NEW YORK — One week after its 33rd Annual Conference on Serving the Underserved, the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions hopes NCUA's practices towards serving underserved communities will match its policies about credit unions doing so.

NCUA Board Member Gigi Hyland addressed a town hall meeting tied to the conference and her comments echoed some of the points the Federation has been making, but now the Federation says is the time for NCUA's practices be changed in light of the policies.

According to Federation Executive Director, Clifford Rosenthal, “changing the culture of NCUA” is at the top of the organization's agenda. “If policy is not aligned with practice, we're wasting our time,” he said after the meeting. “We can't have fine-sounding principles on one hand and on the other hand see small, low-income credit unions being merged away.”

The Federation is also concerned about NCUA examiners penalizing so-called mainstream credit unions for accepting higher delinquency rates and write-offs which can come with serving lower income members.

“If we are going to serve the low-income community, we need to know that examiners are not going to see that as a negative and penalize our credit union,” said Melissa Marquez, CEO of Genesee Co-op Federal Credit Union (Rochester, NY) and chairman of the Federation's Governmental Affairs Committee during the meeting.