Newsroom

September 22, 2016

NAFCU talks MDI CUs at NCUA

NAFCU staff met with NCUA's Office of Minority and Women Inclusion on Thursday to discuss supporting the credit union industry's more than 600 minority depository institutions.

A credit union can self-designate as an MDI if more than 50 percent of its board members are minorities and more than 50 percent of current and potential members are minorities. Currently there are more than 600 MDI credit unions; that compares with just 164 MDI banks.

NAFCU Senior Regulatory Affairs Counsel Michael Emancipator and Regulatory Affairs Counsels Andrew Morris and Ann Kossachev attended the meeting. They focused on the advantages and disadvantages of MDI designation and how to preserve MDIs.

The meeting also covered the agency's plan to release a diversity self-assessment tool on Oct 1. The tool is voluntary and meant to set a baseline for assessing a credit union's diversity in hiring and ongoing operations. NCUA will collect and aggregate the results from credit unions that want to share through Nov. 30, and the data will be reported to Congress next year.

Earlier this month, NCUA offered a checklist, business case and interagency statement regarding its voluntary diversity and inclusion policies in its Letter to Credit Unions 16-CU-05.

Last year, six federal regulators, including NCUA, issued a final interagency statement establishing standards for financial institutions to follow in creating and maintaining diversity policies and practices.