The $25 million dollar Lower East Side People's Federal Credit Union, headquartered in Manhattan, has doubled the number of new accounts it is opening, partly in response to the Huffington Post's high profile effort called Move Your Money.
Move Your Money is a movement Post founder Arianna Huffington launched to help Americans move their accounts from the big national banks that were bailed out by the government.
Staff with the community development credit union reported that the numbers of people opening new accounts since the effort got started has jumped as well as the amount of money they are bringing to the credit union.
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Sherley Soto, member services manager for the credit union, said it's too soon to say if LESPFCU is seeing a trend or merely a blip from the increased publicity, but so far the CU is opening ten to fourteen new accounts a week when it normally opens five to seven. And the new members are different too. Whereas previously new members might be satisfied with initially depositing $25 to open a share account and maybe another $25 to open a checking account the more recent new members will deposit more and want to know more about the credit union's other products and services.
When she began with the credit union, eight years ago, Soto said it was relatively rare for a new member to have had a previous relationship with another financial institution. But now it's becoming a lot more common, usually with institutions the depositors have come to dislike, she said.
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