r/creditunions

Hi!

My husband and I have now lived in BC for years, we moved from Alberta and are now deciding we really need to change our banking over to local as obviously it’s a massive inconvenience to have your bank out of province.

The thing is our current CU offers us Mastercard Debit cards which are so nice and convenient, and so I don’t really want to give that up, however I’m really seeing that offered with BC CUs as much.

We also need to open up a joint account.
We’re in the Okanagan.

Any recommendations for BC Credit Union with Visa/Mastercard Debit included?

Please let me know and thanks for reading!

I’ve been doing a lot of research on personal finance in the past few weeks and basically went down a rabbit hole with Caisses Populaires and Credit Unions.

In my research it seems like they’re essentially the same thing except that Caisses Populaires are basically like Credit Unions but primarily based in French speaking communities around the world and especially in Quebec.

However, this got me wondering: if they’re essentially the same thing but for different languages why do they seem to be so distinguished from one another online with them both having separate Wikipedia articles, separate investopedia articles, etc.

I also stumbled upon some group called the Desjardins group which is based in Quebec and seems to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest Caisses Populaires in the world so if somebody could give some background on that and how they operate that would be great too.