The Credit Union ‘Movement’ is a Mirror of America

  By Ed Speed

The accelerating predatory consolidations, along with the self-serving and self-enriching behavior of some CEOs and boards in today’s credit union “movement,” are not aberrations. They are not temporary distortions caused by technology, competition, or a handful of poor decisions by a few outliers. They are a mirror of America.

What is unfolding across credit union balance sheets, boardrooms, and regulatory corridors is an accurate reflection of American society itself: our habits, our anxieties, our evasions, and our loss of moral seriousness. The credit union “movement” has not simply lost its way; it has absorbed and now reflects the national culture that formed it.

The “movement” now sits atop enormous assets and extraordinary regulatory privilege, yet shows a striking thinness where conscience should reside. We celebrate growth while avoiding hard questions of stewardship. We invoke “members” while steadily erasing their voice and quietly appropriating generational capital. We praise governance while training boards to approve rather than to govern. Strategy has replaced judgment. “Best practices” have replaced moral discernment.

This is not a uniquely cooperative failure. It is an American one.

Increasingly, a Rarity

The cooperative model depends on something modern America is increasingly unable to produce: morally formed volunteers willing to serve without compensation, prestige, or control. Credit union boards were never meant to be résumé builders or ceremonial bodies. They were meant to be acts of civic responsibility, ordinary people bearing limits, learning restraint, and exercising authority on behalf of neighbors rather than themselves.

We no longer have a society capable of reliably forming such people. Using a sports metaphor, the “movement” simply does not have an altruistic volunteer “bench,” and there are few coming up in the draft. Don’t expect a narcissistic culture to produce selfless volunteers. 

We have trained citizens to express grievance, outsource responsibility, and avoid accountability.  Then we wonder why boards grow passive, deferential, and dependent on management.

Drinking the Cultural Waters

Credit union leaders did not invent this posture. They learned it by drinking the same cultural water as everyone else.

This is why consolidation is now framed as inevitability rather than choice. When boards lack confidence in their own moral authority, mergers become destiny. When regulators stop asking uncomfortable questions, permission replaces oversight. When democratic consent is treated as a procedural nuisance rather than a moral requirement, member property becomes transferable with minimal disturbance.

These are not technical failures. They are moral ones.

We should stop pretending that today’s excesses in the “movement” are caused by a few bad actors. Self-enriching CEOs, accommodating regulators, and compliant trade associations are not the disease; they are symptoms of interior cultural rot. Mega-mergers, regulatory abdication, and the quiet appropriation of locally built community wealth did not corrupt a healthy cooperative “movement”; they revealed a “movement” already hollowed out long before the paperwork was signed.

‘Impossible to Ignore’

At this point the resemblance is impossible to ignore. The modern credit union “movement” looks like a wealthy adolescent living off a generational trust fund it did not earn and will not protect, intoxicated by growth, enamored of instant gratification, armed with regulatory privilege, and utterly unprepared for the consequences of the power it wields.

We now inhabit a national culture that treats dissent as disloyalty, questions as obstruction, and restraint as weakness. Boards are trained to manage optics rather than exercise authority. Regulators speak the language of safety and soundness while avoiding the harder work of defending member ownership, member capital, and democratic control. Growth is baptized as mission, and anyone who objects is dismissed as nostalgic, naïve, or irrelevant.

This is not leadership. It is institutional adolescence.

I no longer have any interest in saving a “movement.” I hope the consolidations and mega-mergers accelerate. I want the illusion to end as quickly 

The Biggest Concern

For cooperative credit unions to survive, the “movement” must die.

What concerns me most is not regulatory intervention, but regulatory permission. In American life, judgment rarely arrives as punishment. More often, it arrives as allowance. Credit unions are being given what they insist upon: less oversight, fewer questions, wider latitude, until their own excesses become toxic. This is as true of our civic life as it is of cooperative finance.

No governance reform can substitute for leaders, or volunteers, capable of self-restraint.

Here is the final truth: individual credit unions can still hold back the darkness in their communities; but,  the “movement” that once claimed to unite them is already dead.

The Last Time

This is my last op-ed voicing concerns about the “movement.” (And the trades shouted, “Amen!”) I will, however, take Frank up on his offer to submit future articles focused on sustainable profitability and operations.

In addition, I will volunteer to help any individual credit union team or board that genuinely wants to thrive under true cooperative principles. Communities still need them. Members still benefit from them. But that future will not be secured by slogans, hiking hills, or league-approved language. It will be secured only where conscience still functions, and where service is once again understood as obligation and vocation, not entitlement.

Be well.
Be at peace.
Vaya con Dios.

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. email: [email protected]