The CU2.0 Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Most credit unions have financial literacy initiatives for members - but what if that is doing too little, too late? This podcast explores a wholly different approach to raising financial literacy. But, first, there’s a video for you to watch: Working Class .  31 minutes long.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a 31 minute video is worth maybe a million. What you will see is...

Send us Fan Mail Exactly what does the National Credit Union Foundation do? I found myself pondering that question - and decided the best answer would be to get Lauren Culp executive director of the Foundation on the show.    On the Foundation website, it says of itself: The National Credit Union Foundation is the charitable arm of the U.S. credit union movement. Our mission is to improve financia...

Send us Fan Mail Think it’s hard to convince new members to open an account at your credit union? Think again. Do what the big FIs - Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank - routinely do: offer cash incentives for joining the institution. How much?  $400 to $500 are numbers often seen and sometimes the bounty climbs to as much as $1000. Are credit unions in this too? Indeed they are, and on the show is Fred...

Send us Fan Mail Year in, year out maybe 150 credit unions go out of business, mainly as a result  of mergers, but a few voluntarily close and NCUA sometimes shuts a few doors. Year in, year out new credit unions spring to life.  Two or three every year.   Do the math,.  It’s grim.  It’s not a pleasant look into credit union futures. Now listen to Ben Hering , formerly director of engagement at th...

Send us Fan Mail In the first half of 2026 credit union mergers were down, admits Peter Duffy , a mergers expert now with Strategic Resource Management - but don’t expect that to be a permanent downturn. Mergers will pick up and there will continue to be big credits merging with big credit unions. Duffy, who has guested on the show multiple times before, is one of the leading experts on the subjec...

Send us Fan Mail We need more business members! That could count as a credit union chant of the last decade but a reality is that many credit unions have simply not achieved their goals in terms of enrolling more business members. Enter Goodbuy , which describes itself as “the game changing solution for credit unions, accelerating new SMB account openings.” Now know this: Boise based Goodbuy in Ju...

Send us Fan Mail You know the sad story of IBEW Local Union 712 Federal Credit Union in Beaver PA in 2020.  In an institution with assets of $7.7 million the CE) managed to run up $2,1 million in credit card debt. And in May 2020 NCUA conserved the credit union.   RIP. Except now Andy Janning, a longtime credit union expert, is on the case with a new podcast OVERDRAWN that focuses on the human cos...

Send us Fan Mail What does a credit union lobbyist do?  On the show to answer that question is Ibby Dickson , manager of federal advocacy at the League of Credit Unions , a multi-state league representing credit unions in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Virginia and there’s a merger in the works with the League of Maryland and the District of Columbia. Can credit unions get their message across in toda...

Send us Fan Mail Casap was the best of show winner at Finovate fall 2025 and its business is this: building AI Agents for Disputes ‍and Fraud resolution and it now has 50+ clients that it won with attention grabbing claims: Resolve claims in minutes, not weeks. Earn lasting loyalty. Cut fraud losses. This is a universe undergoing immense change, mainly due to the rise of so-called first party frau...

Send us Fan Mail There are times when credit union discussions about AI and how it’s transforming their operations detour into a reprise of the classic Wendy’s commercial : Where’s the beef? That is: where are the measurable benefits arising from AI use? And then into my email box pops an email from Christian Klacko , CEO of Kintera AI , who says his tools can be integrated into a credit union’s b...

Send us Fan Mail I will admit it, when I first heard about BNPL - buy now pay later - I snorted that layaway had died years ago. I was wrong. BNPL has become a huge marketplace.  Federal Reserve data pegs it at around $160 billion in consumer credit products. And the scary bit for credit unions is that fintechs own over 90% of that market and they aren’t sharing with FIs. Enter Equipifi which has...

Send us Fan Mail Corning Credit Union knew the answers it wanted were in the data on its Symitar core - the problem was getting the answers expeditiously so the information could be put to use when it was wanted. That wasn’t happening. Literally weeks could pass before the wanted information was in hand. Couldn’t it be faster?  Corning Credit Union got in touch with startup Tursio .   In this show...

Send us Fan Mail Agentic AI is coming to credit unions and Saris AI is helping lead the charge. What is Agentic AI? Agentic AI acts as an agent that autonomously executes multi-step workflows.  That is, Agentic AI does.  It doesn’t tell you what to do.  It does it for you. Saris AI says it can automate 70% of tedious, complex back office tasks.  It delivers a 300% productivity increase. And 9.8x c...

Send us Fan Mail Call this a case of two scenarios. Here’s the background: a member calls and requests to skip a payment on a loan balance.  The loan term will simply extend by a month, interest continues to be collected, and there’s a fee - usually between $15 and $60 - for setting up the skipped payment. In scenario 1 the customer service rep fields the call, talks with the member, checks to see...

Send us Fan Mail The headline on the CUInsight story grabbed my attention: AI for credit unions: Making “people-first” work even better. The author, Bonnie Ortiz, has also been a CU 2.0 Podcast guest before so I wanted to get her back on. Ortiz is the founder of 02 Consulting Group and, earlier in her career, she was the long serving COO at The Partnership Credit Union. She’s a level headed expert...

Send us Fan Mail What do we do next? That’s a question heard in most credit union executive suites and boardrooms and what it is focused on is AI. Artificial intelligence suddenly has become the tech that matters among credit unions but there’s just one problem: few actually have concrete ideas about how and where to use AI. Enter Kirk Drake , CEO of the digital consultancy CU 2.0 , author of the...

Send us Fan Mail The Student Choice CUSO, built around student loans, is expanding and now has introduced a program that will enable credit unions to issue small dollar, emergency loans to members with no credit check. These are not payday loans.  Interest rates are capped at 18% per NCUA policies. How can this be?  On the show is Scott Patterson , ceo of Student Choice, and the episode starts wit...

Send us Fan Mail Meet Storyfi - the NACUSO New CUSO of the Year for 2026.   When I saw the press release I had to get Nick Olexa , CEO of Storyfi, a Michigan based CUSO owned by six Michigan credit unions. What Storyfi is doing is important - it’s harnessing video to help credit unions tell their stories and it’s working within credit union budgets. That matters because, nowadays,  video is the gl...

Send us Fan Mail Is the country finally ready for a safe banking act that in effect legalizes cannabis businesses at the federal level? In recent years multiple bills doing essentially that were passed by the House of Representatives only to be buried in a Senate committee that never reported it out for a floor vote. There’s a new House bill in play and this time may be the charm, says Terry Mende...

Send us Fan Mail Title this show everything you need to know about fraud today but have been afraid to ask. Start with this: Fraud is big and getting bigger. That is the worrisome message delivered by Rene Perez, a fraud expert with Jack Henry, and seconded by Stephanie Ziegler, director of financial investigations at SELCO, a $2.8 billion credit union headquartered in Oregon. Perez is on the show...

Send us Fan Mail Can a banker successfully transition into a senior role in a credit union?   Can a credit union deploy a financial wellness initiative that also works as a competitive edge in marketing? Kevin Miller, CEO of $5.7 billion Travis Credit Union in Northern California, is on the show today and he is guilty of that banking background but he has logged 4+ years as Travis CEO. And he also...

Send us Fan Mail Two threads run through this show: the human impacts of AI and the credit union of the future. Ultimately the threads are connected.  If a credit union is its people, what is it when AI does an increasing amount of the work in a credit union? On the show to explore these ideas is Nenuca Syquia , CEO of BoxD, “Better Organizations by Design,” a Silicon Valley consultancy. Herself a...

Send us Fan Mail When will instant payments come to smaller credit unions? Perhaps the better question is: Will instant payments ever come to smaller credit unions? On the show are Bob West, CEO of CUSO CU*South, which serves  some 360 credit unions (in 42 states, not just the south), and Keith Riddle of Payfinia, which has launched an instant payment platform that integrated with CU*South’s techn...

Send us Fan Mail How does a lawyer - by education and employment history - become a top executive at fintechs?   Good question.  But here’s another one: how can a fintech help credit unions win members for savings accounts paying in the vicinity of 4% APR? On the show is Alastair Wood , CEO of Raisin , a fintech that helps credit unions market innovative products - high yield savings included - to...

Send us Fan Mail Can a credit union be a credit union without human employees? Are credit unions, in the age of AI, at risk of losing the humanity that distinguishes them? In this provocative episode, keynote speaker Joshua Evans , who bills himself as an expert on the workplace of the future, talks about how AI is transforming credit unions, how parts of this are to the good, but, he insists, cre...