Five Questions With: Gary E. Furtado

A delegation of 29 executives from the SECREDI Alianca in Brazil is touring North America on a fact-finding tour visiting various credit unions.
SECREDI Alianca is a regional group of credit unions with a cooperative system in Brazil and is one of the largest cooperative financial institutions in Brazil with 101 affiliated credit unions serving more than 2.8 million members representing about $15 billion assets.
The group stopped by in Rhode Island at Navigant Credit Union on its way through to New York City and spent the day visiting with Gary E. Furtado and his team. Furtado discussed the visit with Providence Business News and reflected on the differences and similarities between financial institutions from different countries.

PBN: Tell our readers a little bit about the contingent from Brazil’s visit.
FURTADO:
They came in from southern Brazil with 29 employees of one credit union, which included a few board members and vice presidents all the way down to administrative assistants and tellers, so they had a broad range of people who came up. They flew into Canada and visited Montreal and Toronto and then came down to Boston for one day before coming here to Navigant for a day and then they were off to New York City. Basically, they came to look at the corporate structure of credit unions of North America compared with Brazil. How we set up corporate governance, our product and service and we compared it to what they do, so I think it was interesting on both sides.

PBN: Of all the credit unions in the area, why’d they choose to come to Navigant?
FURTADO:
I think it was because of our 100th anniversary. The Credit Union League told them about us. I talked with one person from a smaller credit union. We are about $1.5 billion in assets and they are about $200 million, or the equivalent in U.S. dollars. Although, they are smaller in assets they’re close to us in the amount of employees and I think they have about 13 to 14 branches.

PBN: What did you learn about Brazilian credit unions that was different that the U.S.?
FURTADO:
They were pretty amazed because they’d never seen safe deposit boxes or drive-thru windows before. They said they’d only seen them in the movies. Also, they were wondering where the metal detectors and security guards were in our branches, because I guess they have them there. When you look at how they run things in terms of corporate governance, it’s pretty close to what we do. They have a board of directors that are elected by the members. But they’ve just gotten into the mortgage business and they charge an interest rate monthly. I asked them what the rate on an auto loan was and they said the average loan was about 1 percent. I thought, 1 percent is pretty low, but then realized that it is 1 percent per month, so really it’s 12 percent per year. They said loans can go up as high as 30 percent. They also asked about our federal fund rates, which I said were about .25 percent. Their governments is 13.5 percent, so you can see it’s a different type of economy. They also asked us about agriculture loans because they do a lot of farming loans.

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PBN: Have you ever hosted credit union representatives from other countries, how did they compare?
FURTADO:
One time we hosted a banker from Russia who spent a couple weeks with us. We’ve had other credit unions come and see what’s going on, but what was really different about this trip is that they didn’t speak any English. They brought a translator in and had headphones. We also have about seven employees who speak Brazilian Portuguese, so we broke them into groups for tours and that worked out well. I think they were really interested because they paid for half the trip themselves and had to use vacation time. They were really interested in the whole [North America] credit union world and how it compared.

PBN: Did they leave you with any piece of information that you didn’t know before?
FURTADO:
When they left I think we said to each other that they are definitely a little bit behind us in the U.S., but they’re older. We were chartered in 1915 and I think the oldest credit union in the country was chartered in 1907 or ’08, but they were chartered in 1902 so they’re actually older than us.

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