Two Former CUs Make Cover Of April Banking Journal

WASHINGTON – Two former CUs that became banks in 2005, have made the cover of the ABA’s Banking Journal. In its April issue, the magazine has a lengthy interview with Larry Duckworth, CEO of the formerly $1.1 billion OmniAmerican Credit Union, now OmniAmerican Bank and a slightly smaller interview with Gary Base, CEO of the former Community Credit Union, now ViewPoint Bank. The interview with Duckworth was a rarity for the CEO who went through the entire conversion without ever talking to the press. In the interview Duckworth revealed that both of his parents had been credit union managers and that his grandfather had founded a credit union. He described it solely as a business decision and the article described it as “helpful” that OmniAmerican had never joined shared branching or surcharge-free ATM networks, which the article described as “potentially entangling alliances.” For his part, Gary Base is quoted as saying that at the time of the conversion “there was not much difference between our type of operation and that of a bank” and both CEOs indicated that their institutions had ceased to be credit unions in spirit long before they actually made the jump to becoming mutual banks.