In the U.S., credit unions have a clear organizational structure. All credit unions belong to one or the other parent credit union (there are 35 of them in the U.S.). The uniqueness of credit unions is that they put together the principles and benefits of financial cooperatives, consumer cooperatives and mutual aid funds, born once by trade unions. The main advantage of credit unions consists in transparency, controllability, governance for shareholders. Historically, credit unions have grown from the experience of credit cooperatives, but they took the experience of organizations of mutual aid of citizens by moving methods of social self-protection from labor and toward consumption. Credit unions are financial institutions, financial cooperatives of citizens, and in this capacity they are above all associations of people, not unification of capitals, which is typical, for example, for public companies.