WASHINGTON–Although he’s more than two months from moving into the job, the incoming president of America’s Credit Unions is sharing some early thoughts on the position, what he believes he brings to it, the “finesse” required in political advocacy today, how he views small- and medium-sized credit unions, and more.
As the CU Daily reported here, America’s Credit Unions has selected Scott Simpson to lead the organization and succeed the retiring Jim Nussle. Simpson currently leads the California, Nevada and Utah leagues and has more than two decades in credit unions. He also has worked on Capitol Hill.
Below, Simpson speaks with the CU Daily about what he sees ahead and more.
The CU Daily: Why did you pursue this job?
Simpson: That’s a solid question. I have a great job and we’re doing cool things. I had kind of already determined that I was going to ride this one out with awesome people and an awesome purpose.
I’ve spent 22 years defending this business model and I started to contemplate my resume and wondering if it matched the moment. It seems like we’re at a fairly critical juncture, although I’ve said that at many points during the last 22 years.
It seemed like it might be a good idea and I’ve had a couple of people give me nudges along the way. Ultimately, I reached out to the board chairs I answer to and told them that I had determined to send in my resume. At that point it was sort of like throwing a dart; I wasn’t sure what would happen.
The CU Daily: The last four CUNA/America’s Credit Unions CEOs have alternated between either coming out of the credit union community or coming out of Congress. What do you think your perspective brings to the job?
Simpson: I’ve come out of credit union leagues, but I’ve worked for credit unions for 22 years. I think that’s a distinction I have. My pedigree really is almost exclusively government and public advocacy and then policy and politics.
Whether it’s a league meeting or a national committee meeting or AACUL, I always hear our organizational imperative, our number-one priority, is advocacy. That’s what I have done for a living from the get-go…I think I probably bridge the space between lawmaking, public policy, electoral politics and a pretty long career in the credit union space.
The CU Daily: You have a parallel with Bill Cheney (current president of SchoolsFirst FCU), who came out of the California and Nevada leagues in 2010 to become president of CUNA. Have you spoken to him?
Simpson: I spent the first couple of days in Southern California this week and Bill was there. We had some great conversations. What a statesman in the credit union space. He knows exactly what this job entails. He knows exactly what it means to run credit unions of a couple of different sizes. I consider him just an absolute mentor.
The CU Daily: Early in your career you worked on the Hill. Can you talk a little more about that?
Simpson: I was the executive director of the Utah Republican Party prior to going to the Hill. I got a call one day from (Sen.) Orrin Hatch. He had just gone through his 2000 election cycle and I was deeply involved in that reelect. We did a lot of groundwork for that campaign, which is not unusual behavior for a political party for our nominee.
He had been roughed up in that reelect. He had already served for 22 years and needed a little bit of hometown connection in his D.C. operation. Most of the folks that had gone back with him originally were up and out with full retirement after 24 years. A lot of the replacements had come from within the Beltway machine and there was some disconnect at home.
So, he asked me to come back in a kind of a unique position created for that moment and sort of just work alongside the chief of staff in managing Utah-related policy…It was about bridging to the political structure back home.
The CU Daily: Do you feel you came away from that with a decent understanding of how Congress works?
Simpson: Absolutely. There are distinctions between the House and the Senate and I worked in the Senate. I’m not sure I’m an expert…but several of my very best friends were chiefs of staff in those offices.
The CU Daily: What do you think you take away from your experiences with the Utah association and then the California and Nevada leagues that you bring to the America’s Credit Union’s job?
Simpson: I think the obvious view is the sort of difference in prevailing political ideology in those two states. When I came to California I think there was a fair amount of doubt about the right-leaning pedigree I brought with me and whether or not I would be eaten alive in Sacramento or by the 52 members of the U.S. House in California.
I tried to reassure them that in my view, game recognizes game, and the credit union business model has to endure wherever the partisan pendulum swings. I feel like I’ve been able to navigate that pretty well and I think the credit unions have found comfort in that and recognize that the skill set applies in legislative bodies regardless of where they may sit on the ideological spectrum.
I do think it takes finesse, it takes care to manage partisanship in this very polarized arena these days.
The CU Daily: You recently spoke with the CU Daily about Fuel, the new shared services organization that has been launched by the California, Nevada and Utah leagues. Could that model apply with America’s Credit Unions, or is it a different animal?
Simpson: I think it’s a slightly different animal, but I think every trade association is trying to manage that, trying to figure out how to deal with the services and business side of their organizations relative to their advocacy machinery.
The reason is advocacy’s retail frontage is fixed. We have 535 members of Congress. The same is true in every legislature. It’s fixed. Scale is not really how you drive value in advocacy. The business side of what we do actually does require scale. We live in a world where the number of credit unions is in compression and that’s having its impact.
So, in the three states that I have worked in we tried to figure out a model that could kind of preserve both paths.
The one check I’ll give you is (Fuel) is not an umbrella organization, it’s a foundational organization; it sits underneath the leagues, not on top of them.
