The CU2.0 Podcast

Send us Fan Mail One site to rule them all. This is the banking version of the Tolkien quest for the one ring that rules them all. Call this open banking and remember that phrase. It's about to get much buzzier and louder over the next year as open banking transforms how US financial institutions interact. Scott Anderson , brand evangelist at Diebold Nixdorf, sat down at the company's DN...

Send us Fan Mail Will your superior teller experiences guarantee your future? Believe that and - probably - you won't want to hear this podcast on the rise of the digital first member.  That member may occasionally step into a branch but usually they are unhappy. They would rather interact online. And their numbers are growing. Smart institutions know this.  A Chase - in its heart - is now a...

Send us Fan Mail You have a successful product that puts small dollar loans in the hands of consumers who may have tattered credit but they need the money and you want to save them from predatory lenders who may charge interest upwards of 100% APR.   Your product usually involves loan rates of 24 to 36% APR. Much better for the consumer. And you have 11 other credit unions offering your loans. Tha...

Send us Fan Mail How does a credit union get heard in the marketing wars with Bank of America, Chase, and the other money center bruisers? Face an ugly reality: You can't win.   No way, no how. Unless you change the rules of engagement. That's what West Community Credit Union in Missouri is doing. A $280 million credit union, it's nonetheless active in SixThirty, a St Louis fintech...

Send us Fan Mail What are your members thinking about you? Say you don't know and you are setting yourself up for failure. Say you do know and, no, you haven't asked them because you, well, just know and you are on the fast track to extinction. If you want to know what your members think and need, ask them. That's where LiveSurvey comes in.  A credit union owned CUSO - developed by...

Send us Fan Mail Can a credit union serve more than one employer group? You know what today's answer is of course. But to know the history you need to talk with Marc Schafer, CEO of Truliant, a Winston Salem credit union. That's because Truliant was sued by a banker's group in the mid 1990s that claimed it was illegal for a credit union to serve more than one employer group.  And th...

Send us Fan Mail You have your eye on new ATMs for your credit union - but you are given pause by the price tags that can quickly jump above $50,000 apiece. Here's a reality: most credit union ATMs that I see are old, creaky, lacking functions, sometimes with screens so weathered and scratched they are barely readable. Then there are the ATMs that I see at nearby Chase's. Cardless access...

Send us Fan Mail Buckle up for big, explosive ideas.  That's what Douglas Hartung - senior director, business development & alliances at Diebold Nixdorf - specializes in and in this podcast he discusses Libra, bringing financial services to the globe's underbanked and unbanked, and the exciting idea that just maybe all a person needs to send money anywhere on the planet is a smart ph...

Send us Fan Mail Richard Crone is a longtime payments geek and when it comes to Libra, he has a particular spin.  It boils down to this: forget the talk about crypto currency. Libra fundamentally is a pre-paid account and because it is a Facebook effort, it has reach into some 2.1 billion daily users of Facebook tools (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.). "It's a prepaid netw...

Send us Fan Mail Take a guess. How many recurring payments does a typical consumer have set up, for how much money monthly? Alain Glanzman, CEO of fintech WalletFi is focused on exactly that issue - and also on the huge potential it represents for credit unions The answers are 10 to 15 recurring payments totaling $857 per month. Surprised? Think Netflix, T-Mobile, the NY Times, Cox Cable, maybe an...

Send us Fan Mail Circle the date, October 26. Las Vegas. That's when Susan Mitchell , a longtime credit union consultant, is convening another meeting of the Credit Union Underground , this time in parallel with Money 20/20 , probably the meeting of the best and brightest in the disruptive quadrant of financial services.   The point of each Underground is collision with disruptors. A lot - ma...

Send us Fan Mail Randy Karnes just may be the poster boy for the cooperative entrepreneur.  In the process he may also have come upon the formula that will enable many hundreds - perhaps thousands - of small credit unions to thrive in the 21st century. How can they? Aren't they technology deserts in an era of digital banking? Nope. Not with CU*Answers, the CUSO Karnes helms, at their side.  C...

Send us Fan Mail Can a credit union double in size in five years? You bet, says Kirk Kordeleski, a senior consultant with Best Innovation Group and before that, CEO of Bethpage Federal Credit Union on Long Island where he did exactly that. Kordeleski points to Navy and also BECU as examples of other credit unions that have also experienced exponential growth. How? That is why you want to listen to...

