BALTIMORE — The National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions launched its 39^th annual conference on Thursday with an announcement of a significant technological grant.

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

Also from National Federation Conference:

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

Federation CEO Cathie Mahon announced a $250,000 grant from Citibank to serve as seed money to help the federation develop a shared banking platform that smaller credit unions generally and CDCUs in particular can use to share their back office and compliance burden.

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

Pablo DeFilippi, the federation's membership director, said the platform would enable CDCUs and smaller credit unions to more easily and efficiently provide services such as check cashing and remittance origination to their lower-income members, as well as help credit unions document what they do for both regulators and grant applications and fulfillment.

Mahon's opening remarks included a story from Baltimore's Municipal Employees Credit Union, a sponsor of the federation gathering.

The $1.2 billion credit union had launched an initiative to help lower-income elderly citizens to open credit union accounts and, in the course of the effort, a MECU employee met an 87-year-old man who could not open an account because he had never had a piece of identification;

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