“There are things we ask credit unions to do that we don’t even read.”
That moment lands hard in this conversation. Not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s honest. In a regulatory environment where checklists tend to grow endlessly and expectations often feel implied rather than explicit, NCUA Chairman Kyle Hauptman is naming something many credit union leaders have felt for years but rarely hear said out loud.
When Sarah Snell Cooke, host of The Credit Union Connection, sits down with Kyle Hauptman, the discussion quickly moves beyond headlines about deregulation and into something more fundamental. What is actually worth everyone’s time? What rules still serve a purpose, and which ones exist mostly because no one ever stopped to question them?
For more on the 8 regs currently up for review, click to our Advocacy page here!
The backdrop is the NCUA’s broad review of outdated, duplicative, and overly burdensome requirements. But the real intrigue comes from how Kyle frames the effort. This isn’t about cutting for the sake of cutting. It’s about cost-benefit discipline, examiner clarity, and the idea that every document required should earn its place. Along the way, he draws comparisons to private deposit insurers, talks candidly about box-checking, and hints at a deeper shift in how the agency thinks about resilience and accountability.
What stands out after watching is how much of the conversation is about focus. Kyle repeatedly returns to the idea that time is finite for both regulators and credit unions. Every unnecessary filing, every outdated instruction, quietly pulls attention away from things that actually reduce risk or serve members. His analogies are simple and effective. Not every patient needs an MRI. Not every rule deserves to live forever.
There’s also a subtle but important reframing of power dynamics. Kyle emphasizes that guidance is guidance and rules are rules, and that blurring the line helps no one. Examiners shouldn’t feel pressure to enforce “extra special” guidance simply because it’s attached to a rule. Credit unions shouldn’t feel like they’re violating something that legally can’t be violated. Clarity, in his view, is a form of fairness.
Perhaps the most revealing moments come when the conversation turns to the future. Kyle talks about resilience not as a buzzword, but as a practical outcome. Smaller credit unions drowning in compliance noise are not resilient. An industry afraid to try new technologies because the regulatory path feels opaque is not resilient. And a regulator that never revisits its own assumptions isn’t either.
Threaded throughout is an open invitation. Credit unions, leagues, and even anonymous commenters are encouraged to speak up about what feels pointless, outdated, or misaligned with reality. The message is consistent: if something doesn’t make sense anymore, say so. The door, at least for now, is open.
NOTE: The below AI-generated transcript to the video might not be 100% right, but are any of us really?
Sarah Cooke
Hello. Welcome everybody. My name is Sarah Snell Cooke. I’m your host here today at The Credit Union Connection, and every day, really, I’m here with Kyle Hauptman, NCUA, Chairman, welcome.
Kyle Hauptman
Hey. Thank you. Thanks for having me, absolutely.
Sarah Cooke
Thank you for being here. Appreciate it. So I saw the announcement about the deregulation project, and obviously deregulation has been a priority for the Trump administration. But can you talk a little more in detail about why this is happening now at the NCUA?
Kyle Hauptman
Yeah, I mean, like you mentioned, is a priority for the administration more broadly, but it’s an opportunity for us to go through with a holistic view a lot of times, or a lot of agencies like ours, you know, we are a monopoly provider of services. Pretty much these things just kind of pile up over time that someone says, you know, what we should ask for? We should mandate this. And it’s not necessarily a bad idea. And then it goes on the list, and everybody has to do it. And then a little while later this, we got to ask for you should ask for this document for everybody. We should ask for this. We should have for that. And it isn’t necessarily what you would do if you were trying to do cost benefit from if you were looking at it from the beginning, you know? And this was an opportunity to just take a fresh look at these sometimes written outdated. And listen, credit unions came to us and say, you know, there’s old letters like, I know you guys aren’t thinking about them, but as long as they’re out there, right? People think that, you know, they have teeth. You know, there’s extreme examples. People say you still got stuff out there on Y2k, you know, and, and, you know, things written in a different time, like we were talking about, you know, sometimes we ask people to put something in the local newspaper that’s kind of from a different era, you know, post it for your employees in the break room, you know. And it’s like they might be remote, you know, like some of these things are outdated. It was, we were, I think it’s a very healthy look for us to use our resources to do what Congress told us to do, and spend time on the things that are important.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Ask somebody who cut their teeth on Y2k, yeah. Definitely been a minute since then, and obviously things pile up like you were saying. So one of the segments is the corporate credit unions. That’s one of the items you’ve put out for comment, one is removing the requirement that their Alco committee have at least one board member, and the other is to remove the filing requirements related to their annual report and the external audit. Can you speak a little bit to those as we were talking earlier, you said there’s some excitement around one of those.
