers, industry observers, (sometimes mislabeled experts) have been telling me for close to 25 years of my 44 year career that I couldn't survive reasonably well with a plain vanilla approach. Well Mike, I am still here and doing well and I am still tired of snide smarmy remarks labeling those of us who will outlive industry innovators, as the Colonel Blimp of Finance. By the way you are equally off base in laying the turmoil and divisiveness at NCUA at Chairman D'Amours' door step. Try scrutinizing the actions of Wheat and Dollar in their naked power struggle and their populist posturing. John U. Barker CEO Hudson River Teachers FCU