CUNA Chief Advocacy Officer Ryan Donovan spoke on CUBroadcast recently to discuss highlights and takeaways from CUNA's recent white paper, "Delivering Financial Products and Services to the Unbanked and Underbanked in the United States - Challenges and Opportunities." The paper, released earlier in May, was produced in conjunction with The Clearing House and other trade organizations.

It outlines the obstacles and potential solutions for improving financial inclusion, while underscoring how important it is to remove barriers to financial access for the unbanked and underserved. It also makes recommendations that policy makers should consider moving forward.

Takeaways from the paper include:

• “one-size-fits-all” approaches to addressing the unbanked and underbanked population are likely to be less successful in advancing financial inclusion
• products and programs already available in the marketplace that have successfully banked the unbanked
• recent legislative proposals for services (enjoy our tangent of Postal Banking) fail to get at the root cause of problems