It’s frustrating to Mariann Peterson that her credit union can’t accommodate an out-of-town visitor who needs emergency cash or access to his or her credit union account.

Beginning in July, however, from its sole location off the lobby of Iowa Methodist Medical Center, United Service Credit Union will be able to serve any credit union member who belongs to a nationwide network of more than 2,300 credit union branches. Its members will be able to conduct business at any of those locations as well.

The arrangement, known as shared branching, is made possible through an agreement announced May 2 by the Iowa Credit Union League with CU Service Network Inc., a Colorado-based shared branching network. United Service was among the first credit unions in Iowa to enroll in the network.

“You don’t want to put a lot of money into bricks and mortar if you don’t have to,” said Peterson, United Service’s president and CEO. “We’re here at the hospital, and we have a lot of people coming in from around the state needing services, and we can’t help them. And we have a lot of members who are ministers in small towns, and snowbirds as well. We did a lot of research on it, and we decided to go with this network.”

Though the idea of shared branching originated 20 years ago and has taken off in many states, Iowa’s 150 credit unions have been slow to embrace it, said Murray Williams, vice president of the Iowa Credit Union League. “What we’ve found recently,” he said, “is that there are more credit unions stepping forward saying they want this convenience.”

Peterson said the arrangement also represents a significant emergency backup plan for credit unions such as hers, because it would enable her staff to temporarily operate from any participating credit union in the network.

Similar to how automated teller machine networks operate, credit unions that are part of the shared branching network incur a transaction fee for each deposit or withdrawal made by one of their members at an outside credit union. The network shares a portion of each fee it receives with the credit unions conducting the transactions.

Those fees are not charged to the credit union members, Williams said. “Those are just fees incurred by the credit unions as part of their operating expense,” he said. “The idea is that if you don’t offer this, members will look elsewhere.”

Doug Burke, CU Service Network’s president and CEO in Arvada, Colo., said the number of branches participating in its seven-state network has increased an average of 30 percent a year, “and we expect that to continue this year.” CUSN serves credit unions primarily in the Rocky Mountain and Midwest states. To offer a nationwide network, CUSN affiliates with Georgia-based Credit Union Service Corp., which represents 68 percent of credit unions that participate in shared branching.

About half of the nation’s 9,000 credit unions have assets of $10 million or less, and those credit unions are typically less likely to participate in the network because they don’t have the necessary technology, Burke said.

“So even if they desire to connect, they can’t unless they make some changes on their side,” he said. “One of the things in our favor is that Iowa credit unions have banded together for several years with a shared data processing system, so that should accelerate the ability of credit unions to join the network.”

Burke said the number of shared transactions handled varies greatly depending on the size of the institution.

“In 2006, one of our larger users did over 300,000 of these transactions, down to maybe 1,000 per year on the low end for smaller organizations,” he said. “The average might be about 10,000 transactions per month.”

“The value proposition depends on the credit union,” Burke added. “If you have a credit union that has multiple branches in a community and their members are solely in that area, they might not use it very much. But for a credit union such as American Airlines [Federal Credit Union], their members will do business in 40 different states.”

Burke said he has several appointments scheduled next month with some of the state’s larger credit unions.

“I think it will be very well received,” he said. “We’ve been working with them on and off for the past three years now. I’ve never heard anyone say it’s not going to work; I’ve always heard everyone say they’re cautiously optimistic.”

Williams said that a concern raised in the past has been that credit unions would take advantage of the system to acquire new members from other institutions in the network. Each credit union joining the network signs an agreement that it will not do that, he said.

“What they’ve found, actually, is that (availability of the network) becomes a deterrent from people wanting to switch,” he said. “If they spend half their time in Arizona, for instance, now they’re finding there’s no need to switch credit unions.”