The CU2.0 Podcast

Send us Fan Mail  Build a fintech from the ground up with security in mind - especially and crucially if the fintech wants to work with credit unions. That is the one sentence takeaway from this 20 minute conversation with Shane Butcher , director of CISO Services of CUSO Ongoing Operations (and a past CU2.0 Podcast guest, episode 85 ), and Gary Jeter, chief technology officer at Trustone Financia...

Send us Fan Mail  Money talks. Fintechs are hungry for money. Ray Crouse, CEO of Parsons Federal Credit Union - and a CU 2.0 Podcast veteran (episode link here ) - talked in detail at the CU2VIP-Live event about how credit unions and fintechs both can harness the money raising ability of CUSOs, credit union service organizations. Ray, by the way, is also chair of the board of NACUSO, the National...

Send us Fan Mail  The inaugural CU2VIP-Live event will become a Woodstock like meeting in this sense: yes, hundreds of thousands went to Woodstock but if you  asked for a show of hands of those who were there be ready to count well into the millions. Five years from now many will say, yes, I was there at the first CU2VIP-Live event. We were actually there and what you will be hearing this week are...

Send us Fan Mail Boring. Old. Anachronistic. Are those the words that come to mind when you think of calculators? Guess what: maybe those adjectives apply to the calculators at your financial institution's website...but that is not how Chase Neinken , a co-founder of fintech Chimney, sees them. That's because Chimney is in the business of creating calculators that engage members in looki...

Send us Fan Mail  How many loan applications does your credit union reject because of the applicant's credit score? Harder question: how many times are those credit scores erroneously lowered due to faulty information in credit reports? Listen to Clint Lotz , ceo of TrackStar AI, and the answer is that plenty of loan apps are rejected for exactly those reasons. What if your institution could...

Send us Fan Mail NSF has become the new four letter within the financial industry.  While many institutions have grown dependent upon the $30 or so they charge a customer/member for an NSF, Washington DC is revving up to throw shame at FIs that impose those fees. What's a credit union to do? A year ago we did a podcast with Joel Schwartz, founder of the then fledgling DoubleCheck , a company...

Send us Fan Mail  To start the podcast we asked NCR executive Doug Brown the hard question: exactly what can mid-size and small credit unions do to stay alive in the face of relentless competition from fintechs who increasingly are gobbling up home mortgages, p2p payments and a lot more - and what can NCR do to help them. The questions only got harder from there. In the podcast Brown tells about h...

Send us Fan Mail Brynn Ammon is on the podcast to tell us that it just isn't true that old cores can't learn new tricks - and she has plenty of examples of integration of new skills into core systems to enable credit unions to offer more and more useful tools to their members. Reports of the death of the core have been greatly exaggerated suggests Ammon and in this podcast she offers an...

Send us Fan Mail  Can AI - artificial intelligence - be harnessed to build and strength member relations, indeed to know what this member is likely to do right now? That is the guiding belief at Senso, a Canada based AI company that now is expanding into the US market with a specific focus on credit unions. It is no secret. The credit union share of the home mortgage market has steadily eroded, as...

Send us Fan Mail  The name is pronounced CU Soul and know that the CUSO's focus under CEO Jonathan Taylor is indeed on soulful solutions to member problems. You almost want to cue up " Soul Man " and break out in song.   But these are very serious, thoughtful and - yes - quirky solutions that are getting cooked up at the Albuquerque-based CUSO, formed in 2019 and owned by four credi...

Send us Fan Mail Crypto is now, it is happening. Happy New Year! Our first show in 2022 is about a topic that you will likely will be hearing a lot about this year: Crypto currencies. And what you may not realize is that with crypto in play the financial institution stranglehold on wire transfers may slip. Even worse, credit card interchange may vanish. Now do we have your attention? Crypto brings...

Send us Fan Mail  Walt Agius knows credit union lending.  And he especially knows what credit unions need to to stay competitive in the 21st century. Consider this podcast a deep dive into today's lending. The guest is Walt Agius, CEO of Lendsys, a fintech, and also CU Lending Edge, a CUSO that today focuses on car loans but, says Agius, he is looking to extend the portfolio.  In the past he...

