LAS VEGAS -- With a rousing opening that featured Blues Brothers impersonators rocking the crowd with "Soul Man" and other familiar hits, NACUSO welcomed more than 400 people its annual conference here.
The full agenda explored a range of timely issues nearly all with the theme of embracing change, including changes to the regulatory landscape. Guy Messick, general counsel for NACUSO, along with Brian Lauer, associate at Messick & Weber P.C., presented a session on CUSO 101. The two discussed a number of current regulatory topics such as NCUA's Supervisory Letter on third-party relationships and the impact of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act, which allowed consumers to dispute inaccuracies in their credit reports. Messick and Lauer also provided the latest updates on unrelated business income tax.
Earlier this year, NACUSO President/CEO Tom Davis said one of the association's initiatives would be developing a political action agenda and regulatory advocacy program. To that end, NACUSO hired Dollar & Associates, a firm founded by former NCUA Chairman Dennis Dollar, to help jumpstart those efforts.
"Enough of the gloom and doom," NACUSO offered. "Even though we are facing significant challenges in today's operating environment, NACUSO believes that this is the time and the season for creating new ideas, promoting possibilities, identifying opportunities and implementing solutions for credit unions."
Davis likened today's credit union landscape to words from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities: "the best of times, the worst of times; the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness; epoch of belief, epoch of incredulity; season of light, season of darkness; spring of hope, winter of despair. We had everything before us, we had nothing before us."
"This is the time to reinvent ourselves and redefine the industry," Davis said.
And that controversial Treasury Department Blueprint proposal that calls for reorganizing the supervision of the financial services industry and creating a single financial institution charter with one set of regulations that could potentially eliminate the credit union charter?
"DOA," Davis said without a hint of pause.
--msamaad@cutimes.com
