The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) has announced that the terms “bank”, “banker” and “banking” now have to be elimination from all Credit Unions marketing nationwide.
It has been estimated to cost over $80 million dollars to change all the marketing materials for all Credit Unions across Canada.
Tim Klassen, President and C-E-O of Sunrise Credit Union, talks about how this will impact business going forward.
“The Bank Act has these restrictions written in them and they are meant to ensure Canadians are not being misled into believing they are dealing with a federally regulated bank,” noted Klassen. “Quite frankly we disagree with OSFI’s interpretation of this Bank Act. We think the Bank Act has been written in a way that does not allows credit unions to use the verbs ‘bank’, ‘banker’ and ‘banking’, to describe our business and until recently the federal government’s enforcement behavior aligned with this interpretation so this has been in the Bank Act for many, many, many years and it’s never been a problem until now.
Just on the Sunrise Credit Union website alone, there are over 2 thousand uses of the terms that would have to be changed, not including on printed materials.
