Thank you for the question.
The credit unions are being onboarded in phases. We began with a group of 11 credit unions last week, and that process is in the works now. We expect them to be completely onboarded by the end of the weekend. There is another group that was already credited with EDC, so it brings the total in this first phase to about 21 credit unions.
EDC and Finance have confirmed that they will roll this out in phases. We're looking at a group of 30 next, and then we'll move on to another group, which does mean a lot of effort to roll out 200 more credit unions. It's unclear how long that will take, but it's not days; it's likely weeks which, for Canadians and for our members, our small businesses, isn't really fast enough.
As of today, we're also working on a parallel track with our centrals. As you know, in our structure we have provincial centrals, which may be able to expedite that process, as well as Concentra Bank, which is a wholesale OSFI-regulated bank owned by credit unions. We're hoping that may alleviate the administrative burden on EDC and facilitate that.
Our centrals, our credit unions and CCUA are willing to do whatever it takes to expedite this process and onboard credit unions quickly and efficiently. It feels like it's very slow. We'd really like to ensure that we can move quickly to get this done.