I don’t know how (the Fuel model) would apply in a national trade association, although the thing that’s cool about it is it’s organized as a type one 501(c)3 supporting organization, which I think is the first of its kind in the credit union space. It would be interesting to think about that, but my number-one priority is to figure out what the organizational imperative is for the national association. I think I have a pretty good view of that, but we’ve got to figure that out. I don’t know enough yet about the specifics of resource allocation there to know exactly how to begin to influence that allocation to make sure we’re aligned with our core purpose.
The CU Daily: It’s early, but in the discussions you’ve had with the America’s Credit Unions board or members of the board, what have they charged you with doing?
Simpson: It will be no surprise to you that advocacy is our number-one priority. I heard it over and over again. Like I said, for 22 years I’ve heard that over and over again. What I’ve experienced in my own shops is we’re in an evolutionary trajectory from our early state as service aggregators and toward our future state as almost exclusive government and public advocacy organizations.
What I absolutely heard and I knew I would hear, is that advocacy is the number-one priority along with keeping the family together. And keeping the family together requires making sure that everybody’s needs are met by their national association. That’s the trick. That’s going to require threading needles and being thoughtful and not being afraid to collaborate. That may mean working with the private sector or the league family to try to figure out how to deliver services in a different way.
The CU Daily: You’ve certainly heard it while you were in your Utah/California/Nevada position: some members of the family, particularly small- and medium-sized credit unions, have often expressed that they feel they’ve become stepchildren in that family or they are not the favorites. How do you address their concerns about their viability and futures?
Simpson: I have enormous empathy for the weight they feel running their shops. They’ve got a regulatory environment that doesn’t contemplate their reality. So, I have a deep emotional connection to that. I’ve seen it.
I think it would be good to talk to the small credit unions in Utah and California and Nevada. I believe they would tell you that these leagues are connected. We’ve got a small credit union organization (in California) called the Shapiro Group, named after the one of the founding fathers of California’s credit unions. They call it the Quantum Group in in Utah. We are intensely trying to support them and deliver as much as value as we can to them to hold them up.
What’s amazing to me is I had a conversation just yesterday with a very large credit union CEO who was deeply sincere about how to help smaller credit unions thrive. So, I think there is plenty of that in our space. I think we’ve got lots of resources at America’s Credit Unions. We’ve organized around that in the three states that I’m familiar with. I’ve seen it amongst my league peers.
I know there are some sensitive feelings and I absolutely don’t discount those. I think that’s mostly driven by the very lonely feeling of having the full weight of regulatory bodies like a state department of financial institutions or the NCUA having them under their thumbs.
That’s where we can and should and will help.
The CU Daily: Do you feel there’s a way to help lighten that load for those credit unions, or it will just be market forces at work?
Simpson: I hope it’s not just market forces. That sounds rough. There are helping hands. I’ve seen it. It’s available. They help each other in extraordinary ways, and then there are the large credit unions that have a genuine desire to help along the way. I think it’s about rallying those resources.
And then there’s using the megaphones that we carry to amplify that voice that this one one-size-fits-all treatment of financial institutions on the part of the regulators and policymakers is not just irresponsible, it’s absolutely a waste of resources and not necessary.
The CU Daily: Speaking of amplifying voices: we hear all the time about credit unions telling their story, and yet credit unions have been pretty bad at telling that story. Why do you think that is and what is the credit union story?
Simpson: I go back to the last answer. They’re under the full weight of being one of the most highly regulated industries in the country. They, too, are trying to efficiently deliver services to their members. I think part of our challenge is that credit unions are so close to their daily work. They have people come in through their branches or their apps or their drive-throughs—however they engage—with the automated, frictionless behavior we’ve been trying to create.
What we haven’t done is slowed down our transactional life enough as credit unions to watch the miracles that are happening because cooperative finance exists in this country.
It’s true. I have two deeply significant credit union stories in my family that happened because of simple transactional behavior. It’s just credit unions doing their job, delivering on the promise of not-for-profit cooperative finance. That happens every day. A teller or a loan officer provides a product that allows a mom to keep enough money to put shoes on their kids’ feet. We let those (stories) just walk out the door like it’s a normal event, and I think that’s part of it.
I had a conversation with someone on the central coast of California last night. It was a midsized credit union that made a small, ITIN business loan to a guy to open a taco truck. Can you imagine what that could mean for generations that follow? This one baby step to economic freedom?
It’s not because we have a lack of those stories. It’s abundant. It happens every day. We just have to somehow figure out how to capture them and find the resources to amplify and accelerate those stories to catch up.
The CU Daily: What is your plan now in terms of moving into the job, moving to Washington?
Simpson: I’m punching the clock on November 3rd, so I’ve got work to do. I have no idea where in the District I’m going to live, but I’ve lived the Beltway commute and I know that there’s a price to be paid for that.
So, I’m going to try to work for simplicity and make it so that I can get to the Hill, to the office, to my home and to the airport quickly.
