The CU2.0 Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Call this the best of times for digital member service company Glia and that is because, in the pandemic era, credit unions' traditional member service tools have fallen out of favor and so just about all of us have become significantly more digital, said Dan Michaeli, Glia CEO and co-founder. Just a couple years ago, many credit unions looked at digital customer service tool...

Send us Fan Mail Call this Part 2 of our smarter lending for credit unions. The recent episode, #113, explored small business lending with Capiform's Sherif Hassan. Listen here . This week it's time for something entirely different. Happy with your car loan portfolio? Many credit unions are anything but and this has become a crucial issue as most are awash in deposits and now are hunting...

Send us Fan Mail Call this Part 1 of our smarter lending duet.  Part 2, posting tomorrow in podcast 114, is on smarter car loans with Nicholas Hinrichsen. You don't want to miss that one.  PPP loans just may have awakened credit unions to the immense opportunity there is in small business lending.  That's what Sherif Hassan, CEO of fintech Capiform, believes.  The opportunity is there. B...

Send us Fan Mail  Now just may be the worst of times but it also is an opportunity for credit unions to reinvent themselves, by reimagining their roles and taking an active part in helping to limit what many experts see as a coming eviction crisis, as renters who have suffered enormous economic hardships in the Covid-19 pandemic are put out on the streets.  What if credit unions made available eme...

Send us Fan Mail Bank Transfer Day 2020, Bigger and Better? By Robert McGarvey You remember Bank Transfer day, that 2011 movement that brought in perhaps one million new credit union members , possibly more. Something a lot bigger may be about to happen. That’s the opinion of Steve Bruyn, CEO of Foresight Research who, writing in The Financial Brand , said that its extensive polling had found near...

Send us Fan Mail No more cookie cutter solutions.  And put a branch in the member's hands with mobile tools that allow the member to do pretty much anything he/she could do in a branch. When Wildfire, a $900 million credit union in Saginaw Michigan, set out on its omnichannel journey four or five years ago it dreamed big, says Mark Schuiling, VP of technology.   A lot of the process was doing...

Send us Fan Mail  For how many years have you heard about omnichannel banking - and you also know not many institution have done this more than pay lip service to an idea of the digital first financial institution. About 90% of financial institutions in the US in fact fall very short of really getting omnichannel, says Vince Bezemer, head of strategy at Backbase, a digital platform provider with t...

Send us Fan Mail  Paul Ablack knows big data and fintechs.  He served as CEO at OnApproach , a big data company aimed at credit unions that was acquired by Trellance. Ablack left OnApproach after the acquisition and is now noodling new opportunities in fintechs and especially in commercial lending for deposit rich credit unions.  In that latter regard he is bullish on what he sees as major opportu...

Send us Fan Mail  Before he was 40, Ralph Swoboda was named CEO of CUNA in Washington, DC.  That was in 1986 and he held the job until 1994.  That was when CUNA was a big association, with a head count upwards of 1400 because it provided a lot of assistance for credit unions with back office operations. His next job after leaving CUNA was chairman of the management committee of the Association of...

Send us Fan Mail  When Bert Hash, Jr. took over as CEO of MECU in 1996 it was a $400 million institution with one branch that served municipal employees of Baltimore. In this podcast he tells about the institution he took charge of. It had exactly zero ATMs.  It did not dispense cash to members - if a member wanted a withdrawal, they were issued a check and most went across the street to a bank to...

Send us Fan Mail Are you ready to jumpstart your credit union's successes?  How about your personal success? You want to know about the new CU2.0 Mastermind group - which is specifically created to help credit union leader and fintech leaders come together in small, working groups to hash out problems, solutions, opportunities. Listen up: we are in a crisis. A health crisis and a national, in...

Send us Fan Mail  Ask Angela Russell, Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at CUNA Mutual Group, a year from now what she would want to be able to tell us about progress made in the year and she did not hesitate with her answer. On a personal level, she said, she hoped her son would be able to go for a run outside without fear. Professionally, she said she hoped that the conversation...

