October Luncheon

Join KCCCU at Ray’s Boathouse for our quarterly luncheon on October 8. Bruce Barcott will be sharing about how credit unions are working with legal cannabis companies as well as recent legislation on banking for these businesses.

11:30 – 12:00: Networking
12:00 – 12:15: Lunch
12:15 – 1:00: Program begins

Remember to bring your business cards for networking and prizes!

Banking on CBD, Hemp, and Cannabis: A Fast-Changing Landscape

For the past six years, a number of credit unions in legal cannabis states have been quietly working with state-licensed cannabis companies to offer them basic account services. It’s not been easy. These accounts require onerous upkeep, documentation, and oversight. Credit union officials often do it out of a sense of community service and public safety.

Over the past few months, Congress and national regulatory agencies have signaled a willingness to step into a new era in banking these problematic businesses. Senate Banking Committee chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) recently gave the SAFE Banking Act a hearing after years of ignoring the proposal. Last December, Congress legalized the cultivation and sale of hemp via a special clause in the 2018 Farm Bill. That opened the door for this year’s boom in the CBD industry, as CBD can be extracted from hemp. In August, the NCUA released an interim guidance stating that credit unions may provide certain financial services to legally operating hemp businesses.

How does hemp differ from cannabis? What are “certain” financial services? What’s the likely timeline for Congressional banking reform in the cannabis sector? Why should a credit union consider building relationships with hemp or cannabis companies now, instead of waiting for full federal legalization? Bruce Barcott will dive into these issues and ask your toughest and most embarrassing questions about cannabis in this fascinating lunchtime discussion.

About Bruce Barcott
Bruce Barcott is a Guggenheim Fellow and author of Weed the People: The Future of Legal Marijuana in America. A nationally recognized journalist, Barcott’s provocative thoughts, ideas, and observations on prohibition’s end–the good and the bad–have made him one of the nation’s most sought-after writers and speakers on this dramatic turn in American history. For the past four years he’s directed daily coverage of national cannabis news for Leafly, the world’s largest and most trusted legal cannabis information site.

In his writing and public events, Barcott questions and considers the moral, legal, ethical, political and financial implications of legalization. “This is one of the most exciting about-faces in recent American history,” he says, “and it has profound lessons to teach us about taboos, assumptions, evidence, prejudice, mistakes, and the factors that lead people to change their minds.” Barcott wrote the Time Magazine special issue, “Marijuana Goes Main Street,” and has been quoted in newspapers around the nation in addition to appearing on MSNBC’s “The Docket” and “The Cycle,” National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition,” KING-TV’s “Evening Magazine,” WJLA (Washington DC) “NewsTalk,” KGO and KCBS radio in San Francisco, KPBS’ “MidDay” in San Diego, KUOW’s “Weekday” in Seattle, and on many other media outlets.

Barcott’s previous award-winning books include The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw and The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mt. Rainier. His cover stories and feature articles appear regularly in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, Outside, and other national publications. As a science writer for more than twenty years, Barcott has covered topics ranging from global warming to risk calculus to the science of camouflage. He led National Geographic’s coverage of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and accompanied James Cameron’s 2012 expedition to dive the deepest spot in the ocean, the Mariana Trench in the South Pacific. He lives on Bainbridge Island, across the water from Seattle, with his wife, the memoirist Claire Dederer, and their two children.