A credit union is a member-owned financial cooperative, democratically controlled by its members, and operated for the purpose of promoting thrift, providing credit at competitive rates, and providing other financial services to its members.
Many credit unions also provide services intended to support community development or sustainable international development on a local level, and could be considered community development financial institutions.
Worldwide, credit union systems vary significantly in terms of total system assets and average institution asset size, ranging from volunteer operations with a handful of members to institutions with several billion dollars in assets and hundreds of thousands of members.
Read more about Credit Union: Differences From Other Financial Institutions, Field of Membership, Not-for-profit Status, Global Presence, Corporate Credit Unions, Leagues and Associations, History
Famous quotes containing the words credit and/or union:
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 6:32.
“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)