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NAFCU met Friday with staff from the Federal Communiations Commission’s (FCC) Consumer and Government Affairs Bureau to discuss issues regarding the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and the FCC’s efforts to combat illegal robocalls. Of note, NAFCU met with staff from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s office earlier in September to discuss similar issues.

During the meeting, NAFCU expressed its support for the commission’s effort to stop illegal robocalls. However, the association stressed the importance of ensuring that these efforts do not prevent credit unions from communicating time-sensitive information to their members, such as fraud notifications.

Additionally, NAFCU reiterated concerns related to certain factors the FCC will use to determine which calls will be deemed likely to be illegal. NAFCU and other trades wrote to the commission regarding the issue in August.

“Banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions place large numbers of fraud alerts, past-due notifications, and other servicing calls in a short timeframe, and these calls may have low average call duration and low completion ratios—three attributes that the Commission has suggested voice service providers and their third-party analytics service providers use to identify illegal calls,” wrote the trades. “We urge the Commission to state that these factors may suggest that the call placed is an illegal call only if those factors are present along with other indicia indicating the call is illegal.”

NAFCU has also urged the FCC to ensure that callers will be notified if they have been labeled as “spam,” and to provide channels to dispute the label.

The association has consistently engaged the FCC on robocalls and robotexts to ensure bad actors are stopped while maintaining pathways for credit unions to communicate with their members on time-sensitive matters.  Stay tuned to NAFCU Today for the latest out of Washington.