Send us Fan Mail Put your brainstorming hat on. You'll want it as you listen to this podcast that serves as a preview of the January 20, 2022 CU 2.0 Brainstorm event that will gather together fintech leaders and credit union executives for a day of lively presentations (topics to be chosen by the attendees) and conversation.  Consider this podcast a mini preview of what the Brainstorm event w...

Send us Fan Mail  BNPL.  Remember that because you soon will be using that abbreviation often. It stands for Buy Now, Pay Later and it is just about the hottest trend in payments at retail. Today's US market is small, maybe $50 billion but forecasts show the BNPL market crashing into the many hundreds of billions of dollars by the middle of the present decade.  And then the numbers start to g...

Send us Fan Mail Be bold. That is the loud message from Cameron Madill, CEO of PixelSpoke, an Oregon headquartered marketing agency that primarily serves credit unions.  He also hosts " The Remarkable Credit Union " podcast.   Too many credit unions simply want to fit in, he says.   Dare to be different and that just may get you noticed. That's just one take-away from this podcast -...

Send us Fan Mail  What you don't know about digital marketing can be your undoing. That is 2021 fact. For some years credit union c-suite occupants have shrugged off digital marketing - it's just for kids, our members skew old.  Maybe that was true (maybe it wasn't as true as the c-suiters believed) but what now has become indisputable in our pandemic era is that digital is here and...

Send us Fan Mail  If you had asked me ten years ago what the future was for corporate credit unions I probably would have said: they have one? There were reasons for cynicism: You remember Wescorp , right? There are links in the show notes if you need memory refreshing. But - and this is a huge but - there are literally thousands of small credit unions that needed and still need a corporate credit...

Send us Fan Mail Some credit unions are making lots of very profitable member business loans.  Most aren't.  In fact, by Mark Ritter's count, maybe 300 of the nation's credit unions are genuine players in this business. The rest are dabblers, he says. That's a shock because in the last couple years there has been a stampede of credit unions eager to get into member business len...

Send us Fan Mail  What are the chief tools of old school debt collectors? Phone and US mail.  Two problems. Nobody answers the phone when it's an unknown number (do you?) and US mail, increasingly, is tossed unread because all the important, urgent stuff comes via email. Enter Debtsy, a fintech that is pioneering 21st century collection techniques that are kinder, gentler and - above all - di...

Send us Fan Mail  Early in this podcast you will realize that  Alexey Krasnoriadtsev is a different kind of tech CEO.  For starters, this is a podcast where you will not hear much - probably nothing - that sends you to Google to look up words you don't understand. But the bigger difference is that this is a tech CEO who talks about why it's important that users of technology feel loved b...

Send us Fan Mail Meet Dora.  She just may change all that you think about mobile banking. A product of USAlliance - a $2 billion credit union based in Rye, NY that happens to be the legacy IBM employees credit union - Dora is the first credit union attempt to create a so-called neo bank, that is a branchless institution with no bricks and mortar. USAlliance has been joined in this effort by three...

Send us Fan Mail Irrelevance beckons. And it will swallow many credit unions whole. That is the message delivered by A ndre Iervolino , a longtime credit union senior staffer who wrote a provocative piece in The Financial Brand entitled "10 Factors That Will Determine Banks' Future Relevance." Reading is article will rock you because, frankly, he is not optimistic about the future o...

Send us Fan Mail Things are different today in financial services and, increasingly, there is a realization that we are not going back to "normal," not later this year, probably not ever.  That means credit union executives have to think bigger - more boldly - about how to compete in a changing financial services landscape. The podcast opens up with a huge credit union 2021 fact: institu...

Send us Fan Mail  The language on the Finalytics.ai website is bold: "Our mission is simple: use technology to help financial institutions offer the same exceptional service they are known for in-branch, online. As digital commands a greater share of the customer touch, we are passionate about helping organizations grow and keep the promise of modern service excellence alive." Read that...

Send us Fan Mail The future of banking just may be voice - but that will probably mean talking with a computer. Already tens of millions of Bank of America customers use its Erica and that number is growing at a brisk rate. It should be no surprise.  Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant are part of many of our lives today. We talk with machines. We like talking with machines. Question: how is a credit...