What 'CU' Can Also Stand For, and Another Lesson Learned This Week - By Frank J. Diekmann - CUToday

 By Frank J. Diekmann - Frank is a Keynote speaker at this year's New Orleans Conference.

As I was placing my bag in the trunk of my Uber at the San Antonio airport last week, I couldn’t help noting his license tag began with “CU.” Occupational hazard, I suppose, but I immediately wondered if he was a member or had worked at a credit union, or, who knows, maybe a CU had financed the car.

Two minutes into the ride downtown—thank you, San Antonio, for not only not burying your river in a pipe but also for having an airport that isn’t another flight away from the city center—the driver asked the Uber-driver-mandated question about why I was in town.

“I’m here to speak to a credit union conference,” I responded.

And given the license plate, this is where I expected him to start talking all things credit union. San Antonio is, after all, among the strongest markets for credit unions in the country, with major CUs such as Randolph-Brooks, Security Service, United Texas, PenFed, Firstmark, and, fittingly, Alamo City among the high-profile brands in the market, along with many others.

“Oh. Are there credit unions in San Antonio?” he asked. 

We were driving past the office tower headquarters of Credit Human Credit Union at the time, by the way.

Realizing the “CU” on the license plate was not some sort of endorsement for financial co-ops (or even knowledge of them), and perhaps an abbreviation for Clueless Uber, I explained that there are indeed quite a few credit unions in the San Antonio market and that he might want to try one.

The moral of the story (once again): You just can’t tell your story often enough.

One more thing: As we approached my hotel a commercial came on the radio in which the announcer in a car commercial—as required by law--shouted, “Buy American! Buy Dodge!” Which was interesting, since Dodge is now owned by Stellantis, which is based in Amsterdam. 

The moral of that story, as we’ve all sadly come to learn in recent years: If you say something false often enough, it becomes true.

The Importance of Story Telling

A day after speaking the Education Credit Union Council meeting, I had the additional pleasure during NAFCU’s Strategic Growth Conference in Greenville, S.C., of getting to moderate a very interesting panel session on how credit unions are using social media.

While there, I had lunch with a group of credit union leaders, one of whom had only recently joined Truliant FCU in North Carolina. 

When I mentioned that his credit union had been the linchpin in one of most consequential events in U.S. credit union history, an event that changed the course of the entire industry in ways both positive and negative, he admitted he had no idea what I was talking about. (And I admit, I get that a lot.)

So, I explained the credit union’s history, back when it was still known at AT&T Family FCU and when in the early 1990s it had expanded its “field” of membership outside of the core sponsor. That led, of course, to a lawsuit filed by the banking industry that went all the way to the Supreme Court, where credit unions lost their case after the high court ruled the FCU Act said “group,” not “groups” when it came to field of membership. 

The decision was followed by a massive grassroots lobbying effort by a rather inexperienced credit union community that still fought and scraped and rallied enough support in Congress for a landslide vote to pass the Credit Union Membership Access Act, opening the way to the widely expanded charters we see today and a roadside littered with the bodies of CUs that never adjusted and a road full of multi-billion-dollar CUs that did.

That’s another story worth telling, and not just to the newbies at Truliant.

Can’t Be Forgotten

History should never be forgotten, as that’s where all the lessons lie. I thought about that again this week with the news Jim McCormack had died. Mr. McCormack was the president of the then Pennsylvania Credit Union League and was invaluable in working with then Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), who co-sponsored the CU Membership Act and who helped shepherd it through Congress (where it got out of committee by one vote).

Had McCormack and Kanjorski and so many countless, countless others who stuffed envelopes and held signs and made phone calls not pushed the stone up the mountain against a banking industry always working to kick it back down, then it wouldn’t just be the occasional Uber driver unaware of what credit unions are, it would be an Uber XL fleet of Americans also ignorant of the same.

That history and those people must never be forgotten.

Frank J. Diekmann is Cooperator in Chief of CUToday.info and can be reached at Frank@CUToday.info. Mr. Diekmann is also author of  several new book, including the brand new “The Last Lyric,” a humorous satire about a murder investigation at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in which every line of dialogue is either a classic pop/rock song title or lyric. Available on Amazon, Apple iBook, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords.  Mr. Diekmann is also author of a non-fiction compilation of the very best & worst he has seen and heard in covering more than 500 CU meetings and conferences, “501 Name Tags: How Everything You Need to Know About Business Can Be Learned at a Conference & Forgotten in the Trade Show.” It is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Lulu, and Smashwords.