BALTIMORE — The National Federation of Community DevelopmentCredit Unions launched its 39^th annual conference onThursday with an announcement of a significant technologicalgrant.

More than 315 credit union and credit union industry haveregistered to attend the meeting that will run through Saturday atthe Sheraton Inner Harbor Hote

Also from National FederationConference:

• NCUA to Retrain Examiners on Small CreditUnions
• Home Offices, Fuzzy Slippers
• NCUA Promises More Scrutiny,Help

Federation CEO Cathie Mahon announced a $250,000 grant fromCitibank to serve as seed money to help the federation develop ashared banking platform that smaller credit unions generally andCDCUs in particular can use to share their back office andcompliance burden.

“We need to be building systems to help us aggregate ourcombined work and create efficiencies,” said Mahon, who took theNew York-based federation's reins last summer.

Pablo DeFilippi, the federation's membership director, said theplatform would enable CDCUs and smaller credit unions to moreeasily and efficiently provide services such as check cashing andremittance origination to their lower-income members, as well ashelp credit unions document what they do for both regulators andgrant applications and fulfillment.

Mahon's opening remarks included a story from Baltimore'sMunicipal Employees Credit Union, a sponsor of the federationgathering.

The $1.2 billion credit union had launched an initiative to helplower-income elderly citizens to open credit union accounts and, inthe course of the effort, a MECU employee met an 87-year-old manwho could not open an account because he had never had a piece ofidentification;

The credit union employee did the research and put in the effortto eventually document this man's life to the point where he hadenough identification to qualify for a state-issued ID and open anaccount at the credit union. Mahon said.