The CU2.0 Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Arlington Community Federal Credit Union - headquartered in Arlington VA and with assets just shy of $500 million - thought it had its growth plan set.  It would merge with $246 million First Federal Credit Union (headquartered in adjacent Alexandria VA). But then the First Federal members rejected the plan. So we invited David Martinez , CIO at Arlington Community, on the show to...

Send us Fan Mail Shazam, watch a $10 gift card - maybe one issued by retail goliath Amazon or perhaps WalMart - transform into a $13 gift card. Can’t happen? Everybody knows alchemy is a hoax? Meet Prizeout, an ad tech company that says it has the formula for  valuing up gift cards when they hit a consumer’s hand. On the show today is David Metz , CEO of Prizeout who offers the details of how Priz...

Send us Fan Mail Talk about Hatfields vs. McCoys. In the world of credit union c-suite retirement planning there are two major competing scenarios. There are SERPs based on whole life policies. And there are IULs, indexed universal life plans. In this intro I am not going to tell you the difference. That’s because this is a complex topic and on the show is Kirk Kordeleski onetime Bethpage Federal...

Send us Fan Mail Financial wellness + millennials and Gen Z = a huge opportunity for credit unions. At least for the credit unions that approach wellness for that age cohort with the right tone of voice and mindset. That’s the core advice offered in this show by Doug Brown , president NCR Digital Banking.  Before that he was at FIS and before that, in 2007, he launched Bank of America’s mobile app...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Part 2 of the CU 2.0 dialogue on the NCUA’s proposed rule changes pertaining to loan participation and related topics. The part 1 podcast featured Kirk Drake, wearing his Quilo hat, and Boris, a Quilo co-founder. There’s a link to that show in the notes.   Here’s a link to NCUA’s lengthy proposed rule changes.  That same link includes a box for submitting comments. As y...

Send us Fan Mail You probably have heard about CuneXus, the CUNA Mutual company that helps a credit union sort through its members and determine which offers - car loans, personal loans, credit cards and more - this member is eligible for without filling out a loan application. Read the last six words again: without filling out a loan application. Think about it: most credit unions already have al...

Send us Fan Mail Just when you start to think that things are settling down in credit union land - talk of recession is vanishing, inflation seems to be getting tamed, most experts expect a healthy uptick in mortgages come Spring and even new car sales are growing - here is Henry Meier, onetime general counsel of the New York Credit Union Association with what he believes are big threats to credit...

Send us Fan Mail The big news out of the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) is that the agency has proposed significant changes to its regulation regarding loan participation - and all the details are available to be read in the Federal Register. There’s a link in the show notes and that same link takes you to where NCUA offers guidelines for submitting comments on the proposal. Understan...

Send us Fan Mail Ignite and preserve. Right there is the motto of rkGoBig, a CUSO with a singular focus: helping smaller credit unions survive and indeed prosper. That seems a Sysephean task? Peter Barnard . CEO of CUSO rkGoBi g, firmly believes that cooperation among credit unions is a fast way to help more small credit unions survive. To that end, rkGoBig offers a basket of services include a co...

Send us Fan Mail Pick a number and here’s the question: over the last 11 years CEO pay in credit unions has gone up 2% per year, 5% per year, or greater than 10% per year? Take a deep breath now.  The answer is 7.5%, said Kirk Kordleski, past CEO of Bethpage Credit Union, one of the nation’s biggest, and now a consultant specializing in retirement plans with OM Financial. If that number rocks you,...

Send us Fan Mail Are you helping your members succeed? Before answering know a couple things.  Banks - definitionally - are in business to benefit their shareholders. A credit union, says Mac Thompson , founder and president of White Clay , which uses data analytics to help deliver more member successes, has as its mission member success. But it’s the getting there that is the journey. To do it, s...

Send us Fan Mail Quick now, no Googling, what’s an ADU? In the next half hour you will learn a lot about ADUs - which, by the way, are accessory dwelling units and recently California law has made it much easier to site an ADU on an existing homesite. That’s good because California’s homeless crisis only worsens and one step in the right direction is more housing.   Other parts of the country - fr...

