Project Credit Union - Day 9

Twitter conversation

Friday started with an interesting Twitter exchange where we were put in touch with someone trying to do interesting things with credit unions. We’ve arranged to meet and we’re looking forward to see if anything comes from it.

Expanding the wiki

James has done a great job of moving our notes out of a Google Doc and into the wiki. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep on top of the inevitable wiki gardening duties to ensure that it remains relatively sane.

James also recently renamed the wiki (well, the GitHub repo) from credit-union to bank to remind ourselves that our high-level goals don’t necessarily tie us to credit unions.

Credit union bank accounts

While the Co-op appears to be the most obvious choice when deciding upon a bank account for your credit union, it would appear that you might also be able to use other banks. Lloyds TSB appears to be the only other bank that explicitly offer a credit union account but they don’t publish their rates so it’s not clear how it matches up to the Co-op’s Community Directplus offering. Both HSBC and Natwest offer Community accounts that might be suitable for a credit union; although with free banking if your turnover is up to £100,000 it doesn’t match up to the Co-op’s free banking on a turnover of up to £1,000,000.

Bitcoin

A couple of comments about crypto-currencies on our Day 1 blog post got me trying to understand a bit more about them and how they might apply to what we’re trying to do. While I don’t think it’s something we’re interested in right now, I do appreciate Mark taking the time to try to explain his thinking and for giving me a reason to learn a bit more about these developments.