Filene Fill-In Ep. 40: Credit Unions' Acquisitions of Banks and Thrifts

Filene Research Institute

So, a professor, a lawyer and a CEO walk into… a podcast…? No this isn’t the set up for a joke…But it is an amazing tale of a credit union growth strategy with seemingly no downside that we could find at least. This is the tale of credit unions’ acquisition of banks and thrifts, as told by David Walker, professor & director emeritus of the Capital Markets Research Center at Georgetown University -- who authored our research report … and Michael Bell, the lawyer who has represented financial institutions across the U.S. through more than 30 M & A transactions in the past 5 years and about 20 of the 22 or so instances of credit unions acquiring banks. And we also hear from Gary Regoli, the CEO of Achieva Credit Union in Clearwater FL -- the first credit union in the country to do this type of acquisition back in 2015. That’s right, there’s been at least 22 since that short time ago and all signs point to the trend accelerating forward. All together these three tell a full story deeper that the research alone. We start with David Walker...