Kyle Hauptman
Well, you gotta it’s cost benefit, right? It’s not that any of the people who put these in place, they were not crazy. They were wide awake, you know, sober people who were probably trying to do a good thing. But we look at our time. It has to be worth the enforcement. It has to be worth US checking for it, right? Everything we ask you to do it better be worth your time and ours better than any other use of time to ask for it, why it’s not late? Why? Why it’s why it’s late, why isn’t it on time? Is it in the right format? And we have to reassess, is it really worth their time and ours? Because there’s, you know, there’s lots of things we could do, but we have finite time, and is it taking our time and their time away from something that’s more important? So that’s the bar. It’s not. Is it useless? Whoever put these things originally? And I don’t even know when this one went in, exactly who was behind it? The bar is doesn’t meet the bar. That’s the best use of our time and attention. Everything. We make somebody send us. We got to make sure it’s in right format. We have to check that they did. We have to chase them down if they didn’t. And it’s like, Wait. Are we sure there isn’t more important things we could be doing. And I like to talk once while, remember I said we’re a monopoly provider. The only way that isn’t true is for chartering. There’s obviously the state’s state charters, right? You can be regulated at the state level. So we have competition there. In a way. You can be federal or state charter and there is, you know, companies that do private deposit insurance, and I like talking to company that does that, because they’re the only credit union deposit insure in America. There’s nobody else I can compare notes with. And I asked what they spend their time on, and they have a very they have market forces, which we usually don’t, and what do they ask for? Like, no, we don’t spend time on that. We don’t spend time on that. We are uninsured, are we? Is whatever we’re doing going to substantially reduce the chance we have to write a big check? That’s what every insurer? Yep. So I know I’m giving you broad here, but that was just not something that we were spending a lot of time looking at. Like, why are we asking you to send us a document that is not a priority for us when we’re doing the exam? You know, because almost all of these things you can request if they matter, but not every patient needs an MRI or a CAT scan. You know.
Sarah Cooke
Exactly, yeah, perfect analogy. I like that.
Sarah Cooke
So the corporate credit unions segment, for example, removing these filing requirements, or having or not having a board member on the Alco committee. What is there a tangible difference for credit unions? What are they going to get out of that? Or corporate credits?
Kyle Hauptman
Put it this way, I think the answer would be determined by the corporate credit unions, right? And I think the answer is yes. Okay, they have more flexibility, instead of us telling them who’s going to be on their committee, and their committee is not going to be handicapped by what they you know, because they’re meeting our requirement, not what they think is best, right? But I did see a LinkedIn post where somebody said, Oh, this is going to make life much easier on corporates, right? So they get to decide whether or not these things are of a lot of benefit, but it still doesn’t mean it wasn’t duplicative or doesn’t make sense. If we can already access this record and that record during the exam. There’s no reason to have this extra reg that says you must, you know, you must provide us with x document when we can get look at all these documents already. You know? Yeah, it’s just it makes it easier for someone to know they’re following the rules. And I think it makes the job of our examiner better, because you’re not as doing as much box checking, if that makes sense, right?
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, yeah. And so with the removal, there was also some regs where you were removing the appendix is to make them guidance, because that’s really what they were, or a letter to credit unions. Is this kind of a does this signify a change in the future at the NCUA?
Kyle Hauptman
What would you say that is?
Sarah Cooke
In previous administrations, there had been Democrats that had, yeah, these guidances or letter what should have been into rules?
Kyle Hauptman
Yeah, so obviously, you know, I always say our only product here is words on a page, right? It’s regulations, that’s guidance, that’s letters to credit unions, that’s the website. You know, there’s various things we have, the examiner manual, that’s words on a page that’s important. Our chartering information, all we have is words on a page, but some of those words are legally different. There’s rule making, which have the force of law, and then there’s guidance, and if guidance is important enough that you can violate it, because, remember, you can’t violate guidance. It’s impossible, because it’s just we even have a pass the rule here at NCUA, no regulation by guidance. Right? That we may put guidance out because people have asked and they want some more clarity, but you cannot violate it. If it’s important enough to get written up for, then it should be a rulemaking, and that’s on us. So we didn’t really want to have two categories of guidance, because the guidance that was attached to a rulemaking sort of felt like it was special guidance. You know that it was guidance that you really were supposed to be like it was guidance. Yeah, it was like extra special, Super Double, secret guidance. You know that you because, why is it attached to a rule? There is a difference. Some are attached to rules and some are not, and they’re not really legally, any different right, but it just gave that view when you’re important, yeah, we think it’s important enough that it’s truly worthy of writing somebody up some kind of violation, then it should be a rulemaking.
