You won’t find the name “City & County Credit Union” on a Minnesota Vikings sponsorship at U.S. Bank Stadium. You will find it on the side of Ramsey County’s TCO Sports Garden fieldhouse, now known as the CCCU Fieldhouse, where a group of moms meets twice weekly in Vadnais Heights for “Toddler Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
If the member-owned credit union — which was founded in downtown St. Paul’s Ramsey County Courthouse in 1928 — has flown a bit under the radar by working with smaller little leagues and community groups rather than major league sports, that’s by design.
Established a century ago to serve St. Paul and Ramsey County law enforcement, firefighters, educators and other municipal employees, City & County Credit Union has undergone expansion to eight counties under the leadership of president and chief executive officer Patrick Pierce, who retires in April after nearly 40 years of state and national advocacy for his industry.
Pierce may be best known in Minnesota for state legislation that allowed credit unions to seek community charters, as opposed to more onerous federal charters. While hotly opposed by competing banks, Minnesota’s charter rule change of 2003 wasn’t his only big win over the years.
A voice for credit unions
He’s helped lead the modern credit union movement as former secretary of the Credit Union National Association, and now as chair of America’s Credit Unions, following a recent merger of the two national associations.
When early drafts of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” included language that would make credit unions for-profit instead of nonprofit entities, some 700 credit union leaders came together to write Congress and urge lawmakers to reconsider. As leader of the national association, Pierce’s name was first on the list. He won that fight, too.
As the son of a credit union board officer, Pierce figured he could put his accounting degree to good use 39 years ago at what was then called the Minnesota League of Credit Unions, a job that opened up for him coming out of the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. He figures he may have beat out another top applicant based in part upon his parentage.
He hasn’t taken the opportunity for granted.
“I’ve never had accounts anywhere else,” said Pierce, who is poised to wrap four decades in a field he’s played no small role in shaping, both within Minnesota and nationally.
Growth and change
Pierce will retire in April after 24 years with the credit union, which has been based at Robert and 11th streets since 1968. City & County Credit Union has grown and changed with the decades, and now holds nearly $1.2 billion in assets — up from $256 million when Pierce came aboard in 2001 — after expanding from three stand-alone locations to eight community sites across the Twin Cities metropolitan area.
The acquisition of General Mills’ Mill City Credit Union in 2019 added five more locations, most of them within General Mills work sites from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Murfreesboro, Tenn. Overall membership has expanded from 34,000 members to more than 62,000 members during Pierce’s tenure.
Pierce also will hang up his hat soon as board chair of America’s Credit Unions, a national organization that has worked to stave off efforts from the banking industry to separate credit unions from their nonprofit status. Banks have generally seen the tax-exempt nature of credit unions as giving them an unfair advantage in the market.
To hear him recount his professional history, traditional banks have been a bit of a bogeyman throughout his career, which started at a time when credit union accounts were still referred to as “share draft accounts” because banks objected to them borrowing the use of the word “checking.”
“What we do is not all that different, but why we do it is completely different,” Pierce said.
Even at a time when mergers have diminished their overall numbers while acquisitions have grown members and assets, the mission of client-owned credit unions as nonprofit community banking institutions remains one he believes in. To become a voting member-owner, for instance, “you have to have $5 in your savings account to be able to vote, but that’s it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you have $5 or $5 million.”
Many credit unions partner across the country, allowing out-of-state customers to use their ATM machines without paying extra fees. City & County Credit Union has launched “relief loans” for customers impacted by cuts to federal food aid known as SNAP benefits, as well as skip-a-payment benefits for federal workers impacted by the recent government shutdown.
Reaching beyond city, county employees
The credit union also employs a financial education specialist, a former classroom teacher who teaches financial literacy at high schools, colleges and almost anywhere he or she is invited. The customers the credit union attracts are sometimes those skeptical of the banking industry, he points out. To that end, he’s been a pioneer of sorts for prize-linked savings accounts, which offer lottery-style drawings with cash prizes to encourage member deposits.
In 1997, Pierce played a key role in helping to merge two state associations that were sometimes at odds in their messaging to state lawmakers, especially when banks proposed new regulations. The Minnesota Credit Union Network was born, or reborn. A similar merger took place more recently among the two credit union national associations.
In 2003, state law allowed credit unions to launch or expand through state-approved charters, as opposed to federal charters, allowing City & County Credit Union to expand its service area across the metro.
“It was a good thing, too, to not be so reliant on city and county employees, so we weren’t so affected by slowdowns or (a government) shutdown,” Pierce said.
Pierce, who is married with three adult children and three grandchildren, plans to volunteer at local hospitals alongside a chaplain from Lutheran Memorial Church in River Falls, Wis., where he first met his wife.
City & County Credit Union’s board of directors has chosen executive vice president of operations Thomas Coulter to serve as chief executive officer upon Pierce’s retirement. Coulter, who has worked for the credit union for 19 years, also will serve as acting president until Pierce’s departure.
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