The CU2.0 Podcast

Send us Fan Mail  Be real - few credit unions can genuinely be all things to all members because how big would the institution have to be? As you ponder that - really drill into the idea that there can be success in being small - now consider a fintech named ZSuite Technologies .  It has three product lines that it makes available to its financial institution partners: ZRent, aimed at property man...

Send us Fan Mail It's tough out there.  That's a paraphrase of how Jill Nowacki , a 20 year veteran of the credit union industry and presently CEO of Humanidei + O'Rourke where she focuses on talent recruitment for credit unions. When fast food outlets are advertising starting pay at $15 and up per hour in much of the country you get a hint of how tough it is right now to recruit fo...

Send us Fan Mail You know the horror stories - the educational loan burden keeps mounting for many millions and, frankly, the options for lessening that burden are not plentiful. But there are options. Meet UNest . It's an app and what it does it help set aside money for a child. It's flexible too. The underlying law is the Uniform Transfers to Minors Act which allows an adult to set up...

Send us Fan Mail  She's smart. She has around 20 years experience at Inclusiv, the association for community development financial institutions and its predecessor organization. And she has put a lot of attention on African American Credit Unions.  Will they survive? Does it matter? Meet Pamela Owens, a SVP at Inclusiv and she comes with a lot to tell us. As for African American credit unions...

Send us Fan Mail Go to the website for Otomo and here's what jumps out at you: "Be the money platform people love. Turn any account holder into an avid user with autonomous personal money management." Read it again. What Otomo is about is a revolution in our digital money management and here is a fact: on a fundamental level, online and mobile banking are not substantially different...

Send us Fan Mail Money woes. It sounds like the title of a blues song but, ask Peter Rice, Chief Banking Officer at Workers Credit Union in Massachusetts, and he will tell you it's not an oldie but today's lyric and he can prove it with a recent Central Mass survey that found 65% of the residents said they were unsure, stressed, or extremely stressed about money.   Ouch. that's a lo...

Send us Fan Mail Ask Kavita Singh - a vice president at payments company Payrailz - what's a smart way to differentiate a credit union in a a competitive marketplace that is ever more cluttered and her answer is succinct: AI. As she wrote in a recent Credit Union Times article , "Credit union leaders must go a step further and find a true strategic differentiator. This can be found via a...

Send us Fan Mail  You know the income of many of your members. Now here's the big question: do you know what they are spending it on? Down to the SKU level - that is, on exactly what are they spending? You want to meet Izabella Gabowicz, COO and a founding team member at Toronto based fintech Sensibill, a company built around the insight that financial wellness is not one size fits all.  Joe&...

Send us Fan Mail  Kelli Ellsworth Etchison ,  chief marketing officer and chief diversity officer at the $950 million, Lansing, Mich.-based LAFCU and a member of Michigan’s Black Leadership Advisory Council , and Gary Lee is Chief Client Office at MDT, Member Driven Technology, a tech focused CUSO, are in this podcast to tell why DEI - diversity, equity and inclusion - matter to credit unions. Her...

Send us Fan Mail Newsflash: ask the experts and they will tell credit union executives that a tidal wave of fraud very likely will be crashing into them and soon. Why? For the past year criminals have been kept busy attempting to cash in on the various federal and state government pandemic related relief programs such as PPP loans.  That money is drying up so they are casting their eyes in search...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the CU2.0 doubleheader podcast where you will hear two perspectives on DEI and the industry.  "We are stronger together." That is what Emma Norman, director of learning and development at Local Government Federal Credit Union and also chief diversity officer at the African American Credit Union Coalition, has to say when asked why LGFCU is all in when it comes...

Send us Fan Mail  You know Renee Sattiewhite. She's CEO of the African American Credit Union Coalition (AACUC), has been a past guest on this podcast ( episode 101 ), she is a co-star in DCUC's Tony Hernandez's recent podcast ( 155 ) and she is the person to see if you want to know how African Americans are faring in credit union c-suites, in boardrooms, and as they stand in teller...