Sarah Cooke
It’s like your boss, what he says carries more weight than somebody who’s like on your same level, when it’s in a rule.
Kyle Hauptman
Now I understand why people do it. You’re already thinking about the same topics. We’re looking we’re you know, so you know the guidance, but we found it simpler, and I think it’s easier. Remember, this is also about our examiners. I want a job where it’s fairly clear what the expectations are, and the things I’m doing are worth my time and everybody else’s, and you don’t have, you know? Well, it’s just guidance, yeah, but it’s guidance attached to a rule. Our examiners feel had the same pressure. This guidance looks different. Why did you attach to a rule? Other guidance isn’t it must be different, right? And so they’re in that position too. So this is as much about simplifying the job to focus on what’s important for our examiners as it is for credit unions, right?
Sarah Cooke
And after the recent risks, again, kind of from coming down from the administration, I’m sure that helps with the relief on the agency as well.
Kyle Hauptman
You’re doing traffic. You’re like, give tickets to people who you know, you think their driving is a little sketchy. I don’t want to do that. That’s very awkward. Give me a speed limit, exceed it or not by X amount, right? That’s what I would want if I was in that position. I don’t want to have to, like, I don’t know, and have sort of arbitrariness, or what we also heard from examiners. I’m asking for this, this document. I got to make sure you do it. I’m not going to look into it. You’re not going to I have to do it because it’s on my list, and that’s my job, right? That happens, and that happens when you stuff just piles up over time. I need this document. I’m not going to read it, you know? I’m not going to read it. You have to give it to me. Why? And I have to look for it because it’s on this list, and it’s a box checking exercise. Meanwhile, the people in the private market who do deposit insurance don’t do all that stuff. So anyway, oh, by the way, I’m being mentioned. You mentioned the phrase riff. We did not do a riff. At least here at the government we can lay off layoff. People got a generous buyout offer, and some took advantage of it. Nobody lost their job who didn’t put their hand up and get a nice check for it.
Sarah Cooke
I understood. Yep. And so as you’re moving forward as an agency, what more can we look for in the next rounds, and how is that going to guide the agency as a whole?
Kyle Hauptman
Well, for one, we are always open to communication, because folks here, yes, it may be the examiners, but they haven’t always been on the other side of the examination table, and so they can bring things up to us. Yes, we’ve done a lot of work going through all these things, but it’s still useful if a credit union or yourself, or through a league says, you know, see this thing we do, I cannot imagine this is useful for anybody, and it’s been there for years, and it was put there long before anybody here, you know, was it NCUA? So there’s no pro, you know, there’s no ego involved. They can suggest stuff to us. And I say this often more for rulemaking. I. Um, when it comes to new things like digital assets and artificial intelligence, that you’re not waiting on me. I’m waiting on you, right? We don’t sit down and just come up a whiteboard every day. The things we could do, what happens is there’s an issue one way or the other. And you know, like people came to us and brought some websites, you know that we’re keeping physical boxes of documents from the 80s, like, why? Well, because you, unlike all the other agencies, don’t have a document retention policy, you know, like the IRS does, the SEC does, you know, they can’t ask you from stuff from 1985 right? Literally, right? I’m like, Oh, we didn’t really realize that, yeah, that came from credit unions, right? Especially the smaller ones. You’re like, you know, we want, as an insurer and just as an American, we want a massive diversity of financial institutions in this country. We don’t want to be Australia that has four banks for the whole country, right? We want lots of nooks and crannies. And despite all the all the consolidation, listen, this country still has over 4000 banks and 4000 credit unions. That’s 8000 different deposits. 1000 different depository and citizens. We got our handful of big banks, but most countries just have, just have their version of Citigroup B of A wells, and there’s a place for them, but it’s also better as an insurer that we have all these little nooks credit unions that do different activities and look different and serve different audience. That makes them much less likely to have problems at the same time. At the same time, you want diversification in your portfolio as an insurer, too. My point being, if one of the reasons that small credit unions don’t want to be started, don’t want to exist, want to merge away the job of running it was kind of a labor of love, you and I both know that sometimes, and then somebody retires, and nobody really wants to take over, because it’s not a great job. You know, you know, you don’t get paid a lot of money. And if they can say these credit unions are going away and you NCUA, don’t want that for a number of reasons, I just said, here’s something. Can this be different? Can it be shorter? Can it be done less often? Can it be done a different way? Are you sure you’re doing you know? So when you say, What’s next, I just, I didn’t want to leave this interview without telling people, right? We have you got to ask NCUA just Google it, right? There’s that page. You can attach