Send us Fan Mail Name the last big innovation in mobile banking. No rush. It's understandable if you are stumped because, well, there really haven't been many in the past half dozen years. Ken Kondo, newly appointed chief innovation officer at Troy, Mich. based Maholo Banking , is on the show to tell his plan for upping innovation in mobile banking. And he believes more innovation is cri...

Send us Fan Mail Here’s the blunt news: the market for mergers and acquisitions involving fintechs now is very, very slow. What’s that mean for credit unions, CUSOs, and fintechs themselves? On the show is Martin Walker , an executive with both Next Level Ventures and Curql which puts him at the epicenter of fintech funding especially in the credit union/CUSO sphere. A past podcast guest - link to...

Send us Fan Mail Here’s a secret you don’t know about the CU 2.0 Podcast. Just about in every show there are some minutes of talk before the show really starts  Most shows do similar. It helps get the guest comfortable and, importantly, it lets the host do a sound check to make sure all is working. Those minutes almost always are deleted in editing. Not in this show with Amy Travers , a regional v...

Send us Fan Mail Discover software as a relationship. That’s the tagline used by Austin TX based Tailwind which says it thrives on handling the knottiest IT problems and also that it is human based - and isn’t always so in IT. On the show today is partner Andrew Tull who explains exactly what Tailwind means when it talks about software as a relationship and also about how Tailwind genuinely takes...

Send us Fan Mail In the cloud. That’s is where People’s Credit Union CEO Sean Daly shifted much of the IT of the approximately $600 million in assets institution and in this podcast he tells why, how it went, and what the early benefits are. In this show you will often hear the initials AWS - Amazon Web Services.  Yep. Amazon. Aside from being a giant retailer, it is one of the biggest players in...

Send us Fan Mail Lucky you. You negotiated a satisfactory SERP (Supplemental Executive Retirement Plan) or maybe it was a 457F bonus package. Just one problem: Ballooning prices in today’s economy coupled with the fast paced growth many credit unions have experienced in the past five years probably have rendered those plans as woefully too small. Remember, the standard goal of much retirement plan...

Send us Fan Mail You know about CRM. Now learn about CXM, a new approach to knowing and managing your members' journeys. OvationCXM is on the show today and Vaneet Grewal , head of banking and financial services, is here to tell us about the emerging field of CXM, customer experience management.  Here's what OvationCXM says about what it does: "OvationCXM is the first platform to ta...

Send us Fan Mail Amarildo is head of Harness FI and, yes, he has a last name that you will hear him pronounce in the opening seconds of the podcast.   Here's the good news about what Amarildo - a longtime Mastercard employee turned fintech exec (and he talks about that transition) - and his team are doing at Harness giving credit unions tools that let them add new powers to old credit cards....

Send us Fan Mail People are staying in their homes longer. That is fact. One upshot is that more homeowners are planning more ambitious home renovation projects. But many have had problems getting a loan for the full amount needed - a kitchen remodel for instance can cost upwards of $30,000. Enter Housetable , a New York based startup that is bringing multiple new ideas to this issue.  The big ide...

Send us Fan Mail  Here is where the pedal hits the metal. In this show credit union executive retirement compensation expert Kirk Kordeleski tells how the credit union senior executives can persuade their board to agree to market rate retirement plans that may well involve multiple millions of dollars for the executive team. That's big money. It takes a smart argument to persuade. Kordeleski...

Send us Fan Mail James White believes that the answer is in the data and he insists that credit unions already have plenty of data to fuel  enormous leaps in member engagement.  And the company where he now works - Total Expert where he is industry principal for banks and credit unions - has plenty of tools to help a credit union get with 21st century marketing techniques. Lots of credit unions st...

Send us Fan Mail Today's credit union leadership - especially at the nation's best and biggest credit unions- is professional and deeply versed in financial services. But that wasn't always so in credit union land. This episode opens with Kirk Kordeleski - onetime CEO at Bethpage Federal Credit Union, one of the nation's biggest, and now an executive at OM Financial Group, whic...

Send us Fan Mail  Free. That's a price you don't hear for a core system - particularly not one with over 100 installations globally and with a pedigree that includes executives who played central roles in bringing the DNA core to market and that core today is integral to Fiserv's product line. The company is Open Banking Solutions and you haven't heard of it or its core because...