Grow Your Credit Union

Read the show notes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com There's a new kind of AI failure, and it's sneakier than bad output. The model tells you your mediocre work is brilliant, over and over, just to keep you coming back. Harvard Business Review has a name for the lazy thinking that sets in when you believe it. In this episode: The subtler AI failure that flatters you into th...

Read the show notes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com Every CEO loves a Big Audacious Goal . The trouble is what happens next: the goal gets tossed to the team with a fantasy timeline attached, and they are the ones left figuring out how to actually pull it off. In this episode: How credit union leaders can reduce the operational distractions eating their day How to write a...

Read the show notes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com A 77-year-old credit union did the due diligence, picked a solid vendor, and built a whole strategy on it. Then the vendor went under and took the credit union with it. The lesson isn't about that vendor. It's about what happens when your entire plan has a single point of failure and no way out. In this episode: How credi...

Read the show notes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com The best teams run circles around everyone else, and it isn't because they hired the best people. It's because they built a system underneath those people that makes it safe to take a swing and miss. Most credit unions have the talent already. What they're missing is the platform that lets it perform. In this episode: Why...

Read the show notes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com Membership growth just hit its lowest point since 2011, and the boom years before it may have been borrowed all along, members rented from auto dealers who were never really yours to keep. The credit unions pulling ahead stopped renting and started building relationships they actually own. In this episode: Whether credit...

Read the show notes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com JOIN NCU-ISAO FOR A FREE TABLETOP EXERCISE ON AUGUST 27TH, 2026 Most credit unions only catch fraud after the money's gone. They budget for the cleanup, staff for the cleanup, build their whole defense around the cleanup, and it's costing them far more than the loss itself. The credit unions pulling ahead are the ones who...

Your best employee is ready to move up. There's no seat open. That doesn't mean there's nowhere for them to go. In this episode: Whether AI ownership belongs to one executive or the whole organization What to do when a star employee is ready to move up and there is no seat open What the Credit Union Board Modernization Act actually changes now that it is law A huge thanks to our sponsor, The Famil...

Read the show notes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com Credit unions were built around the people you knew. Your neighbors, your coworkers, the people you could not avoid. Now communities form on Discord servers, Substack feeds, and shared Slack channels. So should we be pushing for rules that reflect that? In this episode: Why AI is making broken credit union processes faste...

The experience is where trust gets made or broken. Credit unions have always assumed theirs was safe. But somewhere between the app that locks you out and the branch that feels like a Saturday at the DMV, that assumption started expiring. In this episode: Why credit union values are failing to connect with younger generations and what to do about it What member data credit unions already have and...

Credit unions are running networks that look nothing like the ones they started with. Knowing exactly what is connected, who approved it, and what it permits turns out to be harder than it sounds. In this episode: Who is actually on the hook when a fintech vendor relationship goes wrong Why routine connectivity decisions carry risks that boards rarely understand What regulators actually expect whe...

Read the show notes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com Somewhere out there is a credit union board that poured themselves a bowl of nutritious succession planning. Most boards just grabbed the wrong box. In this episode: Why transformation failures almost never start with the technology and what leaders are missing before the project begins Why young credit union professional...

Read the show notes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com Your team is not underperforming because they are lazy. They are underperforming because they stopped believing that what they do changes anything. That is not a motivation problem. It is a leadership problem. And it has a fix that does not involve a single town hall or strategy deck. In this episode of Grow Your Credit U...

Read the show notes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com Credit unions are feeding communities, funding scholarships, and keeping members out of payday loan cycles. The only people who know about it are other credit union professionals. That's not humility. That's a problem. In this episode: Why the projects that stay on your list may be costing you more than the ones you kill...

Read the show notes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com A $12.6 billion merger collapsed. The credit unions are now in court. And somewhere in the middle of it all, a CEO allegedly told his merger partner he was a dictator and didn't care what anyone thought. The question worth asking isn't what went wrong. It's why nobody asked the right questions before the papers were signe...

Read the shownotes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com Every time a credit union has an unmet need, its ready to swipe right on a new vendor. But 450 matches later, nobody's having the hard conversation with the partners already sitting across the table. What if the answer was never a new vendor? What if it was just a better conversation with the ones you already chose? In thi...

Read the shownotes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com Nobody is buying bad technology on purpose. Credit unions are doing the best they can with cores that weren't built for the world they're operating in today, and the gap between what modern software promises and what actually plugs into your infrastructure is nobody's fault and everybody's problem. So how many more systems...

Read the shownotes and full transcript on our site:  growyourcreditunion.com The NCUA says deregulation is coming. Small credit union leaders say it's about time. But when the real burden isn't the rules on the books, it's the people enforcing them, does any of it matter? In this episode host Joshua Barclay  and co-host Becky Reed welcome Doug Wadsworth, President and CEO of Tri-CU Credit Union, t...

Read the shownotes and full transcript on our site:  growyourcreditunion.com There's nothing wrong with using AI to speed up your work. But when you start relying on it to do your job, well, your peers start to notice. "AI workslop" forces your colleagues to interpret, correct, and redo the work you were supposed to finish and they definitely resent you for it. This episode was recorded LIVE from...

Read the shownotes and full transcript on our site:  growyourcreditunion.com Your board thinks $100,000 is too much for a CEO because they never made more than $40,000 on the factory line. Your C-suite wants the credit union of old. And your employees? They're leaving, not for better pay, but because you're offering them a 1995 compensation package in 2026. In this episode: What age is your leader...

Read the shownotes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com We all think it: "If I just work longer, I'll get more done." But when one of your high performers starts operating this way, you need to step in immediately. Because they're not going to tell you they're burning out. So how do you catch it before they quit? In this episode: Why AI isn't making you dumber Why working 70 ho...

Read the shownotes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com Credit unions are out there chasing new members—spending on billboards, opening branches, crafting the perfect rate specials. Meanwhile, 80% of your existing members have one product with you and you haven't called them once. Maybe the new members you're looking for are actually the members you already have. In this episod...

Read the shownotes and full transcript on our site:  growyourcreditunion.com Deepfake technology has become so accessible that threat actors need only 10 to 30 seconds of audio and a $5 monthly subscription to convincingly impersonate executives, bypass authentication, and trick employees into catastrophic decisions. Credit unions face record ransomware attacks while most lack AI governance polici...

Read the shownotes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com A huge thanks to our sponsor, NCU-ISAO — Visit ncuisao.org/gycu to learn more.  Credit unions added 3 million new members last year, but 64% never made a single deposit or showed real activity. The problem isn't just about engagement strategy or welcome emails—it's that credit unions may just be making the fundamental act...

Read the shownotes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com A huge thanks to our sponsor, NCU-ISAO — Watch this video or visit ncuisao.org/gycu to learn more.  Credit unions invest heavily in stadium naming rights and campus partnerships to reach younger members, but those partnerships fall flat when the mobile app experience disappoints. Gen Z has been Wescom Financial's fastest g...

Read the shownotes and full transcript on our site: growyourcreditunion.com Credit unions face steep member acquisition costs while losing 15% of their membership annually. But the institutions treating acquisition costs as the primary metric are missing what actually drives member loyalty, referable experiences, and long-term value that can't be calculated on spreadsheets. In this episode of Grow...