Lake Trust started looking at the cannabis industry in 2018 and took two years before it began signing on clients in June 2020. The credit union now has 20 cannabis members, out of a total 176,900, and it is onboarding three more to join within a month.

It has gone slow on purpose, said Ray Zillgitt, the credit union’s senior vice president of risk management and general counsel. Caution is key because stakes are high.

“The reason we decided to get into cannabis banking was twofold: The first piece of it is that we clearly saw there was a need, there was a lot of unbanked and underbanked cannabis businesses,” Zillgitt said. “In fact, on a monthly basis we would probably have to kick out two or three because we were not allowed to bank them under federal rules. And … historically credit unions have banked unbanked and underbanked populations and communities so that was the right thing to do.”

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