A credit union, a type of financial institution similar to a commercial bank, is a member-owned nonprofit financial cooperative. Credit unions generally provide services to members similar to retail banks, including deposit accounts, provision of credit, and other financial services. In several African countries, credit unions are commonly referred to as SACCOs.
The Desjardins Group is a Canadian financial service cooperative and the largest federation of credit unions in North America. It was founded in 1900 in Lévis, Quebec by Alphonse Desjardins. While its legal headquarters remains in Lévis, most of the executive management, including the CEO, is based in Montreal.
Little Canada is a name for any of the various communities where French Canadians congregated upon emigrating to the United States, in particular New England, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A variant of Canadian French known as New England French is still spoken in parts of New England.
Gabriel-Alphonse Desjardins, born in Lévis, Quebec, was the co-founder of the Caisses Populaires Desjardins, a forerunner of North American credit unions and community banks. For his contribution to the advancement of agriculture in the province of Quebec, he was posthumously inducted to the Agricultural Hall of Fame of Quebec in 1994.
Caisse populaire acadienne ltée, operating as UNI Financial Cooperation, is a Francophone credit union based in New Brunswick, Canada whose members are primarily Acadians. UNI's administrative headquarters are in Caraquet on the Acadian Peninsula.
Cooperative banking is retail and commercial banking organized on a cooperative basis. Cooperative banking institutions take deposits and lend money in most parts of the world.
Banque Populaire is a French group of cooperative banks part of Groupe BPCE. The central entity is controlled by 15 independent regional banks and also operated under the CASDEN and the Crédit Coopératif subsidiaries.
Natixis is a French corporate and investment bank created in November 2006 from the merger of the asset management and investment banking operations of Natexis Banques Populaires and IXIS.
Groupe Caisse d'épargne was a French cooperative banking group, with around, 4700 branches in the country. Its origins go back to the founding in 1818 of the Caisse d'Épargne et de Prévoyance de Paris, France's first savings bank. The group was active in retail and private banking, as well as holding a significant stake in the publicly traded investment bank Natixis. In 2009, it merged with Groupe Banque Populaire to form Groupe BPCE.
Credit unions are not-for-profit financial cooperatives. In the early stages of development of a nation's financial system, unserved and underserved populations must rely on risky and expensive informal financial services from sources like money lenders, ROSCAs and saving at home. Credit unions proved they could meet demand for financial services that banks could not: from professional, middle class and poorer people. Those that served poorer urban and rural communities became an important source of microfinance.
The Province of Ontario Savings Office (POSO) was a financial institution established by the Government of Ontario, Canada in 1922 to provide a government-owned alternative to banks. The POSO was closed in 2003 when its assets were sold to the Quebec-based Desjardins Group cooperative of caisses populaires to form Desjardins Credit Union. In 2011, Desjardins Credit Unions in Ontario were transferred to Meridian Credit Union.
America's Credit Union Museum is located in Manchester, New Hampshire, on the site of the first credit union founded in the United States. The museum is housed at the original location for St. Mary's Cooperative Credit Association, renamed in 1925 to La Caisse Populaire Ste.-Marie, or "Bank of the People", St. Mary's. In 1996, the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Building at 418–420 Notre Dame Ave.
Pierre Hevey was a Canadian-born American priest, and second pastor of Ste. Marie Church in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the early 20th century. He played a key role in the establishment of the first credit union in the United States on November 24, 1908, to help his parishioners save money and access credit at a reasonable cost.
Attorney Joseph Boivin was a co-founder and first president of the first credit union established in the United States, St. Marie's Cooperative Credit Association. The son of Stanislas and Marie (Doucet) Boivin, Joseph Auguste Boivin was born September 21, 1866 in Coaticook, Quebec, Canada. Mr. Boivin contracted polio as a child and lost one leg to complications of the illness. He studied at Saint Hyacinthe College, Coaticook, and lived for several years in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec. Boivin immigrated to Manchester, New Hampshire, on October 1, 1883. He studied law in the offices of Burnham, Brown, Jones and Warren, and later with Judge George W. Prescott. He was admitted to the New Hampshire Bar in December 1899 and, subsequently, to the Hillsborough County Bar Association. He studied at St. Anselm College in neighboring Goffstown, where he also taught French. He married Miss Emma Gilbert of Lewiston, Maine, in September 1901; they had four children between 1902–1907: Dominique, Therese, Gilberte and Gertrude.
Groupe BPCE is a major French banking group formed by the 2009 merger of two major retail banking groups, Groupe Caisse d'Épargne and Groupe Banque Populaire. As of 2021, it was France's fourth largest bank, the seventh largest in Europe, and the nineteenth in the world by total assets. It has more than 8,200 branches nationwide under their respective brand names serving nearly 150 million customers. It is Europe's largest bank by revenue, ahead of BNP Paribas and HSBC. It is considered a global systemically important bank (G-SIB) by the Financial Stability Board.
Crédit Mutuel is a French cooperative banking group, one of the country's top five banks with over 30 million customers. It traces its origins back to the German cooperative movement inspired by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen in Alsace–Lorraine under German rule, in the 1880s. Crédit Mutuel was a member of the International Raiffeisen Union (IRU).
Canada has significant per-capita membership in credit unions, representing more than a third of the working-age population. Credit union membership is largest in Quebec, where they are known as caisses populaires, and in western Canada.
The presence of the French language and the New England variety of French, in New Hampshire, has been around since the foundation of the state. Workers in the area even developed their own dialect of French.
