This article was originally published on LinkedIn 9/22/25
Scanning through some recent RSS feeds, one headline jumped out at me like a typo on a wedding invitation: Bankers Relentless to Tear Down Credit Unions. Of course, I clicked.
It turned out to be an article on RealClearPolicy by none other America’s Credit Unions President Jim Nussle. In this article, he shared his response to some research by the ICBA in which it claims that bank acquisitions by credit unions are harmful to the communities they serve. I wanted to get the full scoop, so I clicked over to the ICBA website. There I found a blog post by ICBA President Rebeca Romero Rainey titled New Analysis Shows Credit Union Acquisitions of Community Banks Harm the Communities That Can Least Afford It.
Let’s ignore that she conflates tax-exempt with taxpayer-subsidized and focus on the data. I’m admittedly no rocket surgeon, but for me, the numbers Ms. Romero Rainey extracted from this “exhaustive ICBA data analysis” just didn’t add up. For example …
Romero Rainey noted that “since 2010, credit unions have acquired 77 community bank charters with less than $50 billion in assets—with more than 60% of these charter acquisitions (49) occurring in the past five years.” She added that during that same period, “more than 80% of charter acquisitions involved a credit union with more than $1 billion in assets, while more than 40% involved a credit union headquartered in a different state than the acquired bank.” She said these things as if her readers should be appalled (and maybe they were), but my response was a yawn and a big, “So what?”
CUs Behind in Business Banking
She then offered a wide range of stats to show that credit unions – especially those that acquire banks – are bad for local businesses – especially in low-income areas. If you don’t have time to read this section of the post, I’ll sum it up for you: Community banks do more SBA lending than credit unions do.
Duh! I could’ve told you that. That’s why credit unions are so enthusiastic about the SMB market – because it represents a tremendous opportunity for them. Technology has been a barrier for decades, but I can probably name a half dozen digital banking providers that have introduced state-of-the-art business features in the past couple of years. Sure, community banks serve more SMBs than credit unions. That’s long been their jam. However, they should expect that margin to narrow considerably in the next five years. That’s my not-so-bold prediction.
What About Mortgages
The mortgage “data” was even more perplexing. Romero Rainey claimed that according to publicly available numbers from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, “total mortgage applications decreased in 57% of affected service areas following an acquisition.” Think about that for a moment. Did eager home buyers really say to themselves, “My bank just got bought by a credit union, so I’m going to stay in my apartment”?
She then added, “The amount loaned per approved mortgage application decreased in 61% of acquisitions, while the median mortgage loan amount across all areas decreased $20,000 per loan.” Let’s see here. The number of applications went down, and the average loan amount went down. Sounds like a soft housing market to me, not a credit union problem.
The Cooperation Pipe Dream
Consider this. The five largest US banks by assets, with their approximate total assets as of recent data, are:
JPMorgan Chase: ~$3.64 trillion
Bank of America: ~$2.59 trillion
Citigroup: ~$1.76 trillion
Wells Fargo: ~$1.71 trillion
U.S. Bancorp: ~$663 billion
That puts the combined total assets of these five banks at approximately $10.36 trillion. On the other hand, the total assets of all federally insured credit unions are somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.37 trillion. Community banks (those with fewer than $10 billion in assets) have a slight edge, with about $3.2 trillion in assets. In other words, all the community banks and credit unions combined have about half the assets of the top five banks.
Who should community banks (and credit unions, for that matter) be worried about? Maybe not each other. Credit unions have already proved that financial institutions can cooperate with each other for their joint good and still thrive individually. Is it too much to ask community bankers to take this to heart? And credit unions, would you welcome them if they did? I’ve heard worse ideas.
Parting Words
Community bankers, I have one more piece of advice for you. If credit unions buying banks is such a horrible thing, maybe just stop selling your fricking banks to credit unions. That said, credit unions and community banks, are you ready to extend the proverbial olive branch? Seriously. Your biggest competitors aren’t headquartered down the street; they’re headquartered in New York City skyscrapers.
Let me know what you think.