Meet the Family Behind the Legal Weed Industry’s First Credit Union

When Alex Mason, a gregarious 25-year-old South Carolina native, moved to Colorado in 2012 to pursue advanced wilderness EMT certification and a passion for mountain climbing, he never imagined that he would end up founding the world’s first financial institution dedicated to the legal cannabis industry. That institution, the Fourth Corner Credit Union, received a green light from state banking regulators in November, and is set to open in downtown Denver by mid-January.

“I always saw myself as an outdoorsman who would one day climb the highest mountain,” Mason says. “Maybe that mountain was trying to figure out how to help the legal cannabis industry get banking services.”

But Mason couldn’t scale that peak alone. So he recruited his family – father Mark, mother Rhoda and sister Delaney – to assist with his budding idea.

“Alex called one Sunday in February and I could sense in his voice he was really passionate about this issue,” recalls Mark Mason, a South Carolina attorney. “He wasn’t venting. He had an idea to solve this problem. He said, ‘Dad, the legal cannabis industry needs to start its own credit union.’ Everyone said it could not be done, but no one had actually tried.”

The problem that needed solving was a big one: Although the U.S. Department of Treasury released banking guidelines for state-licensed marijuana businesses last year, most banks and credit unions still steer clear to avoid bureaucratic red tape and risk of hefty fines, since weed is illegal on the federal level. As a result, ganja entrepreneurs can have a hard time finding both legitimate funding and a secure place to stash what money they have and make.

“The serious public safety concerns of a cash-heaving marijuana industry gave rise to an urgent need for a banking solution,” says former Denver City Attorney Doug Friednash, who assisted in drafting the city’s regulations governing cannabis and helped credit union organizers navigate complex legal issues. He says that the founding of the Fourth Corner Credit Union “is a major public safety victory. It will also provide safe, regulated services to marijuana businesses allowing this laboratory of democracy to thrive.”

For Alex, his motivation to found the credit union came from a more personal and emotional place. “I didn’t think it was fair that my friends in Colorado’s legal cannabis industry were deprived of the one tool they really needed to succeed – access to banking,” he says. “They are legal. They pay taxes. They provide good jobs. They used the system to change the law, but now the law was punishing them for no reason.

“When I also learned that some charities helping sick children with epilepsy, people with cancer and Parkinson’s disease, could not get bank accounts, I really knew someone needed to solve this problem.”

Alex started doing research and he discovered that almost any group that shares a common bond can form a credit union, according to state banking laws, but it’s a rigorous process. “As I read about the common bond requirement for credit unions, I thought to myself that no industry has a stronger common bond than the legalized cannabis industry,” he recalls. “They have had to stick together, first to emerge, then to survive and now to grow.”

Next, he called his dad, and within a month, the father-son duo established an office at the Daniels & Fisher clock tower in Denver. “I slept there on the floor on a blow-up mattress for months and stayed in the clock tower building, working so long that Alex started calling me Rapunzel,” Mark Mason recalls, laughing.

As helpful as he was to the process, Mark says that it was Alex’s cannabis connections that enabled Fourth Corner’s team to complete the due diligence required to receive the credit union charter. “Without Alex telling his friends it was OK to talk to us, our questions would not have been candidly answered,” the elder Mason explains. “I look too much like ‘the Man,’ an FBI agent or something, and so did the other experts on the team. This couldn’t have happened without the legal cannabis industry being open and honest with us.”