Chartering and Field of Membership Manual

The NCUA Board (Board) is issuing a final regulation to amend the associational common bond provisions of NCUA's chartering and field of membership requirements. Specifically, the amendments establish a threshold requirement which provides that, in order for an association to qualify to be part of a federal credit union's (FCU) field of membership (FOM), the association must not have been formed primarily for the purpose of expanding credit union membership. The amendments also expand the criteria in NCUA's current totality of the circumstances test, which is a regulatory tool used to determine if an association, after satisfying the above-referenced threshold requirement, also satisfies the associational common bond requirements necessary to qualify for inclusion in an FCU's FOM. The amendments will better ensure that FCUs comply with established membership requirements. Additionally, NCUA is granting automatic membership qualification under the associational common bond requirements to certain categories of associations that NCUA has routinely approved for FCU membership in the past. For ease of reading, NCUA uses the terms ``association'' and ``group'' interchangeably in this rulemaking.