NCUA Board Member Rodney E. Hood Statement on the Board Briefing, Board Briefing, NCUA’s Modernized Examination Tools

As Prepared for Delivery on November 18, 2021

I’d like to commend Kelly Lay and her team on the deployment of the Modern Examination Risk Identification Tool, MERIT, and the other modernized tools we were briefed on this morning. I would also like to commend the agency since we are leading the other financial regulators with the deployment of MERIT in terms of being a cloud-based examination tool.

While I am delighted about the potential of this new system, I have been concerned about the cost of MERIT. While I understand an initiative such as this is expensive, I do have some questions:

• How much have we spent on MERIT to date?
• How much can the agency anticipate spending on operations and maintenance on MERIT for next year and subsequent years in the near term?
• The agency recently hired an outside firm to look at the costs associated with MERIT. What did we learn from this report, and what do we plan to do about it?

In regard to the other modernization projects:

• How can vendors test their data files to meet the standards in the Data Exchange Application?
• What resources are available if credit unions need help with the NCUA’s modernized tools?