Credit Union Fee Sensationalism

In the Wheaties for you Wallet link list for yesterday I noticed something from Jesse Robbins, the prominent voice of Black Rock Federal.  While I applaud Jesse for attempting to make the already public CU data more readily available (the NCUA site is not consumer friendly), it shows the top ten CU’s annual numbers from December, so naturally, Navy Fed is at the top and looks like they are just raking in the dough. 

The Fees per Member graph that Jesse also put up is a much better gauge of how a particular CU fees their membership.  All this data is wonderful, but it must also be taken with a grain of salt.  As with any set of data, the results of analysis are only as good as the data that gets put it.  There are, and will always be, many anomalies in call reports so it is vital to analyze data with different denominators, whether it is by member, employee, number of branches, asset size, market share, or number of checking accounts.