In 2025, credit union business lending quietly staged one of its strongest comebacks in years, and Mark Ritter has the numbers to prove it. From a 25% surge in business loan volumes to a 43% jump in participation loans, the recovery exceeded nearly every expectation. But Mark does not stop at the good news. He tackles the slow erosion of community lending, the growing threat of credit union mergers, rising delinquency rates, and an NCUA board in limbo that could create regulatory turbulence for years to come. This is the episode you forward to everyone in your network.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

✅ How credit union business lending rebounded in 2025, with industry-wide business loan volumes climbing over 25% and participation loans rising 43% after years of tightening liquidity.

✅ Why credit union consolidation and ongoing credit union mergers are quietly weakening community lending and reducing the cooperative presence in local markets across the country.

✅ How rising delinquency rates and increased charge-offs are signaling early stress in portfolios, particularly among larger institutions that leaned into big real estate loans without personal guarantees.

✅ Why the NCUA board leadership gap is creating real strain on credit union examiners and slowing down the regulatory clarity that smaller credit unions desperately need.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Credit union business lending volumes for 2025 are revealed, including a 25% industry-wide surge

04:05 Participation loans jumped 43%, and MBFS crossed 1,000 loan underwriting milestones in a single year

06:14 Mark has some random thoughts about the industry

09:54 New people in the industry, credit union mergers, and consolidation are shrinking community lending and weakening local cooperative roots

13:48 Rising delinquency rates and charge-offs signal growing portfolio stress tied to loosened business lending standards

15:19 The NCUA board leadership vacuum is straining credit union examiners and stalling critical regulatory relief

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

💎 Credit union business lending surged over 25% in 2025, with participation loans up 43%, proving the industry can recover strongly after a prolonged liquidity crunch when conditions align.

💎 Credit union mergers continue to erode community lending at a local level, with member engagement in cooperative principles so low that consolidation often passes with only a fraction of members voting.

💎 The current NCUA board vacancy is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is creating mounting pressure on credit union examiners and delaying the regulatory relief smaller institutions need to operate effectively.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Mark Ritter - Website

Mark Ritter - LinkedIn

SEO KEYWORDS:

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[00:00:26] At your credit union, it just wants to talk and bounce things off and find out how you're doing compared to everybody else. Give us a ring@mbfs.org and connect with us on LinkedIn and we'll see if we can help you out. So today is a solo show. It's the rare solo show. I haven't done one in a long, long time, and the reason.

[00:01:15] It was three years ago. I did one and it was a nice little reflections show. My wife liked it. I told my story and backstory and it was, I did that right when I turned 50, and just recently I turned 53. And what I discovered is nobody cares when you turn 53. It's just some random age out there where there's no, there's no monument, there's no melt marker.

[00:02:03] So here goes, I'm looking forward to it and hopefully you like it as well. So. Just recently, we were able to wrap up our 20, 25 year-end numbers for our industry and also for MBFS. And about a year and a half ago when I was budgeting 2025, if you would've told me what the industry was gonna be like and what our numbers were going to be like, I would've laughed at you and there is no reasonable effort.

[00:03:03] So interest rates were skyrocketing, inflation was skyrocketing and it really just had a crunch, like hopefully we don't see it at any time, and was towards the end of 2024. We really saw that slowing a slowdown in that crunch. And 2025 there was great demand for loans and it was plenty of liquidity.

[00:03:53] And portfolios, you can set your watch to the business Lending industry. At credit unions [00:04:00] portfolios are up 10 to 12% every year and it was the same thing. Even participations. One of the pieces that was up a lot last year were the amount of participation loans among business lending. That number was up 43% compared to 2024.

[00:04:54] I'm really proud of that. It's dollars that wouldn't not have gone to our industry. They would've [00:05:00] gone elsewhere. And to our credit union partners, we love to help credit unions with, put loans on their books. If anybody's listening to this out in the void of the internet, please, if you're looking for loans, let us know, because we're always trying to expand partners, you know, and for the first time ever, we cracked a thousand loans underwritten last year.

[00:05:48] So we are a servant for the credit union. We really are happy and thankful for our partners, for our industry. I'm thankful for our staff in supporting [00:06:00] that. And we were able to hire and put some more people to work last year, so that's good for everybody as well. So 2026, we'll see. I think it's gonna be pretty steady.

[00:06:39] And my wife and I were actually. Talking about how 25 years ago everything was better chain restaurants were better, movies were better, airlines were better. Many of the things that we use were better 25 years ago. Even though we have faster services out there, we really miss some of the stores [00:07:00] that were there.

