WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – The beginning of any year provides a good place to look at some of the baselines of the industry. Which credit union members carry the highest card balances, which processors have the most of the CU market and which CUs have the most ATMs? The answers can be somewhat surprising. Who would have guessed that the credit unions whose card programs had penetrated their membership rolls most deeply would all be below $500 million in assets? (The largest, Northern Massachusetts Telephone Workers, headquartered in Lowell, is $394 million.) Likewise, while there is one credit union with over $500 million in assets and one with over $1 billion in the top five CUs whose members have the highest average card balances, the remaining three are not nearly as big and still manage to keep their CU cards at the top of the wallet. And who would have guessed that State Employees' CU, the second largest CU in the country and headquartered in Raleigh, N.C., deploys more than twice the number of ATMs than the next nearest CU ATM deployer? Finally, who would believe two of the five top CU debit processors are cooperatives owned by their member credit unions? They are. See all these facts come to life in the charts here.