World Council of Credit Unions’ (WOCCU) 2021 Statistical Report findings maintain the global credit union movement’s chief priority is digitization.
“Despite the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to impact credit unions across the globe in 2021, they still managed to increase membership by 5 percent and grow assets by 9 percent,” WOCCU President and CEO Elissa McCarter LaBorde said. “For WOCCU to ensure that type of growth continues and credit unions are able to reach even more underserved populations, we need to gather more specific data from national credit union associations than ever before. While some data sets in this report are more complete than others, this is just the first step in our plan to offer a continuously clearer picture of the challenges and opportunities credit unions face in each region of the world.”
Digitalization serves as the global credit unions’ chief overall priority. Additionally, 81 percent of respondent credit union associations rank digitization at or near the top of their lists; 66 percent of respondent credit union associations identified membership and asset growth as another top priority; while regulatory reform was identified as a prime priority for 51 percent of those surveyed and served as the prime concern for respondent credit union associations in North America and the Caribbean.
The report determined that as of Dec. 31, 2021, there were 393,871,631 members of 87,914 credit unions worth $3.48 trillion in assets across 118 countries.