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Since the Credit Union Membership Access Act of 1998 was enacted, credit union membership in Missouri has climbed from 1.2 million to 1.4 million.
Nationally, credit union membership rose from 70 million in 1998 to 84 million today, according to Rosie Holub, president of the Missouri Credit Union Association. Those numbers equal less than 10 percent of the consumer finance market in Missouri, Holub added.
Credit union officials thank the Credit Union Membership Access Act for stimulating recent growth. That legislation, which essentially reversed an earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision, allowed credit unions to expand by merging multiple unrelated fields of membership (occupational, associational and geographical). This meant, for instance, that a particular credit union which had as its traditional members the employees of a certain company could solicit new members from any resident living near the credit union.
"Credit unions are not going away," said William Emmons, an economist for the Banking Supervision and Regulation Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. "Banks can forget about that. Now, it's just about how credit unions are going to grow and compete."
Emmons and Frank Schmid, a senior economist with the reserve bank, published their latest take...