The CU2.0 Podcast

Send us Fan Mail James Robert Lay is back with a new book, Banking on Change , and a message that will rock credit union executives out of complacency: “The Age of Artificial Intelligence spares no one from its transformative power.” This podcast is a fast paced, 40 minute romp through the changes that are transforming banking as we’ve known it into something that looks entirely different. Conside...

Send us Fan Mail Tom Shen is a fintech success story.  He was EVP at Digital Insight when Intuit bought it for truckloads of cash.  He went on to found Malauzai, a truly innovative mobile banking app.  Finastra bought it in 2018. Nowadays Shen is on the board of a number of early stage fintechs, he’s an investor, and he genuinely understands what it takes for a fintech to succeed in the unique wor...

Send us Fan Mail The show starts by asking Eric Foster , CEO of Woop Insurance , why the heck he named the company Woop, and it gets livelier from there. Hard to believe a podcast about insurance could be anything other than humdrum. Believe. Insurance is going through massive changes as many insurers are dramatically raising rates and/or pulling out of entire markets. Consumers accordingly are sc...

Send us Fan Mail What’s the second biggest branch network in US financial services? Guess Wells Fargo and you’re wrong.  It has 5600 branches which makes it the nation’s leader. But the CO-OP Shared Branching network for credit unions has 5444 branches which puts it in second place. Chase is third with 4700. Who knew? I have thought very little about shared branching in the years I have covered cr...

Send us Fan Mail This podcast started at the CU 2.0 Live event in Arizona a few months ago because that’s where a lightbulb went off in David Eldred ’s head.  Chief experience officer at billion dollar Solarity Credit Union in Washington State, Eldred went to the conference already aware of AI but at the conference he began to see that really, truly he could put AI to work at Solarity in very usef...

Send us Fan Mail There’s $140 billion in unclaimed federal benefits and assistance for households in need. That’s a mountain of money. Why is it unclaimed? Sometimes it’s because folks just don’t know it exists. Often it’s because the process of applying for it can be daunting - especially for the people who need it most. Enter Starlight , a New York based startup helmed by Catherine Xu and Shreen...

Send us Fan Mail Call this podcast what you think you know about SERPs but that’s not fact. Two truths are plain: senior credit union executives want to secure their retirement much as their for profit sector peers do AND there just is a lot of confusion about SERPs - supplemental retirement plans. A big reason for this show is that in it Kirk Kordelesi, onetime CEO of Bethpage Federal Credit Unio...

Send us Fan Mail On any list of my personal favorite CU 2.0 podcasts is episode 149 - it dropped May 2021 - with Samira Rajan , CEO of the Brooklyn Cooperative, a small, scrappy credit union. How did a Bryan Mawr graduate - who also has a master’s from Harvard's Kennedy School - wind up in Bushwick at a tiny credit union? She started there in 2001 as a volunteer and these many years later she...

Send us Fan Mail Fraud - there’s your five letter word for today and inside many credit unions it’s counted as a curse. Fraud also is in the midst of an AI driven revolution.  Fraudsters - just as you are - are harnessing AI tools to get smarter, faster, better. On the show today is Sara Seguin , principal adviser, fraud and identity risk at Alloy , a provider to more than 500 banks, fintechs and...

Send us Fan Mail Jennifer Oliver wants to tell you about Rize where the tagline is Beyond Banking. That’s an Irwindale CA based billion dollar institution - formerly SCE Credit Union -  but Oliver says that even when she interviewed for the job she already was thinking about a name change. SCE, by the way, stands for Southern California Edison, a big electric utility. In the show Oliver explains w...

Send us Fan Mail There are some CEOs you just like.  Kent Lugrand, CEO of InTouch Credit Union, is one such and, with him, he has a personal story about his winding path to becoming CEO of a large credit union that will just get you. One of the pleasures of doing this podcast is that I get to throw a spotlight on unique credit union people who help make the industry different. This is one. The int...

