Gigi Hyland: 'Challenging' Times for Credit Unions

NCUA Board Member Discusses State of Credit Unions, Top Threats
Gigi Hyland: 'Challenging' Times for Credit Unions
What is the current state of the nation's credit unions? Healthy, says Gigi Hyland, board member of the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), but still in need of some focused plans for the future.

"Overall, credit unions remain healthy and strong," Hyland says in a new podcast interview with Tom Field, editorial director for Information Security Media Group. "But just like with other types of financial institutions and businesses in general we see in the paper day in and day out, our nation's credit unions are really finding the current economic environment pretty challenging. The financial statistics that we gather every quarter really reflect, I think, the collective difficulties that our nation's credit unions are experiencing."

Over the past three years, Hyland says the aggregate net worth ratio for all federally insured credit unions dropped, from 11.51 percent to 9.91 percent. Add to that net-worth-ratio decrease the doubling of delinquency and loan charge-off ratios, as well as the fluctuation between negative and marginal profit levels, and it's easy to see that credit unions -- like other financial institutions -- have some rocky roads ahead of them.

"They have not been immune to the effects of the economic climate," Hyland said.

Partially as a result of tough economic times, credit unions have suffered increased incidents of insider crime, Hyland says. She lists the top five information security threats facing credit unions:

  • Employee theft of data;
  • Employee misuse of data;
  • Debit and credit-card processor issues, ala the Heartland Payment Systems breach;
  • External hacks, where an outside party gains access to a credit union's system;
  • Third-party risks from service providers.

Hyland also discusses how credit unions are complying with the Identity Theft Red Flags Rule, as well as what she expects to see in terms of regulatory reform from pending federal legislation.

For more details, please listen to the recorded interview.


About the Author

Tracy Kitten

Tracy Kitten

Former Director of Global Events Content and Executive Editor, BankInfoSecurity & CUInfoSecurity

Kitten was director of global events content and an executive editor at ISMG. A veteran journalist with more than 20 years of experience, she covered the financial sector for over 10 years. Before joining Information Security Media Group in 2010, she covered the financial self-service industry as the senior editor of ATMmarketplace, part of Networld Media. Kitten has been a regular speaker at domestic and international conferences, and was the keynote at ATMIA's U.S. and Canadian conferences in 2009. She has been quoted by CNN.com, ABC News, Bankrate.com and MSN Money.




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