Jim Blaine’s blog SECU-Just Asking!  has continued almost daily for over four years.

His blogs have focused on SECU’s changes of policy, norms and practices which he and Mike Lord, his successor, developed over four decades.

These changes of direction included potential mergers, ending the partnership with Local Government FCU, considering business lending and expansion of the FOM.  But his early and most strident criticism was the implementation of risk based pricing on consumer loans.  The prior practice was to charge each member the same interest rate on loans of similar maturity independent of the members’ credit score.

Jim then exercised the owner’s option to recruit members who were open to his point of view to run for open board seats at the annual meeting.  The first effort was successful in that all three member-nominated candidates won over the board’s chosen.

But since that first success the board has enacted bylaw and other procedures to make it increasingly difficult for independent candidates to run–and then eliminating any “live” member participation at the owners’ annual meeting.

Jim’s SECU blog is sometimes caustic and personal.  But most often he tries to present his policy concerns with facts, logic, SECU’s experience, and occasionally referencing other credit unions.

Creating a Unicorn

He believed that long term success depended on creating unique value through  innovation rather than following conventional wisdom or practice.

He would reference the unicorn as a standard for differentiation–mythical or real.

The Basic Question Animating His Commentary

Recently Jim began a series of blogs on SECU’s use of the the 30-year mortgage as the industry standard for home lending.  A practice that includes periodic sales of those loans in the secondary market to minimize ALM risk.

This analysis began on September 18 with a blog titled: SECU “Reinventing The Wheel” With 1930’s “New/New” Mortgage Model.

Subsequent posts have demonstrated the advantage of ARMS for members in many circumstances, but not all.  You can read his follow on daily analysis at the site.

What’s At Stake?

I chose this issue to illustrate what I see as Jim’s basic concern with the many changes suggested and introduced by his successors over the past four years.  His critique is more fundamental than a difference of business judgment.

At the core is a profound  philosophical difference in what it means to be a cooperative.

Jim’s believes the credit union  is owned and exists strictly to serve the best interests of the members.  The most important corollary is the coop’s loyalties cannot be divided between other stakeholders and their business values.  Especially when choosing operational partners, interacting with regulators or even working with other credit unions.

Reading his critique of the industry standard of the 30 year mortgage, this concern comes through loud and clear.  Yes, many persons believe and have been schooled to think that this is the optimum choice when it may not or would not be the best option.

For this is a product designed, facilitated and controlled by two quasi-governmental entities  Fannie and Freddie.  They determine what is best for consumers and their financial duopoly, not for the  consumer requesting the loan.

When one looks at his other critiques, they often ask a basic question, Why is this action, change, or initiative in the members’ best interest?

What is occuring at SECU and many other credit unions is that industry stature and growth  are the primary drivers of change.   We see this reflected in mergers of long-serving, healthy independent credit unions, the buying of banks and outside businesses.  Most critically this disdain for members well being is demonstrated in the  elimination of any owner role in the election or other involvment at their annual meeting.

The coop model has been increasingly hijacked by leaders who inherited generations of member created financial wealth that they presume is now theirs to use as they alone determine.

One of the oldest lessons from all faith traditions is that a person cannot worship both God and mammon.  A number of today’s credit unions have given up on honoring members’ interest as the highest good.  Instead their goal is to become an industry asset leader, to paraphrase a recent CEO’s defense of mergers.

Or, as explained by the $9.0 billion Community America’s CEO Lisa Gitner (Kansas) in proposing a merger with the $3.5 billion Unify Financial Credit Union in Allen Texas:  “Now, we have an opportunity to expand our reach and create more access to CommunityAmerica for you, your families, and even more people across the country. I’ve always led CommunityAmerica with goals that are defined by how many people we can help–not by how much revenue we can generate. That is the driving force behind a transformative milestone in our credit union’s history–and the reason I am writing to you.”

Or to put the issue more bluntly, what consumer or member is going to choose this credit union because it will now “have a presence in 18 states and 22 markets, with branches in Arkansas, California, Nevada, Tennessee and Texas?”

An historical note to start:  Today is Constitution Day in the United States, because it was on this day in 1787, at the old State House in Philadelphia, that the final draft of the Constitution was signed.

From Jared Brock on capitalism’s financial incentives:

Turning anything — money, houses, scotch — into investment products skyrockets the price of things.

Financialization… the process of turning anything into an investment… skyrockets prices.

Think Taylor Swift concert tickets, Beanie Babies, baseball cards, cryptocurrency, etc.

Turning an item into an investment increases its price.

We’re currently witnessing this with the financialization of classic cars, high-end wine and scotch, and fractional investment in paintings.

A rare piece of canvas covered in colored paint is only “worth” $100 million if the investor knows he can rent that painting to a museum and re-sell it for $110 million in the future.

Because it’s more profitable to get rich by monopolizing stuff and lending it for a profit instead of actually working to create new stuff to sell, the rich are actually incentivized to bid up prices instead of creating new useable goods and services for others. Shareholders are actively trying to destroy our wellbeing for profit.

From a credit union observer:

“Cooperatives are the future of our ecosystem. It is how we take care of each other, how we take care of our community, and it’s how we can create generational wealth for all of us moving forward without being a part of this really extractive system.”

The question:  Do credit unions practice both these economic goals for example in mergers and bank purchases? Is being a part time coop good enough?

One of the immediate consequences of mergers of sound credit unions is the loss of their legacy and traditions created by generations of member service.

Often the continuing credit union tries to ameliorate  this wasting  by temporarily retaining the old name while consolidating operations and leadership under outside direction.  And shortly thereafter comes the new brand.

Terms such as “goodwill” acknowledge the real value that the relationships and roles of long-serving firms bring their communities in addition to  their economic contributions.

Family vs Public Business Success

A July 11, 2025 article in Bloomberg Opinion by Adrian Wooldridge suggests that the recognition and respect for a firm’s history may be a critical factors in the long term survival of family business versus that of most public companies.

Below are a few excerpts from his article Europe’s Best Family Firms Have a Secret Weapon Money Can’t Buy.  

Tradition can’t be bought. It’s fashionable in business circles to pass over Europe with a sigh. But the best European family companies have survived everything history can throw at them, and the majority of businesses that have survived for 200-plus years are European,

Part of the answer lies in longevity: The best European family companies have survived plagues, famines, world wars, recessions, revolutions — and continue to thrive. The Henokiens Association, an international club of 57 family businesses that have survived for at least 200 years, includes only ten non-European members, all Japanese. . .

The typical life expectancy of any company, family or non-family, is only a couple of decades, and is falling. What explains the longevity of the best European family businesses? . . .

Tradition. Tradition is a unique resource which newer firms cannot match regardless of how much money they have: Thousands of companies produce wine, for example, but only the Frescobaldis in Tuscany can boast that their ancestor, Dino, rescued the first seven Cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy from destruction.

Tradition provides impossible to quantify corporate benefits: pride in collective achievements; the self-confidence to make difficult decisions; and, perhaps most important of all, a sense of perspective–family companies are much better than public companies at resisting the pressure of quarterly results for long-term results.

For their part, big public companies often suffer from a “crisis of banality”: in a world that is hungry for meaning, all too many of them adopt identical virtue-signaling language or forgettable names or logos. . .

They should study the art of storytelling practiced by the likes of Berry Bros. & Rudd founded in 1698 selling coffee.  Even as some American tourists like to lament Europe’s supposed decline into a collection of monuments without any economic prospects, some of those monuments contain clever and innovative companies that will continue to thrive even after the giants of Silicon Valley have gone the way of Shelley’s Ozymandias.

The poem’s final stanza: