He is best known for building the Filene's department store chain and for his decisive role in pioneering credit unions across the United States.

Reputedly Edward Bernays claimed that William was born with the surname "Katz" but upon entry changed it to a misspelling of "Feline",[2][3] though more likely it was the toponymic "Filehne", the German name of Wieleń a town 90km from Posen.

[4]: 19  In 1872, Clara Filene enrolled her three boys in the "Brüsselsche Handels und Erziehungsinstitut", a boarding school known for excellence in instruction and discipline in her Franconian hometown Segnitz-am-Main.

The headmaster at that time, Samuel Spier, was one of the founding fathers of the early German democracy movement and an outspoken atheist; one of Edwards schoolmates was a certain Ettore Schmitz from Trieste who later became famous as the Italian writer Italo Svevo.

[5] Most of the pupils in Segnitz were the sons of German and Austrian Jewish entrepreneurs or merchants like, for instance, Edwards classmate Richard Fluss, a childhood friend of Sigmund Freud.

[4]: 19  Upon his return to the US, Edward attended high school in Lynn, Massachusetts, and worked in his father's store evenings, weekends, and summers.

Edward began traveling in the 1880s, purchasing merchandise, studying business practices, and increasingly examining how different societies were organized and the problems they faced.

He instituted a profit sharing program, a minimum wage for women, a 40-hour work week, health clinics and paid vacations.

On his return, he contacted his associate Franklin D. Roosevelt and suggested that a similar type of organization be promoted by the US government in the Philippines.

Subsequent to this trip the philanthropy he practiced, combined with the steady implementation efforts of his associate Roy Bergengren were critical to the emergence of credit unions in the United States.

He also donated $1 million to the Consumers Distribution Corporation to help them organize a national network of cooperative retail stores.

Filene maintained that a national law should be based on a sound understanding of the diverse circumstances of people across America—from shrimp fishermen in Louisiana, to factory workers in Massachusetts or farmers in the mid-West.

[15]: 218 Second, as the Great Depression set in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under President Hoover sought to stimulate the economy with soft loans targeted to banks, railways and large companies.

"[15]: 219 With the work of the Bureau essentially completed, a national meeting of credit union leaders was called at Estes Park, Colorado.

He had a great distaste for material things, lived very modestly, never owned an automobile and was scrupulously careful about small expenditures, all because he felt that he was a trustee for the money that he had earned and that the trustee-ship involved turning his accumulations into the greatest possible disinterested public service.

"[4]: 19  Filene "played a pivotal role in passing America's first Workmen's Compensation Law in 1911" and was a founder of the Boston, American and international chambers of commerce.

[2] Filene believed in the intrinsic capability of ordinary people to improve their own condition, given "good information and the discipline to use it effectively.

"[17] This faith led not only to his involvement with credit unions, but to a wider interest in research into critical social and economic trends.

[citation needed] Living in the era of Henry Ford, Filene believed that the problems of mass production had essentially been solved.

[17]: 20 An important initiative was the "Boston-1915", a multi-sector, private-public sector partnership that organized leaders and committees to take leadership roles in solving key urban problems, including slums, public health, crime and local governance.

[8] Filene corresponded with a wide range of leaders from Woodrow Wilson and Georges Clemenceau to Mahatma Gandhi and Vladimir Lenin.

He believed in learning and searching out the ways of human progress.Roy Bergengren conducted a series of memorial meetings for credit unionists around the country.

The Board of Directors of Credit Union National Association and CUNA Mutual Insurance Company voted to raise funds to build a memorial to their founder.

Filene is considered the father of the U.S. credit union movement, which by the end of 2008, with 89 million members, had the largest membership of any country and one of the highest levels of market penetration in the world.

[20] In 1944, the Liberty ship SS Edward A. Filene was built for the U.S. Maritime Commission by St. Johns River Shipbuilding Company in Jacksonville, Florida.

Laid down on February 9, the ship was launched on April 6 in a christening ceremony sponsored by Catherine Filene Shouse that many in Florida's credit union business attended.