For Credit Unions, Now is the Time of Monsters

By Ed Speed

In the 1930s, Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned by Mussolini’s regime for his opposition to fascism. From his cell he wrote about the turbulence of his era, observing: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

Gramsci meant that when the familiar order collapses and a new one has not yet emerged, opportunists and destructive forces inevitably rush in to fill the void.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.”

I believe the credit union movement is in its own version of that moment. The old moral and operational framework that once defined us is fading, while a coherent new vision has not yet taken hold.

In that gap, forces have emerged that threaten the very soul of what credit unions were meant to be.

The Old World Is Dying

For decades, credit unions were grounded in a simple but powerful truth: we are here to serve our members, not to profit from them. The “common bond” was more than a legal definition—it was the lifeblood of the movement.  It grounded and rooted us.

We knew our members. We were their neighbors, co-workers, and fellow parishioners. Our lending decisions were made with more than numbers; they were informed by relationships, trust, and a shared story.

This was the moral order of the old world: people before profit, local control over remote bureaucracy, cooperative ownership instead of corporate extraction. It worked. Executives who would forgo doing well so that they could do good.  Credit unions grew not because they mimicked banks, but because they were different—trusted alternatives that put service ahead of size.

The Interregnum: Between Two Worlds

The shift began subtly. Field-of-membership rules loosened, then became meaningless. Growth strategies leaned toward expansion rather than deepening service. Consolidations became commonplace. Somewhere along the way, the language of “members” began to sound more like “customers.” Executive compensation became obscene, grasping and greedy.

The old framework eroded. Tragically, a new values-driven framework did not replace it.

What we have now is an uneasy bastardization — part cooperative heritage, part corporate ambition. And in this vacuum, the monsters have appeared.

The Monsters in Our Midst

These monsters are not fairy-tale beasts. Equally important, they are not simply individuals—though there are individuals who enable them.

The monsters are the cultural and systemic distortions that thrive when institutions forget their purpose. In the credit union movement, they take the form of mega-mergers that erase local identity, regulatory maneuvering that exploits tax advantages without delivering the cooperative mission that justifies them, growth strategies that measure success only by asset and branch count, and marketing facades that trade on the credit union brand while adopting the same fee structures and lending practices, and compensation that we once rejected.

Some argue these changes are simply the price of survival in a competitive marketplace. There is truth in the need to adapt. But there is a difference between adapting and becoming unrecognizable.

Credit unions were created to be structures of grace—financial institutions that embodied dignity, solidarity, and the common good. When we drift from that mission, even in small ways, we risk becoming just another financial provider—indistinguishable from the for-profit sector we were meant to complement, not copy.

A Movement at the Crossroads

If you lead a credit union today, you are operating in a “time of monsters.” That means the stakes are higher than ever. You can adapt to the monsters, prioritizing growth at all costs and treating the tax exemption as just another competitive edge and grab all of the salary, bonuses and buyout money you can. 

Or, you can recommit to your founding mission, measuring success by the depth of member relationships, protecting local decision-making, and ensuring your practices align with your cooperative purpose.

The second path is harder. It may mean slower growth, tougher board conversations, and resisting industry pressures. But it is the only path that ensures the credit union you hand to the next generation still has a soul.

I view this world through two lenses. One is that of a very successful forty-year credit union senior executive who has seen the industry’s highest ideals and its most disheartening betrayals. The other is as a credentialed Catholic theologian, trained to see economic life through the moral framework of Catholic Social Teaching. That tradition insists that every institution, including a financial one, exists to serve the human person, to protect the dignity of work, to foster solidarity, and to pursue the common good.

When I apply both lenses to the credit union movement today, I see our movement in tension with its own founding values—a cooperative heritage rooted in service colliding with market pressures and greed that tempt us to forget who we are.

Midwives of the New

Gramsci warned that monsters arise when the new world is not yet born. That birth will not happen on its own—it needs leaders willing to midwife it into being.

For credit unions, that means reclaiming the common bond—not necessarily in a narrow legal sense, but in a relational and cultural sense. It means investing in staff and leadership who understand cooperative values, not just sales metrics. It means holding ourselves publicly accountable for the member outcomes that justify our not-for-profit status.

Courageous Leaders Needed

The old world of the credit union movement may indeed be dying. I believe the credit union movement I knew and loved is on life support, at best. But that does not mean the future must belong to the monsters. It can belong to the leaders who have the courage to rebuild our movement’s moral center—those who refuse to worship scale for its own sake, and instead measure success by the lives they strengthen and the communities they serve.

The future will be written by those who resist the monsters and replace them with something better. Salvation remains within our grasp.

Edward Speed is the retired CEO of a multi-billion-dollar credit union and holds a master’s degree in theology. These days, he spends his time serving food, washing dishes, and sweeping floors at a Catholic Worker House, helping homeless senior citizens.