Compliance Blog

Written by Victoria Daka, Regulatory Compliance Specialist

NCUA recently released its May 2015 Report. This report includes articles on:

• Membership Requirements Eased with Associational Common-Bond Final Rule
• Chairman’s Corner: Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder
• Consulting Nominations Now Open
• Vice Chairman Metsger’s Perspective: Wizards, Angels and Crystal Balls, Oh My!
• Board Member McWatters’ Perspective: Room for Improvement
• Board Actions: New Share Insurance Coverage Proposed for Certain Escrow Accounts
• NCUA-SBA Partnership Builds Credit Union Small Business Lending
• NCUA Loans Build Credit Union Capacity to Serve Communities
• NCUA Resources Support Credit Union Efforts to Protect Older Members

While the May issue contains a number of articles that may be of interest to you, the Membership Requirements Eased with Associational Common-Bond Final Rule article, in particular, caught my eye. Under the final rule, three broad changes are made to the NCUA’s common bond requirements, which this article discusses. Of note from the article:

“The final rule grants automatic qualification under NCUA’s rules to certain categories of associations the agency has routinely approved for federal credit union membership. At the suggestion of commenters, the Board added five categories to the seven originally proposed.  In all, 12 new types of associational groups will receive pre-approval…

 The final rule also establishes a threshold common-bond test that an association not be formed primarily for the purpose of expanding credit union membership. More than 99 percent of associational applications reviewed over the past three years have met this new requirement. Additionally, the rule expands the criteria for the agency’s totality-of-circumstances test, used to determine whether an association that is not automatically approved satisfies the common-bond requirements to qualify for manual inclusion in a federal credit union’s field of membership.” 

For the entire article, you can access it here.  Also, for more information on the final rule, take a look at NAFCU’s Final Regulation here and blog here. 

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Programming Note. NAFCU's office will close at noon today and will also be closed on Monday for Memorial Day weekend. We will be back to blogging on Wednesday. Have a great weekend!