Hard on the heels of our paper on the US experience of mortgages (see post on July), which is now on general release here, we are now sharing with members a report called ‘The Business Case for a Credit Union Central Finance Facility‘.
Movement-owned central finance facilities (CFFs) have been key to the success of credit unions around the world. Basically functioning as a ‘credit union for credit unions’, CFFs use the aggregate scale and buying power of the movement as a whole to obtain the best rates safely possible on investments, to assure credit unions of dependable access to liquidity at wholesale borrowing rates, and to employ the professional expertise to do so safely and profitably. Using case studies from the US, Canada and Australia, this paper shows how CFFs were instrumental for credit unions to evolve into full-service financial providers. The paper suggests possible ways forward to creating CFFs in Ireland and Britain, where they do not yet exist.
We intend to put this paper in the public domain in October, and it will be available on our website for download.