Send us Fan Mail  Now don't you wish you had a magic decoder ring? There's an alphabet soup in the podcast title. Let me decipher. DCUC - Defense Credit Union Council, the trade group for some 181 military themed credit unions (and many are behemoths - Navy Fed, Pen Fed, you get the picture). Tony Hernandez is the DCUC CEO , after logging 25 years in the Air Force where he finished as a...

Send us Fan Mail  An elderly member contacts you.  He/she has a stack of medical bills, little in savings, but substantial equity in a home.  What are the options? How can you help? Two obvious choices are a HELOC and a reverse mortgage but there are significant problems with both. When there are no other options, well, maybe.... But now there is a third way and today's podcast guest, Joe Cia...

Send us Fan Mail  Jon Voorhees has spent his work life optimizing branch performance. He has headed initiatives where an institution added hundreds of branches and he has headed initiatives where hundreds of branches were closed.  His last job at a financial services company - he now is a consultant based in Washington State - was as a senior vice president at Bank of America and you can guess how...

Send us Fan Mail  You know the headline - in fact you could write the story on the explosion in digital banking transactions during the last pandemic year.   But do you know this: there has also been an explosion in the use of digital self-service information gathering and problem solving. That's the surprising news in a report from TimeTrade SilverCloud, a provider of customer engagement sol...

Send us Fan Mail  Consider this podcast everything you wanted to know about credit unions and their social media channels but were afraid to ask.  Or maybe you just didn't know to ask. But the reality today is that social media have emerged as a crucial communications outlet - and for some generations they may be the most important way to communicate. And yet the channels are so new.  Twitter...

Send us Fan Mail File this under trends that will rock the ground beneath your feet.  The next wave in financial services will be self-direction, says Vince Bezemer, head of strategy at Backbase, whom you know from CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 110 (and the companion, 111 , with Wildfire Credit Union, a Backbase customer). Now Bezemer is back with a big message: members no longer want you to tell them ho...

Send us Fan Mail It was the members' personal stories that hooked Samira Rajan early in her employment at what then was known as the Bushwick Cooperative and now is the Brooklyn Cooperative. When she started there it was in 2001 as a volunteer via AmeriCorp Vista  the recently founded credit union had assets of $299,000, four employees (including her), and a membership of under 1000. Rajan ha...

Send us Fan Mail Cathi Kim's job title at Inclusiv, a trade association for community development credit unions, tells you why you need to listen to her. She's Director of Inclusiv/Capital which means her focus is on finding ways for community development credit unions, often very small, to bring in new capital, which can come from a range of places - government programs, big credit unio...

Send us Fan Mail Latino Community Credit Union was founded in 2000 in Durham NC when the community was rocked by a wave of robberies - even murders - of Latino workers who were paid in cash and were believed to walk around with their pockets stuffed with cash because they were unbanked. Enter John Herrera - whom you know from CU 2.0 Podcast 142 - and a handful more helpers and visionaries who foun...

Send us Fan Mail   Anil Aggarwal is an entrepreneur who knows a thing or two about providing venues where executives come together and good things happen.  He was co-founder of Money 20/20, an event that redefined how financial services executives and fintech executives could profitably come together.  After that venture was sold, he co-founded Shoptalk , a meeting venue for retail execs and techn...

Send us Fan Mail PSCU called it a growing credit union threat .  CUNA Mutual called it one of the fastest growing malware threats. Security company Arctic Wolf has said there was a 520% increase in ransomware and phishing attacks in the banking sector between March and June 2020.  NCUA has even issued a punchlist of steps to take to protect against ransomware attacks. Color me surprised.  I had th...

Send us Fan Mail At 29 Randy Icelow said he was a temp worker for a bus company in California's Central Valley and flashforward to now he is 38 and CEO of a $63 million credit union, Rolling F based in Turlock CA, where its SEG is Foster Farms, one of the biggest chicken companies in the country. This podcast grew out of a post Icelow put up on the CU 2.0 Facebook group where he recounted his...

Send us Fan Mail  The building still stands at 420 Notre Dame Avenue in Manchester NH.  That's where the nation's first credit union - St. Mary's Bank - opened its doors in 1908, to serve founding French American mill workers (and, yes, much of the original paperwork was written in French). St. Mary's Bank outgrew that space, moved into other facilities, but some years later it...