Dade County Federal Credit Union has been approved for a major expansion that will add nearly 2 million potential members to its field of membership.
The $1.2 billion-asset credit union recently received the green light from the National Credit Union Administration to expand into Broward County, which has a population of 1.95 million people.
Dade County FCU currently serves more than 101,000 members across Miami-Dade County; its potential field of membership before this expansion is roughly 2.6 million, based on the number of people who live, work, worship, attend school or operate businesses in that area.
As a result of this expansion, the credit union's full potential field of membership would be 4.6 million. No other community-chartered credit union in Florida appears to have gotten that large through a field-of-membership expansion, according to the NCUA.
The Sweetwater, Florida-based credit union already has branches near the Miami-Dade/Broward County line and an extensive shared-branching footprint within Broward County. But Dade County FCU said it still regularly turns away would-be members from Broward County who are not eligible.
Because the two counties are part of the same combined metropolitan statistical area, the expansion would normally have qualified as a "presumptive community" under NCUA rules. But the issue was complicated by the two counties' combined population, which is well over the 2.5-million limit set by the NCUA for any proposed community.
So the credit union applied for consideration through the NCUA's open hearing process. The public hearings are the result of changes to NCUA's field of membership rules in 2018, NCUA spokesman Ben Hardaway said.
The NCUA's chartering and field-of-membership manual now allows an applicant to gain a community charter for an area with multiple political jurisdictions with a population of 2.5 million people or more. Dade County FCU was the first credit union to request a
Dade County FCU had been exploring ways to expand into neighboring Broward County to "evolve and grow" with the South Florida community it has served for more than 80 years, its CEO George Joseph said during the hearing.
"While Miami-Dade County's population has grown significantly since our founding, Broward has exploded," Joseph said. "Many of our members have migrated north. And our counties are tightly linked, which makes this expansion a necessity."
Andrew Morris, senior counsel for the National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions, said the two counties have "clear economic and social cohesion." He added that without the ability to expand, credit unions face more consolidation.
Mergers in the banking space are resulting in service "deserts," and credit unions such as Dade County FCU can fill those gaps, Morris said.
Other large expansions in the credit union industry have been announced recently —
The banks say credit unions' ability to easily add groups to their membership bases
Alex Sanchez, president and CEO of the Florida Bankers Association, said the Dade County case is just another example of credit unions wanting to be tax-exempt banks and continue to grow into geographical areas or serve different clientele that have nothing to do with what a common bond used to be for a credit union.
"So as an example, the milkman credit union is open to everybody who's either bought milk, spilled milk or cried over milk," he said. "And that's not what it was intended when these institutions were created."
To obtain the NCUA's approval, Dade County FCU had to explain both the common interests and interactions between Miami-Dade and Broward counties, as well as the credit union's ability and intent to serve the entire new service area.
Afterwards, the open hearing allowed Dade County FCU and other interested parties to present information relevant to the requested service area. Sanchez said representatives of the Florida Bankers Association did not attend this hearing. In fact, no one spoke against the expansion during the hearing.
Dade County Federal Credit Union reported net income of $9 million through the first half of 2023, an 11% increase compared with a year earlier, according to call report data from the NCUA.
