Cathie Mahon, Federation CEO, was profiled earlier this month by Arianne Cohen for Bloomberg Businessweek.
The CEO Who's Leveling the Playing Field Between Credit Unions and Big Banks
Cathie Mahon, who runs the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions, emerges as a champion for grass-roots financial institutions
Illustration: Sam Kerr
For millions of working Americans, the 6,000-plus credit unions across the nation can serve as a paycheck-to-paycheck life preserver. Credit union tellers can refer customers with low balances to in-house financial literacy counselors, and their loan desks frequently offer the best rates, and lowest fees, in the country. A third of these institutions - almost 2,200 - cater to low-income customers as standalone businesses or small chains.
What Cathie Mahon, chief executive officer of the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions, found is that credit unions often use the same processing software as big banks but spend more on it. "Our smallest members pay more for software than personnel," says Mahon, who leads a network of 235 CDCUs that share a mission of helping distressed communities. "They're negotiating one-off contracts all the time."
From 2007 to 2012, Mahon led New York City's Office of Financial Empowerment, which was then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg's initiative to educate, empower, and protect low-income residents when it comes to their financial resources. (Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, publisher of Bloomberg Businessweek.) In her role, which interfaced closely with credit unions, Mahon began working in 2015 with EPL Inc., a Birmingham, Ala., organization that provides core data processing to institutions. The goal: to develop a platform called CU Impact that would update account balances, power every auto bill pay, and fuel every ATM visit. In 2016 she and EPL negotiated a contract for members at a discount-unheard of in a business where investment in these types of platforms is very unusual.
Read the full article here.
Learn more about CU Impact here.