Business View Magazine | October 2020

73 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2020 NEW YORK CREDI T UNION ASSOC I AT ION 13,000 by the early 1990s. But over the past two decades, the industry has experienced a shift seen in many other business sectors, and in the financial industry in particular: Consolidation. “When I began working in the credit union movement in the 1990s, there were over 700 credit unions in New York,” says NYCUA President/CEO William J. Mellin. “Today, there are less than 330. Yet, despite the decline in the overall number of credit unions, more and more New Yorkers are turning to credit unions for their financial needs. Currently, New York’s credit unions boast more than 6 million memberships. In other words, almost a third of the state’s population are credit union members.” That dichotomy— significant increases in memberships while the overall number of institutions declines — can be attributed to several factors. One of the key reasons for consolidation within the credit union industry is consolidation and business factors outside the NYCUA President/CEO, William J. Mellin