Board Meeting Digest — December 2025

QuarterCall Research · March 15, 2026
A leaner agency, a steady fund, and the chairman's concern about auto lending: At the NCUA's final 2025 meeting, the board reviewed the Share Insurance Fund (third-quarter net income of $100.4 million, an equity ratio holding near 1.30%), launched a deregulation project aimed at small credit unions, and approved a 2026 budget 20% below 2025 that cuts the operating fee charged to federal credit unions by roughly a quarter. Chairman Hauptman singled out auto lending as the system's "scariest" asset class, with national auto-loan delinquencies now running above their financial-crisis peak.

A Deregulation Project and a Leaner Agency

The main policy item was the newly launched deregulation project, a review of the entire rulebook that the chairman likened to spring cleaning, with four notices of proposed rulemaking already open for comment. Its stated aim is to lighten the compliance load on small credit unions so more of them can survive and grow, on the argument that a credit union's job is member service, not redundant regulatory paperwork.

Board members acknowledged colleagues departing through a deferred-resignation program and retirements, which leaves the agency with a smaller team, and a 2026 reorganization is planned. The board also granted a federal charter to Haven Federal Credit Union in Santa Clara, California.

Share Insurance Fund: Q3 2025

The Office of the CFO reported third-quarter net income of $100.4 million, up $28.2 million from a year earlier on lower insurance-loss provisioning and higher investment income. Fund assets rose to $24 billion, and the loss reserve stood at $240.3 million. Two credit unions failed in the quarter at a $7 million cost to the fund; year-to-date losses were about $24 million against roughly $591 million in failed-institution assets — a loss of about 4% of those assets. Portfolio yield rose to 2.77%, and the agency again earned a clean audit.

Recalculated only at mid-year and year-end, the equity ratio was 1.28% as of June 30, with a year-end projection of 1.30%. The credit union count fell to 4,339, down 42 in the quarter, while the share of insured deposits in CAMELS-3 institutions eased to 8.4% from 9.2%, and more than 90% remained in CAMELS 1 or 2.

Auto Lending: The "Scariest" Asset Class

Asked for the risk that worries him most, the chairman named auto lending — not for credit unions specifically, but system-wide: national auto-loan delinquencies now exceed their levels during the financial crisis, the product of higher car prices and higher rates combining into large monthly payments, and all of it before any significant rise in unemployment. With roughly a third of credit union assets in auto loans (and about half in mortgages), it is a large exposure. Credit unions are performing better than the national average, and the chairman noted auto delinquencies beginning to stabilize, but he flagged it as the asset class to watch. On the macro backdrop, the Federal Reserve's latest quarter-point cut brought the target range to 3.50–3.75%, down 125 bps from the summer-2024 peak, restoring an upward-sloping yield curve that is, all else equal, favorable for credit unions.

The 2026–2027 Budget

The board approved a combined 2026 budget of $316.2 million and 967 positions, a 20% reduction from 2025, with 2027 set at $325.3 million. The operating fee billed to federal credit unions falls about 24.65% from 2025. A $100 million credit union's bill works out to roughly $14,200, about $5,000 less than it would have paid on the prior year's trajectory; a $1 billion credit union saves on the order of $50,000, and a $10 billion credit union more than $200,000. The budget carries $16 million for the reorganization and technology investment. A lower budget means a smaller draw on the Share Insurance Fund, about $60 million less for the year, and staff noted that it nudges the equity ratio up by roughly a third of a basis point (a full basis point requires about $183 million in fund balances). Fee relief and fund strength come from the same pool.

QuarterCall Research Assessment

We read the chairman's auto-lending warning as the meeting's most consequential item. The Q4 2025 Call Report data are consistent with it: the system's 60+ day delinquency ratio crossed 1% for the first time in the dataset, to 1.03%, with the over-$10B cohort, heaviest in consumer and indirect auto, running well above that, as the Q4 2025 Ledger and System Signals show. Hauptman's view that the risk is concentrated and not yet acute squares with those numbers: charge-offs have not spiked, though we read the rising delinquency as a pipeline that is still building.

The fee cut and the deregulation push are aimed at the other end of the asset distribution: the small credit unions whose earnings are thinnest. We read the relief as real but modest against their underlying problem, which is scale rather than compliance cost. A smaller invoice leaves a sub-scale credit union earning close to breakeven, and lighter regulation does not change the economics that reward getting larger.

Source
Derived from the publicly available December 18, 2025 NCUA board meeting webcast and transcript. Figures are as presented at the meeting; speaker names are drawn from the automated transcript and the agency's public roster and should be verified against the official record.
Cite as: QuarterCall Research, “Board Meeting Digest — December 2025”, March 15, 2026. https://quartercall.com/research/board-digest/2025-12-18/
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