Credit unions don't want the added regulatory burden of complying with the Community Reinvestment Act, but 40% of those surveyed said they would add an underserved area to their field of membership if the law were changed to let them do so.
Those are among the findings of NAFCU's recently released Flash Report. The survey found that 66.7% of respondents have an underserved area as part of their membership and of those, 97.2% have outstanding loans in those areas.
In addition, if credit unions were allowed to expand their fields of membership to include certain underserved areas-which has been proposed in several bills that Congress has considered in the past few years-40.4% of respondents would consider adding such areas.
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But the respondents are overwhelmingly fearful of a government mandate to serve the underserved, such as expanding the Community Reinvestment Act to include credit unions, as some on Capitol Hill have proposed. The survey found that 79.6% said such a move would increase their compliance costs, though 88.6% said it wouldn't have much of an impact on the number of loans they make to underserved areas.
The survey found that respondents were true to the credit union mission of people helping people. All of them give financial donations to community groups, 98.1% have their employees volunteer time to such organizations, and 79.2% have co-sponsored special events.
NAFCU usually has responses from about 80 of its more than 800 members, and this provides the basis for the data.
Although the economy appears to be improving, respondents were pessimistic about the demand for certain loans during the next year.
Respondents all over the country had negative expectations for new-vehicle loan demand and were negative about their expectations for used-vehicle loans in all areas except Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia where they expect demand will be unchanged.
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