adminCUNA’s new and bold advocacy goal for 2018 is to revolutionize the operating environment for credit unions. This agenda has four main points: reduce regulatory burden, expand and protect credit union powers, enhance payment security, and preserve the credit union tax status.
“We spent a good deal of time last year working with our members across the country, as well as with our league partners, to develop a national advocacy agenda for 2018 that builds on the success of our Campaign for Common-Sense Regulation from last year,” says Ryan Donovan, CUNA’s chief advocacy officer.
CUNA seeks to achieve this goal by:
- Reducing regulatory burden so that credit union members have access to more efficient and affordable financial services from credit unions. This includes:
- Advancing CUNA’s vision for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) under new leadership to fix burdensome rules and slow the pace of new rules;
- Pushing the CFPB to transfer supervisory authority of very large credit unions back to NCUA;
- Retaining the CFPB’s Credit Union Advisory Council;
- Making broader and deeper use of the CFPB’s existing exemption authority; and
- On a state level, working with leagues in states where attorneys-general and legislatures may try to implement overly burdensome regulations.
- Expanding and protecting credit union powers so consumers and small businesses can more easily access the credit union services they need and demand. This includes:
- Preparing legislation to modernize the Federal Credit Union Act;
- Continuing to encourage NCUA to allow credit unions to use supplemental capital to comply with the risk-based capital proposal, using this as a pilot for additional supplemental capital authority;
- Working with Congress to find a fix for the government sponsored enterprises that retains access to the secondary market for credit unions; and
- On a state level, working with leagues to pursue legislation that puts more competitive pressures on the federal charter including interstate branching legislation and field of membership modernization.
- Enhancing payment security to reduce the impact that merchant data breaches have on credit unions and their members. This includes:
- Pursuing legislation to subject merchants to strong data security and data breach notification requirements;
- Working with policymakers to strengthen the cyber infrastructure to protect consumer data from attack;
- Continuing to aggressively pursue entities that have allowed consumer data to be exposed in court, as CUNA did successfully in the Home Depot case and as CUNA is currently in the Equifax case; and
- On a state level, working with leagues that pursue data security legislation in their state capitols with the hopes that the pressure that can be put on them in the states will help CUNA advance legislation in Washington.
- Preserving the credit union tax status so that credit union members continue to enjoy not-for-profit cooperative financial services. CUNA expects an effort to enact technical corrections of last year’s tax reform bill which could put the credit union tax status at risk, and CUNA, leagues and credit unions will work to ensure no such provisions are signed into law.
