Project Credit Union - Day 6

To I&PS or not to I&PS?

The ever-helpful Dawn at UKCU explained that we wouldn’t need to register an Industrial & Provident Society first and then somehow turn it into a credit union. As far as I can tell, this is because the credit union application process is a “superset” of the I&PS application process and the PRA and FCA regulate both credit unions and I&PSs.

Maybe this should have been obvious to us, but it was never explicitly explained anywhere. I think our confusion stemmed from reading that a credit union has to be a type of I&PS and then seeing the separate application forms. Anwyay, I’m glad we’ve now got that cleared up!

Manifesto

As I mentioned on Friday, we’ve been struggling a bit with motivation on the project. So yesterday we decided to step back a bit and re-think what we’re trying to achieve. We remembered that setting up a credit union was only a means to an end and that, as Chris mentioned yesterday, we ought to double-check there aren’t any other banking “entities” that would allow us to achieve our goals.

As we’ve gone along we’ve understood more about our motivations for taking on this project and we decided to draft a “manifesto” to explain this a bit more. We also tried to think a bit about why we might stop working on the project. The criteria we came up with were a bit subjective, but we did at least agree that we need to focus on trying to “fail fast” i.e. keep trying to identify the main obstacles and work out whether we can realistically overcome them.

Anyway, the main upshot was that we decided to press on and spend at least another week on the project to see where we get to.

Reactions

Since we’ve started this project, we’ve had quite a few people contacting us on Twitter, in blog comments, by email and in-person. The reaction has been unanimously positive and supportive which has really helped with our motivation - thanks, folks!

We’ve been doing our best to respond to everyone, but apologies if we don’t get to you. Interestingly a number of people have offered to put money into the project which definitely suggests that it’s something that people care about.