documents if you want. You can do it with your email address or anonymously. People can always set up. Me. Khauptman@ncua.gov, I’m pretty easy to reach, and so there’s that, but we are looking at when we announced our the items that you have in front of you. We do intend on releasing more, but I just don’t want people to sit back and wait and see mode, you know, okay, I want them to be proactive and say, you know, what’s really annoying and pointless, or the way this language is, we had one, for example, that had said since, like, the 70s, you know, mail a copy to NCUA, whatever it was, right? Obviously, at the time, that meant a paper envelope with a stamp, you know. And I said, Do people know that they can, this is, like, four years ago. Do they know that they like, they can send it to us via email, right? And our folks were like, well, yeah, yeah, we get them via email. I said, Yeah, but can we just say that right in the reg. Can we just say email is okay, right? Because, you know, it is a credit union if at some point you were always doing it the physical mail, and then eventually you’re like, can we send them, you know what? Just do it the way we did it last year, because we know that was fine and it’s not worth anyone’s time. If we can right yet, can we just write not only that, you can email, but you can email to this address, email, right? And it actually did have a change. You wouldn’t have thought that in this decade, that it would actually change people’s behavior that we explicitly said, Yes, like, you know, some people just like sending paper. Are you sure? Have we told them that you can do it this other way? And then it actually led to a change, even, I think it was in 2022 and you would have thought by then, everybody wanted email would have already, but people do. They know it was fine to send it by paper mail last year, so you do it again this year, and it’s just not worth the hassle. For some reason that wasn’t okay.
Sarah Cooke
And one of the things you mentioned, though, was credit unions talking about them, bringing up the ideas to you. And obviously they have some, I’m sure they have a lot. One of the things that I’ve seen over 27 years I used to actually started my career as a DC reporter covering NCUA and whatnot, but is that credit unions don’t comment. I know Sarah bang has encouraged it.
Kyle Hauptman
I know I am. But listen, that is what they can funnel it through you if they don’t want to comment directly. I’m aware that people don’t always like pushing back against the regulator has power over them, right? That’s not how the world should be, but I understand that that’s also what leagues are for. You know, that’s what our anonymous ask NCUA is. You know, if there’s a way to get it to us, they can do it. But some people do. You know, they’re a guy that was the name Doug Wadsworth. I think he’s starting up this new small credit union thing. And you know, he comes with a whole bunch of details list, you know, now some of them, you know, sometimes it’s Congress and it’s not us, sometimes it’s the CRPD rule and not us. But still, you know, concrete things, right? You. So what was your point there that people don’t want
Sarah Cooke
To people just that they don’t, and I’m not sure, like, there are times when there have been hundreds I back in the old Field of Membership, like there were lots of regs going on back in the day, and you might have hundreds of comment letters for something like that, or other things, but, yeah, I just feel like credit unions don’t feel comfortable enough to speak up. And I get that point too, that you know they are the NCUA is like controlling your life, but at the same time, you do have the opportunity to speak up, and that’s why you guys ask for comments all the time too. I understand, you know, all of this is a change in direction of the NCUA from previous administration. And you’re also, I understand changing or tweaking the your mission, the NCUA is mission a bit. Can you talk a little bit about that? And why?
Kyle Hauptman
Sure, yeah. I mean, to be clear. You know, the Share Insurance Fund is always goal one, and Congress has told us what our statutory requirements are, and those have not changed, and we’re not going to change those. We did add our mission statement, and so currently enable access to financial services by facilitating safe, sound and resilient credit unions. I think the resilience is maybe where we tweak it a little bit. Doesn’t sound like much, but resilient. A lot of small credit unions feel they’re overly burdened, which means they’re not resilient, which means they spend time on stuff they shouldn’t and don’t want to exist. And that’s part of the reason, I don’t know how much, but part of the reason that you and I. See merger announcements every week. Why there’s a three digit number every single week? Same with banks. And so that resilience that they’re focused on what they have to when we talk to them, we’re focused on our part of it. I think that adds to that resilience you’re not supposed to your job is not supposed to be complying with our lists of things that we created over decades. They never reviewed, you know, I just sent you a notice, by the way, from Mark triple. It was his view on corporates. That’s what I was you asked me how it might affect them, you know. And this is just a post from him saying that it makes life easy, eliminated, outdated burdens, some paperwork. I say that solely because it’s easy for me to say this will be useful. It’s a lot easier for somebody else to say this will let them spend more time on what they’re supposed to be doing, and not outdated requirements.