[00:07:28] Is an expert now on AI support even though the industry is only a few years old. Magically all of these people are experts and some of that, maybe it's just me being a grumpy old man anymore, but LinkedIn has gone from something that I just really enjoy being on to just horrible, and I wish there was an alternative.

[00:08:14] There's one or two choices for our industry, and if you don't like it too bad. These are the people you're fixing, you're shopping. Shopping for core services, shopping for insurance and bonding services, and especially finding things that fit the credit unions is brutal. It is absolutely brutal. I don't know what the solution is.

[00:08:58] From my side, the [00:09:00] business lending volumes are going well, and I'm seeing a transfer and shift to where people are focusing on relationships. As opposed to just, let's get you a business loan and we're gonna keep $10 in the account. I, I'm really seeing that shift and, and partially I think it's because of the liquidity crunch and partially competition and people are realizing the value of relationships over transactions.

[00:09:54] But I have one concern, and that's in as we bring in new people. [00:10:00] We want you to keep our culture and cooperative principles. I guess it's like people who live in Texas when they say, oh, we have a bunch of people from California moving in. Keep your California vote at home and move to Texas and become part of us when you come from Wells Fargo Bank or some other mega bank and come into our business.

[00:10:50] We need to bring the advocacy groups together. What we don't need is to bring a smaller and smaller number of people together [00:11:00] for collaboration. I see it a little too much. When we have collaborative efforts. We need to bring all the parties to the table and not just the biggest of the big. I'm pleased with our collaboration, but let's keep an eye out on for that.

[00:11:43] And unfortunately many of those credit unions don't succeed. 'cause it's really tough to start a de Novo credit union today. Once a credit union is gone, it is gone forever there. There might be a branch there, but that local [00:12:00] presence is not there. I think of a credit union of one of our owners. Uh, former owners of MBFS that got merged out in Scranton and taken out by large credit union, and there was an office building in downtown with plenty of employees who parked downtown and shopped at local restaurants and were part of the community and working in the community and lent to local businesses.

[00:12:55] That's why I got into this space. And just not all [00:13:00] mergers are equal. When you add these credit unions together, many times there's a net loss for our industry and really for that community where that's located at. And also when we have that, that Cooper, when that credit unions merge, it's a cooperative, it's owned by the members in that community.

[00:13:48] The other piece that I would say that concerns about me is delinquency. Delinquency is going up and we're actually, for the first time [00:14:00] in a long time, last year we crossed 1% and I think we're gonna see, continue that continue to creep up. The only reason we had a little bit of a flattening in the last quarter of 2025 was because there was a huge increase in charge offs.

[00:14:43] What happened was during the heydays of COD is we could go back to doing huge real estate with no personal guarantees. And that's what people did. There was plenty of liquidity people wanted, had saw they needed to put money somewhere, so they [00:15:00] went for large loans and now we're seeing the impact of that.

[00:15:23] Currently we have a board of Chairman Kyle Houtman. Kyle Houtman is great. He is great for our industry. He is great for credit unions, and when he moves on, he will be very successful in its next venture. The move to a one board member has really. Just been chaotic. You know it, it's really, I hate to say it's rudderless, but that's there because it's very difficult to address the issues that we need to now.

[00:16:16] And that hasn't happened and we're coming up on a year and Kyle Houtman is also looking at at his next venture. So we have zero as he's looking to move ahead. So we really have to solve this and then we could have a trickle down to the, to credit unions because it's really just doing a disservice to our industry.

[00:17:04] Smaller credit unions I see treated proportionally, unfairly. I just mentioned in an episode that I had an examiner tell me I wish participation loans would go away 'cause it makes his life more difficult. So we gotta solve the NCUA and we gotta solve this NCUA board issue. If not, it's gonna be a mess for years and it's gonna reverberate for years.

[00:17:52] Is anybody listening? And then I'll go on a run where people say, oh, I like this episode. I listened to your show. I like this. [00:18:00] I didn't like this. And I would really like the feedback from you, our listeners, from the industry. What would you like? I'd love to hear from you. If there's subjects you would like me to see, if there's topics you want me to tackle, let me know.

[00:18:35] What would you like us to hear more of or less of? So thank you. This is Mark Ritter, your host of Credit Union Conversations, and please listen on your favorite audio platform and hit that subscribe button. Thank you and have a great day.