I’ve been a happy member of Vermont State Employees Credit Union for over three decades, and I’ll be voting against the merger. Having read and considered the various reasons proposed for this move, I think it comes down to a few simple things.
First, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. VSECU is a healthy business and provides far better service to us than other, larger financial institutions offer their customers.
This leads me to the second thing: bigger isn’t better. Bigger means the individual customer means less. It means that service to the individual customer gets sacrificed to the economies of scale. Enjoy dealing with phone mail menus and business systems that dispense with human contact? Would you rather try to have a computer resolve your loan or credit card or statement problem, wading through phone menu after phone menu, instead of sitting down with a human being who knows what they’re doing and can help you on the spot? Then vote for the merger.
Lastly, both sides in this debate claim to be preserving VSECU’s character as a community-based organization, but that is only true for one of them. “Community-based” means based in the community. If an organization extends its services from the community it was based in to a much larger area, then (except in a technical legal sense) it is no longer based in the original community. I want to keep VSECU based in Vermont. That’s why I oppose the merger.
Seth Steinzor
South Burlington