Jim Hanisch, executive vice president for CO-OP Network, said the credit union ATM and EFT giant expected that the network would survive the loss of the tax-exemption but that it might have to change some of its policies and procedures to give its credit union members the best ATM strategy in the new economic environment. "There would also have to be a decision, at the board level, about whether and how to change our structure in regards to banks being members," Hanisch said. Currently, CO-OP member credit unions which become banks can continue participating in the CO-OP but cannot continue as owners and cannot be on the board. "The board would need to look at the situation and make a decision," Hanisch said, and that would be on the ATM side and on the shared branching side. CO-OP owns the Shared Service Centers shared branching network. Both Sarah Canepa Bang, CEO of the Financial Service Centers Cooperative, the shared branching network headquartered on the West Coast, and Craig Beach, vice president with the Atlanta-based Credit Union Service Centers shared branch network said that losing the tax-exemption would likely help shared branching. "Since shared branching is a strategy credit unions can adopt to overcome difficult economic circumstances, I expect shared branching will continue and grow," Bang said. She pointed out that FSCC has had a good deal of experience now with having shared branching credit unions with overlapping fields of membership grow through their participation in shared branching. Beach agreed generally with the optimistic stance, noting that the advantages shared branching provides would continue, but threw in a caveat that credit unions' strong commitment to cooperation and cooperative arrangements would have to survive taxation for shared branching to continue. "Of course, if credit unions' spirit of cooperation fails the industry has far bigger problems than shared branching," Beach observed. Jim Park, CEO of the Credit Union 24 ATM and EFT network headquartered in Tallahassee, Florida, noted that Credit Union 24 is a for-profit cooperative and as thus already pays taxes. The biggest change taxation could bring, he said, might be that millions in patronage dividends that the network distributes to its credit union members might become taxable income. "Now when we make a patronage distribution it's tax-free to our credit union owners," Park noted, "but depending on how the taxation might be structured, those payments might become taxable income," he said.