Oct 29, 2026 · 22 min · 11 segments
America’s Credit Unions President and CEO Scott Simpson talks through his takeaways from his first year on the job, the importance of the upcoming midterms, success in 2026, and credit union…
I think one thing that we've really focused on is our national policy influence campaign.
You've talked a lot about the two-pronged elements of advocacy, which is money.
How is this campaign translating into tangible value for credit unions that may never really interact directly with lawmakers nor see the campaign themselves? It's kind of the campaign's kind of in the background at Congress.
The industry's kind of famously had a campaign with varying degrees of judgment about its utility.
But what we've keenly sensed, I think, in Washington, both our comms team and our legislative advocacy team, is this need to have a constant narrative in the grill of the policymaking community in Washington.
and to have some programming that pushes back against those that are attacking our business model.
We've talked about it, but the worry is that credit unions won't see it because if they do see it, then our targeting's off because it's meant to hit the phones, right? you know, and the eyeballs of people who work in the office buildings, the Capitol complex, the White House complex, which includes the treasury, right? But that's the traffic we're trying to hit.
We've got a decade worth of quantitative and qualitative research about how the credit unions are viewed and on Capitol Hill as our baseline and that we will measure against to make sure that this continues to move in the right direction.
But in the immediate wake of don't tax my credit union and all the hyperbole that the banks were throwing at us and continue to try to lever to have this sort of constant message about what credit unions mean to Americans in front of the minds and eyes and minds of policymakers is huge.
I think one thing that we've really focused on is our national policy influence campaign.
You've talked a lot about the two-pronged elements of advocacy, which is money.
How is this campaign translating into tangible value for credit unions that may never really interact directly with lawmakers nor see the campaign themselves? It's kind of the campaign's kind of in the background at Congress.
The industry's kind of famously had a campaign with varying degrees of judgment about its utility.
But what we've keenly sensed, I think, in Washington, both our comms team and our legislative advocacy team, is this need to have a constant narrative in the grill of the policymaking community in Washington.
and to have some programming that pushes back against those that are attacking our business model.
We've talked about it, but the worry is that credit unions won't see it because if they do see it, then our targeting's off because it's meant to hit the phones, right? you know, and the eyeballs of people who work in the office buildings, the Capitol complex, the White House complex, which includes the treasury, right? But that's the traffic we're trying to hit.
We've got a decade worth of quantitative and qualitative research about how the credit unions are viewed and on Capitol Hill as our baseline and that we will measure against to make sure that this continues to move in the right direction.
But in the immediate wake of don't tax my credit union and all the hyperbole that the banks were throwing at us and continue to try to lever to have this sort of constant message about what credit unions mean to Americans in front of the minds and eyes and minds of policymakers is huge.
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