It's no secret
Over the weekend we wrote about how all mention of the OnPoint Credit Union-Countrywide Financial mortgage joint venture had been erased from the OnPoint website, without a word of explanation to the credit union's members or anyone else. We also complained in comments to that post that the OnPoint website gives exceedingly scant information about the finances of the organization -- for a full annual report, it says, you need to e-mail headquarters and ask for it.
Not so, as an alert reader points out. OnPoint's quarterly financials are available for public inspection on the website of the National Credit Union Administration, a federal agency. If you go here and enter either "OnPoint" in the name field or "62745" in the number field, you'll get lots of information as fresh as December 31, 2007. They'll even send you an Excel file of a lot of the data if you'd like. Why wait for the glossy brochure?
Just for kicks, we tried to get the December 31 and September 30 data files, and at least the December 31 version came through. The Excel file is here. We also printed out both the 12/31 and 9/30 NCUA performance reports, and compared them against each other.
Now, we're no expert on financial institutions, and OnPoint doesn't look to our untrained eye like it's in any great trouble, but there were a few stats in there that confirm what anyone who reads the news might imagine -- that the last quarter of 2007 wasn't so rosy:
| Item | 9/30/07 | 12/31/07 | Increase (decrease) |
| Total investments | $239,660,803 | $209,617,805 | (12.54%) |
| Federal agency securities | $97,766,028 | $66,299,032 | (32.19%) |
| Total reportable delinquency - total delinquent loans | $3,525,641 | $5,472,354 | 55.22% |
| Total reportable delinquency - indirect lending | $1,659,211 | $2,592,869 | 56.27% |
| Total outstanding loan balances subject to bankruptcies | $4,595,702 | $6,466,112 | 40.70% |
The NCUA reports for both periods rate OnPoint as "Well Capitalized." There's certainly no reason to panic, we suppose, or to think that this isn't an industrywide problem. But the numbers do confirm what a brutal quarter 2007 closed with. And one would think that the quarter we're currently in won't be better, although we won't have the figures for this one until May.
Finally, there isn't anything in the NCUA files at all about the Countrywide deal. Apparently that was the whole point of the Countrywide joint venture -- to keep the loans generated by that partnership off OnPoint's books. And so the circumstances surrounding the termination of that relationship remain unknown, at least to us.
| Posted at 9:17 AM | Permalink |
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Comments (4)
The pleasant recording I heard yesterday while waiting to report my ATM card lost informed me OnPoint's annual shareholders' meeting is next Thursday at Montgomery Park. They're serving snacks! That might be a good time to ask about Countrywide.
Posted by Chris Snethen | March 11, 2008 10:11 AM
I hope someone does bring it up at the annual meeting (can't go myself). Weird how it disappeared down the memory hole so quickly. Might be for the best though; I was never sure how the joint venture was in the members' best interests anyway . . .
Thing is, OnPoint's own mortgage products aren't that great. At least they weren't when we were looking for one in fall of 2006. All ARMs. Granted, 5-year adjustables with some other attractive features, but not a single fixed-rate product was offered. We ended up getting a better deal through U.S. Bank.
Posted by Eric | March 11, 2008 10:19 AM
I haven't seen it in the OnPoint posts or comments, but I assume many readers know that the FBI is currently investigating Countrywide for fraud.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/08/news/companies/countrywide_FBI/index.htm
Posted by none | March 11, 2008 11:26 AM
A very interesting exercise is to compare the NCUA data with other community credit unions. For example, UNITUS seems to have pretty good financials.
Posted by Wes | March 13, 2008 11:29 AM