The US is struggling through a tough financial year, however Mike Beall, the newly appointed President and CEO of the National Cooperative Business Association believes “co-ops have a bright future".
Mike Beall, who was appointed as President and CEO in October, said the NCBA will be focusing on the financial crisis and in particular how the fiscal cliff will affect working families across the country during 2013.
Mr Beall, whose parents met while working at a credit union, has worked in the sector for most of his life. He believes in the future “there will be fewer credit unions, but more members" through consolidation. He added: "I think credit unions will continue to take the market share away from banks in particular and keep growing."
In December Mr Beall, who was formally the Chief Executive Officer of the Missouri Credit Union Association (MCUA), sent letters to all members of Congress to support the Credit Union Small Business Jobs Bill, which aims to enable credit unions near a business lending cap to continue to serve small businesses. If Congress passes this legislation, credit unions will be able to lend an additional $13 billion in the first year alone, helping small business create 140,000 new jobs, at no cost to taxpayers. However it ended in a “stalemate” between the credit unions and banks, with neither side getting their end of the deal.
“I think what you’ll see is a renewed effort on changing the law. I think you’ll also find credit unions looking at other alternatives to how they get there,” added Mr Beall.
He also noted the importance of other co-op sectors. Agricultural co-ops, he added, played a vital role in “making sure working families get good healthy options”, adding the NCBA would continue to communicate this to consumers.
He added that this year he hopes to get more young people involved in co-operatives. “Our understanding is that younger people, without knowing what a co-op is, are drawn to the co-operative principles in business and so being able to take the co-op principles and make them relevant to a new generation is something we’re going to try to work on this year,” he explained. “We definitely want to use more social media to reach young people.”
Overall he said promoting the co-operative model across the US was different to countries such as the UK. “It is harder to promote it, what you’ll find us do is promoting the principles. The co-op principles are the DNA of an alternative way of doing business, from what we’ve just seen in the greed on Wall Street;” he added.
He said there was nothing wrong with profit, but “the problem is when it goes on steroids, when it goes out of control.”
