MADISON, Wis.–The World Council of Credit Unions has sent a letter in support of the Global Partnership for Financial Inclusions’ (GPFI) work to help reduce the regulatory burdens on credit unions in order to help them promote financial inclusion of unbanked and underserved individuals.
World Council said it strongly supports the continuing work of GPFI resulting in regulatory reform using the “concept of proportionality” to limit unnecessary regulatory burdens on credit unions that come from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and other International standard setting bodies.
“In short, credit unions should not be subject to regulations that are designed for large, internationally active banks, and the concept of proportional regulation should result in credit unions being exempt from the most burdensome aspects of these international rules,” WOCCU said
WOCCU called on GPFI to allow credit unions to make digital disclosures to consumers without the need to provide paper disclosures as well as urging credit unions having reasonable access to all payments system infrastructure on fair terms. It further urged the GPFI to recommend that international standard setting bodies like the Basel Committee develop data protection standards to apply to merchants and other non-financial entities.
Finally, WOCCU asked GPFI to clarify that its recommendations concerning assessments of financial inclusion should not result in new reporting requirements on credit unions, because such reporting requirements would be a new regulatory burden with significant compliance costs that would make it more difficult for credit unions to promote financial inclusion. In addition, credit unions have no reason to discriminate against their member-owners and have shown no history of doing so.
A copy of the WOCCU letter is available here.