Getting to know some Estonians

If it weren’t for the language, Rick Pillow would almost qualify as an honorary Estonian.

“I can only speak a little of it,” said the Virginia Credit League Union’s president, “and that’s with a southern Virginia accent.”

Ask Pillow about Estonian credit unions, though, and he’s on an immediate roll. He’s not only schmoozed with Estonian representatives in Lynchburg, but been to their country on the Baltic Sea, as well.

The first question in your mind might be, “Why?” It’s not as if we have any Estonian companies in Central Virginia, and Lynchburg is decidedly short on Estonian immigrants.

Rather, the Lynchburg/Estonian credit union connection comes through a Washington-based group called the World Council of Credit Unions, which matches fledgling credit union programs in other countries with their U.S. counterparts for information-sharing purposes.

“We had a choice between Guatemala and Estonia,” said Virginia Credit League Union public relations director Lewis Wood, “and one of our CEOs happened to have parents from Estonia. That’s what decided it.”

Last month, Estonian representatives Andro Roos and Erki Pisuke were in Virginia, including a two-day stop in Lynchburg.

“They’re both in their 20s,” Pillow said, “and are involved with the credit union at Tartu University. One (Roos) is the CEO, the other (Pisuke) is on the board.”

Since Tartu University does not have a football team, you may not have heard of it. But it’s nearly 400 years old, which makes the University of Virginia seem like it was founded last week.

“We took them to UVa so they could visit the credit union there,” Pillow said, “and they left wearing Virginia hats. I don’t know how that will go over with the Virginia Tech fans on our board.”

They also visited Monticello and the Virginia General Assembly and watched the baseball All-Star game on television with their Virginia counterparts.

“They had actually heard of (St. Louis Cardinals’ star) Albert Pujols,” Pillow said.

Credit unions are not unknown in Estonia; in fact, they were once a dominant force.

“Just before World War II, they had a 52-percent share of the banking market,” said Pillow. “We’d love to have that here — we’re at 6 percent.”

The problem was, Estonia was sealed behind the Iron Curtain by the end of the war, and the occupying Russians apparently helped themselves to the credit union reserves.

“To this day, it’s hard to get older Estonians to put their savings in any financial institution,” Pillow said. “They remember what they lost before. Most of the loans credit unions are making now are agricultural loans.”

Estonia isn’t exactly a Third World backwater, but its credit unions were forced to start from ground zero.

“Our struggle is competing with commercial banks,” Roos said when he was in Lynchburg. “Estonians depend heavily on electronic access to their accounts, payments systems and on ATM access. We can grow to become competitive with commercial banks, but I believe that credit unions in Estonia will fade in as little as five years if we cannot develop a modern banking infrastructure.”

This is, after all, a nation with nearly two cell phones for every resident.

“I was told that the men need one for their wives and one for their girlfriends,” Pillow said. “I think that was a joke.”

What isn’t a joke is the lack of deposit insurance among Estonian credit unions.

“That’s one of the things we talked about when we went over there last year,” Pillow said. “They’re trying to put that together.”

If nothing else, however, the new movers and shakers behind the Estonian credit unions are, in the words of Lewis Wood, “talented and extremely passionate. They are really doing this for the benefit of the credit union members.

“It was great to see the roots of the credit union movement taking hold there.”