Interest-rate risk is a core competency, not only for directors, but for their credit unions, says Brian Smith-Vandergriff.
“If you do interest-rate risk well, you can be a better credit union,” Smith-Vandergriff, a partner at Financial Management Services Inc., said during a breakout session at the 2019 CUNA Finance Council Conference in New York City on Monday. “It you don’t do it well, you might as well divide up the capital and return it to the members. It’s inherent to who we are as credit unions.”
Smith-Vandergriff says interest-rate risk should not be “a regulatory pacifier,” but something credit unions use to make decisions.
Credit unions are subject to several different types of risk, Smith-Vandergriff notes. They are:
“The real reason we want to take this training back our credit unions is because we have to make it work in the real world,” Smith-Vandergriff says. “In some cases, the membership is shifting. In other cases, we’re fixated on being market related. But in either case, we have to pay attention to why these changes are taking place.”
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