The CU2.0 Podcast

Send us Fan Mail There's gold in them there hills. That used to be the rallying cry for miners especially in the Southwest and California but listen closely in CU c-suites today and you may here a new cry: There's gold in our data. Wait, you may be shouting. Didn't all those big data projects at credit unions a decade ago fizzle out? Well, maybe not all...but a lot did. Today howeve...

Send us Fan Mail  The stark reality is that as interest rates edge up - and already in much of Europe inflation has climbed above 10% in the year and interest rates will follow - a fresh new look is being given credit union executive retirement plans. It is just is exponentially harder - and more expensive - to plan retirement in a high inflation world. Accept that funding such plans will cost mor...

Send us Fan Mail You know what we are talking about? Then you have to get to know Kris Kovacs, CEO of Constellation , a CUSO birthed to make it easy for a credit union to add the tech it wants, from AI tools to crypto to pretty much whatever you imagine because Constellation is open to adding fintech tools that its customers want. This is a smashing of the technology walls that, for  decades, have...

Send us Fan Mail Ask Jaime Marks how she sees her role in the credit union universe and her answer comes fast: cheerleader. She is a true believer in the credit union mission and the credit union difference. Most recently she has been a vice president at California Credit Union but along the way she has worked at CoastHills Credit Union, also Ent Credit Union. Now buckle up for a wide ranging disc...

Send us Fan Mail You may think IPA is a particular kind of craft beer but Joseariel Gomez, CEO of Shastic, is on the show today to tell all you don't know but need to know about Intelligent Process Automation. Along the way he also tells about RPA, robotic process automation. What Shastic does is develop tools that let credit unions speed up many, many processes - everything from processing h...

Send us Fan Mail Cars are more expensive than ever.  New cars are hard to find in a marketplace ravaged by supply chain bottlenecks.  Consumers are keeping their cars for ever longer terms. Add that up and one conclusion is that the new car financing marketplace is slowing. But another conclusion is that there just may be an emerging market opportunity in car refinancing. It's a relatively ne...

Send us Fan Mail Who opens email anymore and as for phoning members, forget about it. Diminishing returns from once mainline communication channels have many credit unions pulling  their hair out in frustration. Enter Larky .  Larky delivers context appropriate push notifications from inside the credit union mobile app.  It's not SMS, these are notifications in the mobile banking app. In fact...

Send us Fan Mail  This is a different kind of podcast. Unlike just about any other in the series. It started normally enough.  An email came in from a PR person offering Kent Lugrand, CEO of the $1 billion InTouch Credit Union in Texas, as a guest to discuss the institution's high yield checking account which provides members a way to earn up to 4% interest on deposits if they put $2500 per m...

Send us Fan Mail The latest CUES executive compensation numbers for credit union executives are out and this explosion still reverberates across the industry. Total median executive comp in 2022 was up 14.9%.   For CEOs the total median compensation was $515,602.   Understand: those numbers are from a time when inflation was not a concern and most workers in most industries were happy to get a 2 o...

Send us Fan Mail What a difference a year makes. A year ago the typical credit union was awash in deposits - much of it coming in via stimulus money - and accordingly there was a rush to get that money back out on the streets working. that meant loans. In mid 2022, the deposit glut is history for most credit unions. So what happening on the lending side? Meet Chad Heese , chief lending officer at...

Send us Fan Mail Robert Johnston was a Marine and that is where he honed his skills at waging war in the cyber dimension - and you better believe that is where a lot of warfare now happens, from Russia knocking out ATMs in neighboring countries through nation state hackers targeting financial institutions, both to fuel widespread anxiety and simply to plunder others' money. Johnston has a ped...

Send us Fan Mail   Quick now, are you current on what's happening in the fast changing payments universe? Can you ace a pop quiz on the hot topics in payments such as *         Contactless payments’ role in a post-pandemic economy (Tap to Pay, Digital Wallets, etc.) ·         Faster payments and key considerations for the FedNow service ·         Emerging payments fraud concerns ·         QR...

