Credit Unions’ Response to Covid-19

This is a new research project undertaken by Dr. Marc-Andre Pigeon, University of Saskatchewan and Dr. Daphne Rixon, Saint Mary’s University. As financial co-operatives, credit unions have a reputation of putting their members and communities ahead of short-term profit considerations. They routinely emerge, for example, at the top of national surveys of retail and small business banking customers/members. In their research, Pigeon and Rixon ask whether we can observe evidence of this responsiveness by looking at how a sample of the country’s largest credit unions communicated to their members in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis compared with their big bank competitors? To answer this question, they look at a combination of annual reports and samples drawn from credit union and bank websites at key moments in the pandemic using scraping algorithms developed by the Canadian Hub for Applied Social Research (CHASR) at the University of Saskatchewan.