Send us Fan Mail Call this the credit union oral history sequence - Blaine, Bucky Sebastian, now Gary Oakland who took over BECU, with around $700 million in assets, in the mid 1980s and when he left in 2012 it had become a $10 billion+ credit union, one of the nation's very biggest. How did Oakland do it? In this podcast you will hear his recipe for credit union success which, put simply, is...

Send us Fan Mail A state regulator in Illinois. General counsel at NCUA. A co-founder of Callahan Associates. Longtime CEO at GTE Financial.  Head of the National Credit Union Foundation. Guess who. Meet Wendell Sebastian , call him Bucky. His has been an extraordinary career and you will like him. For two reasons. He is a vocal credit union cheerleader. And he deeply believes that credit unions -...

Send us Fan Mail Cannabis banking. Data breaches.  Taxation of credit unions. The disappearance of small credit unions.  The rise of $10 billion+ credit union behemoths. Welcome to the world of Caroline Willard, CEO of the Cornerstone League and, before that, she spent a decade at Co-Op in senior marketing slots. What do credit unions need to do to survive? What do leagues need to do? Willard offe...

Send us Fan Mail Elder fraud is big business. The FBI calculates last year's losses at over $700 million and involving two million seniors. That's a lot of pain. The scams are predictable. “Your grandson has been arrested. He’s in jail in Memphis.  You need to bail him out. It’s dangerous. Send $5000 in gift cards.” There are variations. But the usual drill is that a relative has fallen...

Send us Fan Mail Put phishing emails in front of credit union employees and how many will fall for them and cough up sensitive info? 20 to 60% will get conned. And that can be costly to a credit union, both in terms of money and reputation. Enter BrightWise, a Des Moines Iowa cyber training company created by Sherri Davidoff, CEO of LMG Security, and the Iowa Credit Union League’s holding company...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the CU2.0 Podcast with your host Robert McGarvey. In every episode we probe the massive digital transformation that now is remaking the nation’s credit unions and today’s guest is Vasilios Roussos, executive director of the DCU Fintech Innovation Center in Boston. The what?  You're right: this is a major departure for a credit union and in this podcast you'll...

Send us Fan Mail At 30 he took over as CEO of State Employees' Credit Union in North Carolina.  That was 1979.  Come 2016 and he retired. SECU had grown to $33 billion - and it had 256 branches and 5800 employees. That's the Jim Blaine story and here he sits for a marathon interview, the longest in this podcast's history. It's worth the hour. Make time. Blaine starts out by que...

Send us Fan Mail Consumers don't want a digital bank. They want digital banking. That's a building block belief of futurist-blogger Chris Skinner who has become a regular on the conference speaking circuit. Even though what he has to say will upset many financial services executives. That's because he thinks many are going about becoming a digital banking prover all wrong. It's...

Send us Fan Mail Will your credit union be in business in 2029? The question is not academic and it's exactly the kind of question futurist Thomas Frey chews on. We first heard him at Co-Op's Think '18 ( video here ) and the conversation picks up where that presentation left off: what's the future of the car business? And know that the answer directly impacts credit unions. Kno...

Send us Fan Mail You want to know about community development financial institutions? Cliff Rosenthal is the man you want to talk to.  He literally wrote the book on CDFIs and also the longstanding credit union initiative to serve the unbanked: Democratizing Finance: Origins of the Community Development Financial Institutions Movement . Have CDFIs lived up to their potential? Have credit unions ch...

Send us Fan Mail You want more Millennial members. You need them. Born between 1981 and 1996, Millennials are a prime age cohort for financial services - they are getting mortgages, buying cars, taking vacations. And yet many of them know squat about credit unions and do not belong to them even though in many respects credit unions line up perfectly with what Millennials want: free checking, non p...

Send us Fan Mail Ask Victor Corro, of Coopera, the Hispanic focused consulting firm for credit unions, on why Hispanics matter to credit unions and he gets impassioned.  Hispanics need credit unions, he says, just as credit unions need Hispanics.  He tells in detail exactly why that is so in this edition of the CU2.0 podcast. Note: the audio quality has imperfections in parts of this podcast.  We...