Send us Fan Mail You know the feelings - powerlessness, exasperation, maybe even anger - and know that these are typical for credit union staff involved in audits conducted by regulators. Those audits are routine but for many credit unions they are an ordeal. Why?  Maybe 8 in 10 credit unions still handle issues that arise in an audit the same way they did in 1990, that is, a  lot of email flies a...

Send us Fan Mail "The credit union industry needs to reflect the community," said Pablo DeFilippi , a senior vice president at Inclusiv, the association for community development credit unions, a past CEO of the Lower East Side People's Federal Credit Union in New York, and a leading voice in the push for more Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the credit union universe. He points o...

Send us Fan Mail The subtitle for this podcast should be All You Wanted to Know About Mortgage Servicing But Were Afraid to Ask. Our guest is Andrew Wang, CEO of Peach Street , a new approach to mortgage servicing that just may be exactly what many credit unions want. Most mortgages are passed off to third party servicers for two reasons. The servicers know the government regs and how to comply an...

Send us Fan Mail Is there racism in US financial institutions? Can credit unions make a difference in the fight to combat racism? Yes is the answer to both, says Renee Sattiewhite, CEO of the African American Credit Union Coalition , a founding member of the CU DEI Collective which is centered around this belief: "We believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion is good business and is fundam...

Send us Fan Mail Something is happening, something big, when it comes to the US and race relations and this is making itself felt in financial services. That's the strong opinion of Victor Miguel Corro , CEO of Coopera,  a consulting firm - started with support from the Iowa Credit Union League - that helps credit unions meet the needs of Hispanic consumers. That market is huge.  In less than...

Send us Fan Mail Call it a sea change - a massive alteration of the US financial services landscape.  Everything seems different today and it is because of the pandemic. What do you need to be thinking abut now to survive tomorrow? An interview I did with Cornerstone consulting firm's Brad Smith for a CUInsight article left me wanting more from Smith and here it is, a one-on-one podcast where...

Send us Fan Mail You want to read James Robert Lay's Banking on Digital Growth.   It's a book not about digital tools but rather about the transformation of community financial institutions, credit unions included, into organizations that can compete with and win against the mega banks. Too small to do that? Nope, says Lay. That size can be a strength. It means a credit union can turn on...

Send us Fan Mail Do you have 10 minutes? That's all it will take to listen to this CU2.0 Fast Take on PPP Loan Forgiveness, a topic that suddenly is bedeviling thousands of credit unions as they confront the reality of how time consuming it is to navigate the loan forgiveness process. Make no mistake: you want to get that loan forgiven. Best guesses are that many of the loans that aren't...

Send us Fan Mail Steve Winninger is the man to talk with about credit union boards and governance. A longtime credit union CEO - 20 years at Lake Trust - now a $1.6 billion institution based in Michigan - plus he also served as CEO at IBM Lexington and since retiring from Lake Trust he has put in stints as CEO at four credit unions (only one of which merged out of existence). But Steve is a rare C...

Send us Fan Mail Michigan Legacy Credit Union just may be a unique $220 million institution - it's the product of five mergers in five years, said Carma Peters, the CEO.  And now she said the institution is on a huge digital push, an initiative that had been in the works but Covid-19 has intensified the effort. One Michigan Legacy employee has died from Covid-19. So did a former member of the...

Send us Fan Mail Cybersecurity starts with you. "It's about people," said Nabil Hannan, managing director at cybersecurity firm NetSPI when asked when cybersecurity goes right and when it goes wrong.  He added in this podcast that Covid-19 and credit union responses have triggered their own cybersecurity issues that are very particular to today. But they also need timely responses t...

Send us Fan Mail America's housing stock is old - often over 50 years of age in much of the nation and owners want, need, improvements to live in the home they want. The problem: many buyers stretch to buy their home and they do not have that much equity built up, even after five or perhaps even ten years in the house. But now there are two more children, maybe a grandparent, added to the fam...

Send us Fan Mail What will blow your mind as you listen to this podcast is how savvy and smart the guest is. That's Sahil Pankhaniya, a 20 year old student at George Washington University in Washington DC who is pursuing the launch of a wholly new, student run credit union credit union at the Washington DC institution. How cool is that. The effort has been written up in Credit Union Times , a...