A credit union is a member-owned nonprofit cooperative financial institution. They may offer financial services equivalent to those of commercial banks, such as share accounts, share draft accounts, credit cards, credit, share term certificates, and online banking. Normally, only a member of a credit union may deposit or borrow money. 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.
Norman Edward D'Amours is an American lawyer and Democratic politician who was a five-term member of the United States House of Representatives from New Hampshire from 1975 to 1985.
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 was a French group of cooperative banks, with origins in the European cooperative movement. In 2009, it merged with Groupe Caisse d'Épargne to form Groupe BPCE.
Groupe Caisse d'épargne was a group of French savings banks that were converted into cooperative banks by legislation enacted in 1999. Its roots went back to the founding in 1818 of the Caisse d'Épargne et de Prévoyance de Paris, initiated by Benjamin Delessert and the Duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt.
The Farmers' Bank of Rustico operated in the village of Rustico, Prince Edward Island, from 1864 to 1894. It is often considered to have been the first community-based bank in Canada. Founded and managed under the leadership of Father Georges-Antoine Belcourt (1803-1874), the Farmer's Bank of Rustico was established on April 21, 1863. The bank received Royal Assent for its act of incorporation at the Court of Windsor on April 7, 1864." The first president was farmer Jerome Doiron, and the first cashier was Marinus Blanchard, a local school teacher.
Credit unions are not-for-profit financial cooperatives. In the early stages of development of a nation's financial system, unserved and underserved populations had to 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.
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, Ste. Marie's Cooperative Credit Association.
Credit unions in the United States served 100 million members, comprising 43.7% of the economically active population, in 2014. U.S. credit unions are not-for-profit, cooperative, tax-exempt organizations. The clients of the credit unions become partners of the financial institution and their presence focuses in certain neighborhoods because they center their services in one specific community. As of March 2020, the largest American credit union was Navy Federal Credit Union, serving U.S. Department of Defense employees, contractors, and families of servicepeople, with over $125 billion in assets and over 9.1 million members. Total credit union assets in the U.S. reached $1 trillion as of March 2012. Approximately 236,000 people were directly employed by credit unions per data derived from the 2012 National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) Credit Union Directory. As of 2019, there were 5,236 federally insured credit unions with 120.4 million members, and deposits of $1.22 trillion.
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.
