If you judged the state of credit union acquisitions by the 2026 announcement count, you’d think the market had gone quiet. Only four or five credit union purchases of banks have been announced this year. But the quiet is an illusion — and understanding why matters for any credit union building its growth strategy. On a recent episode of With Flying Colors, I talked with Michael Bell and Justin Gingerich of Honigman, the firm that has closed more credit union-bank acquisition

When a major credit union fraud makes headlines, the instinct is to treat it as someone else’s catastrophe — a failure so large it couldn’t happen at your shop. Credit union attorney David Reed takes the opposite view. As he told me on a recent episode of With Flying Colors, it would be almost criminal not to use a moment like this to ask the harder question: would we catch that here? Reed knows the terrain. A former general counsel, he also spent ten years on a supervisory c

For the first time in three decades, the rating system that shapes nearly every supervisory conversation in the credit union world is being rewritten. The CAMELS framework — Capital adequacy, Asset quality, Management, Earnings, Liquidity, and Sensitivity to market risk — last saw a comprehensive overhaul in 1996. The current proposal, moving through the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), would touch every banking regulator at once, which is why the N

A call I wish I’d been wrong about On May 6th, NCUA conserved Jackson Area Federal Credit Union, a 1953-chartered, self-designated Minority Depository Institution serving Jackson and Hinds County, Mississippi. Within days I recorded an episode saying I thought there was a serious problem — possibly a large insurance-fund loss, possibly embezzlement. I wasn’t guessing blindly. I was reading a call report that didn’t hang together. The institution reported about $162 million in