Send us Fan Mail Tom Shen is a fintech OG, one of the originals who got his start in the industry 40 years ago when it was still called just financial services. He's had glittering successes.  He was EVP at Digital Insight when Intuit bought it for $1.33 billion in 2007. Earlier he founded Software Dynamics Inc. (SDI). More recently he founded mobile app developer Malauzai which was bought in...

Send us Fan Mail Ask Pablo DeFilippi, an executive with Inclusiv, the trade group for CDFI credit unions, why they did a deal with QCash, the fintech birthed to facilitate making small dollar loans quickly to credit union members, without reference to credit scores, and his answer boils down to this: It's the CDFI mission. Members have financial needs, many turn to very high interest alternat...

Send us Fan Mail Your members text. Especially your younger members but today, really, everybody texts. That means your employees text too. So why can't your employees text members with questions and offer them help. pointers, suggestions? You say there would be compliance questions. Meet Statflo, a company that specializes in one thing: compliant texting software and it also specializes in t...

Send us Fan Mail Talk about miracles. River City FCU in San Antonio knew it wanted to make small business loans - many of its members owned and/or worked in small businesses - and you have to know how hard it is for any small business to snare a loan. Then up the degree of difficulty if the small business is minority owned (and River City's membership is majority Hispanic). How can those typi...

Send us Fan Mail  A machine just maybe can pick stocks better than a human - and just maybe credit unions can augment their investment services by offering a new robo-advisor service from longtime fintech Access Softek, a 36 year-old Berkeley CA based fintech that offers online and mobile banking and more to hundreds of FIs. Now Access Softek founder and CEO Chris Doner wants to put a robo-advisor...

Send us Fan Mail Now the US Congress is weighing in on credit union boards and Chris Otey, an executive with CU 2.0 but importantly for this podcast, board chair at South Bay Credit Union in California, tells what he likes about the H. R. 6889, the Credit Union Board Modernization Act , which now has been voted out of committee and will come up for a vote in the full House. The bill has bipartisan...

Send us Fan Mail There has to be a better way. A safer way. There has to be a way to swiftly let  a member re-set a password to gain entry to his/her accounts and to also defeat the account take-over criminals who specialize in seizing control of others' accounts and swiftly draining them. Know this: the criminals who do this are an industry.  They are professional.  And they work fulltime at...

Send us Fan Mail  Tools, not tips, that's what those with damaged credit need to get themselves on the path to credit improvement. Right there is the guiding credo of Credit Mountain , a new CUSO that Cornerstone Foundation, the charity wing of Cornerstone League , helped birth.  Credit Mountain successfully ran a pilot with seven credit unions and now is looking to offer its app through more...

Send us Fan Mail  You are going to want to listen to this podcast twice. That's because the first time you hear it you will think, this can't be so. It can't be that easy for a credit union to connect with fintechs and have all the compliance and integration and all that complex and expensive stuff just, well, handled by this Utah based open banking company I have never heard of. Th...

Send us Fan Mail Here's the big, immense, mind blowing idea that is central to this podcast: a competitive credit union has to view executive compensation as a strategic initiative, really no different from putting investment money into a CUSO or  rolling out a spiffy new mobile banking app. Understand this: NCUA regulations explicitly allow this allocation of capital. And grasp this: unless...

Send us Fan Mail  Steve Bone, a longtime fintech executive, has been given the big chair at Ongoing Operations - aka OGO - and now he is running the CUSO's efforts in providing credit unions with Business Continuity Planning (BCP), Disaster Recovery, Information Security and more. Bone is just a few weeks in the job - taking over from Kirk Drake (hear his recent podcast here) -- and he is ful...

Send us Fan Mail  Kirk Drake spent 15+ years conceiving, building, and nurturing Ongoing Operations, a CUSO focused on disaster recovery, cloud services, and more. Now he is moving on. He leaves OGO in good hands. The new leader there is Steve Bone, whose podcast focused on his vision for OGO posts Wednesday. In this podcast, Drake reminisces a little about OGO, muses about the growing role of fin...

Send us Fan Mail  Are you earning enough at a credit union? Here's the bad news: it's not easy to figure out the right answer to that question. Information about executive pay at credit unions is not easy to come by. Here's the worse news: If a top exec at a credit union is underpaid, very probably most of the executive staff is too - and that is an institution that will find it eve...