Send us Fan Mail Martin Walker is the man to know if you are a fintech looking for credit union related venture funding and he also is the man to know if you are a credit union looking to invest in fintechs. On LinkedIn Walker’s tag line is Investing in Fintechs that Enable Credit Unions. That pretty much says it. Walker and I started talking at the  June  CU 2.0 Live event in Fountain Hills AZ an...

Send us Fan Mail Probably you think a book titled Community Capital has to be a snoozefest.   And then there’s the new book with that title written by Clifford Rosenthal and Michael McCray and it’s a book that will rock you and your beliefs about NCUA, African American focused credit unions and more. The book splits into two parts.  There’s Rosenthal’s part where he looks at the struggles of small...

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'd he do it? Listen up.

Send us Fan Mail Four years ago Kirk Drake wrote a book that explored how artificial intelligence - AI - would transform financial services.   Now he’s released a free addendum that tells what he got right in the book, what he got wrong, how he is using AI tools to effect big gains in his personal productivity and where he sees AI making big differences in credit union operations. It’s meaty stuff...

Send us Fan Mail Artificial intelligence: is it real or a mirage? Lots of credit union executives are pondering exactly that question and on the show today are Steve O’Donnell , EVP at One Nevada Credit Union, and Saroop Bahrwani , founder of Senso and CUCopilot, a generative AI toolkit. They came to the show fresh from a three day joint engagement where Saroop and his team went to the One Nevada...

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.

Send us Fan Mail What happens when an executive who is seeking a SERP plan to sweeten his/her retirement years is turned down for life insurance - which is the bedrock that supports many SERP plans? And people do get turned down for life insurance due to health issues. Anything from cancer to obesity. On the show today is Kirk Kordeleski , onetime CEO of Bethpage Federal Credit Union, one of the n...

Send us Fan Mail Subtitle this show: All You Want to Know about CUSOs but Didn’t Know to Ask. On the show is Michael Heller , an associate with Messick Lauer & Smith, a leading firm in CUSO law. Heller and I had started talking at the CU 2.0 Live event in Fountain Hills AZ and it was only natural to capture the conversation on tape for distribution as a podcast. Here, Heller talks about how CU...

Send us Fan Mail You know about Paul Fiore .  He’s the man behind Digital Insight , the first big digital banking tool that was acquired by Quicken for $1.35 billion in 2007. Fiore is back dreaming big and his present focus is a company called CU WealthNext (nee Digital One), a CUSO that aims to bring powerful wealth management technology tools to credit unions. Wealth tech already is big business...

Send us Fan Mail High velocity origination platform. That’s a key focus of Amount, a fintech that has a partnership with Velera nee PSCU. The plain reality is that many credit unions make it too hard to do business with them.  21st century fintechs focus on making that first date very easy to set up. Ask yourself how many possible new members fall out before completing the many steps many credit u...

Send us Fan Mail This golden oldie turns the clock way back - to June 2019 when Jim Blaine, the retired CEO of SECU, then and now still one of the nation’s biggest credit unions, sat for an hour long session where Blaine muses about credit union past, peasant and future. Listen up.

Send us Fan Mail Small business lending. Name a desire shared by most credit unions and those three words capture it. Most definitely want to do more small business lending but most also are falling short of their own expectations. On the show today is Sherif Hassan , an expert in how to better use data to make more and more profitable loans. Sherif is a veteran on this show.  He appeared on episo...

Send us Fan Mail Here’s the fact: more senior executives are coming into credit unions and are insisting on competitive retirement plans, typically a SERP (Supplemental Executive Retirement Plan). On the show today is Kirk Kordeleski , onetime CEO of Bethpage Federal Credit Union, one of the nation’s largest, and now a partner with PARC Street , where the focus is on matching executives and credit...

Send us Fan Mail Should we merge? With whom? Those questions are heard in just about every credit union’s c-suite and boardroom.   The answers aren’t easy. Enter Sam Brownell’s CuCollaborate which boldly states its purpose this way: “We are here to help credit unions adapt, grow, and succeed long term — and we offer the innovation, insight, and know-how to help them do it.” In its toolkit are powe...