The first thing to understand about CRA is that it boils down to a very simple question: “How does my bank meet our community’s need for credit services?” Whenever you measure your bank’s CRA performance you should always keep this in mind. This question has 3 built-in assumptions: (1) you know what your community’s credit needs are, (2) you have loan products to meet those needs and (3) you have ways to measure how you are meeting those needs. Let’s briefly review the first of these topics…