Financial Services

Financial service cooperatives are composed of credit unions, banks within the farm credit system, mutual insurance companies, and a variety of financing organizations that lend to cooperative firms and banks. Table 4-4 shows that 8,627 of the 50,330 financial service cooperatives in the U.S. provided us with data. These "reporting" cooperatives account for $2.8T in assets, $265B in revenue, 376,000 jobs and $13B in wages. There are 325 million members, which as we noted previously, grossly overstates the total number of unique members within this aggregate sector. For example, many of the 91 million credit union members are also likely members of a mutual insurer.

The Cooperative Finance subsector accounts for the largest share of assets within the Financial Services economic sector, followed by mutual insurance companies, credit unions, and the farm credit system. Credit unions and mutual insurance companies account for the largest number of firms, establishments, memberships, and employees.

We report only on firms for which we have collected economic data (some firms did not respond to our requests for information), so that these numbers represent lower bounds regarding the full economic footprint of cooperatives in this aggregate sector. As we described in the previous section, we extrapolated to the full population for our impact analysis. As a consequence, the sum of direct impacts in the following subsections will be larger than the corresponding aggregate variables reported here.

Table 4-4: Financial Services CooperativesSummary of Key Variables
Economic Sector Reporting Total   Estab.   Assets Revenue Wages   Employees Memberships
  (firms)       (million dollars)   (thousands)
Credit Unions 8,334 8,334   29,029   760,971 40,218 9,421   236.55 91,537
Farm Credit System 104 104   1,497   186,451 11,884 1,009   11.17 401
Mutual Insurance 148 1,497   19,761   842,340 140,038 1,893   122.17 232,969
Cooperative Finance 41 43   43   1,072,196 72,691 757   6.25 27.891
Total 8,615 9,978   50,330   2,861,958 264,831 13,080   376.14 324,935

 

Figure 4-4.1: Combined Distribution of Financial Services Cooperatives