Sarah Cooke
And so I also always allow my client, I also allow my guests to have the final thoughts. What would you like to leave our credit and professional audience with?
Kyle Hauptman
Well, sometime in 2026 will be my last day at NCUA. My term ended in August, and the political process takes its time, but sometime in 2026 will be my last day. Obviously, NCUA existed before me, exists without me. But I would like to think that some of the reasons I took the job have been achieved, which are accountability, that it’s two way encourage the federal credit unions to record the exams. Just very useful. Eliminates a lot of problems later, both for NCUA and that that’s different, that right there, changes behavior. Our post exam survey with very simple questions, was everything you have to do, put in writing, yes, no, right, that kind of thing. And usually like a five question survey, but then there’s an open ended six, which is what else should be on the survey. And that was born of frustration I had when I worked in Capitol Hill and for regular institutions, but being told to do something verbally, but nobody will put it in writing, and that’s a little sketchy, but and then having these arguments later that are just pointless arguments. You know, when I worked on Capitol Hill, this bank said we just got told to do something, and we’re legally don’t have to do that. And then so you call up the agency and say, No, we wouldn’t do that. And then you go back to the bank and say, can you send me anything you have, you got anything in writing, you got a form, an email. You’re like, No, it was all verbal. Okay, Sarah, now what do we do? Right? And because it’s like, no, they wouldn’t say that, and it’s just pointless. So some of the same accountability that government requires of regulated entities, I think government can have some of that accountability too, and I think it makes it a better job for everybody. Better job for everybody. If I said something in your your exit interview, by the way, that’s the only part that that we recommend the recording of right? Both parties have a copy. It’s in our software. Does NCUA have a copy? This applies to federal credit unions, not. The whole is a place for privacy and quiet conversations in the hallway and everything, sure, just the exit. You know, when you get your camels rating right, or joint conference, depending how they do it, with the board that should be recorded. That’s just useful information. If I was an examiner, and it was seven exams ago, and you caught me up and said, Hey, we’re having an internal debate. Did you mean to do it this way or that way? So can you help me out by saying exactly what I said? Answer you. It’s just useful. And we’ve had a situation where there’s a brand new examiner who wasn’t there at the last exam, and a brand new CEO who came from outside, neither one of them, and they’re both trying to figure out, did you fix this stuff from last time? Right? It’s just a lot easier, and that I understood that there’s a risk of not innovating. Yes, and I hope everybody I like to think I’ve been as open as possible. I put freely put my email and my cell phone on online, and people ping me on LinkedIn, although I have to do everything official on government channels. So I just reply, please send this NCUA. You know, khauptman@ncua.gov but I just hope that I realized that, you know, we’re public servants over here, and I didn’t want the agency to be guilty of, you know, do as I do, as I say, not as I do. And should be fair. I want to be clear to everybody at NCUA, this agency was not this agency generally had a good track record on those things, right? We weren’t doing drive by enforcement’s regulation by enforcement trying to end of the year with a big press release for all the fines we levied. You know, this agent, I don’t want anyone, any of my colleagues, to think that this is a critique of NCUA in particular. As a matter of fact, it is less a critique, but I do think that we’ve done some accountability measures that may be a model for others, but that’s for other agencies to determine.
Sarah Cooke
And one of the things you’ve been big on is AI and the use of alternative payment rails, like distributed ledger and stuff like that.
Kyle Hauptman
I think those are going to be big, whether I’m here or not. Yeah, I always say I don’t want credit unions to go the way of Blockbuster Video because their regulator wouldn’t let them compete. Mm. Mm, hmm, and that that’s a risk sure, is right. Trying new vendors and do tools, yeah, they’re going to come with risk. They always do. You know, when you and I were kids, did we have any ransomware and internet viruses? No, because we didn’t have the internet. Everything new comes with negatives. You know, I said, you know, there were zero car crashes before we had cars. You take a horse to work today. I didn’t either, right? So the understanding that that’s a risk, they’re trying to freeze time and keep it as it is, is a absolute sure fire way to fail.