CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 218 on Larky and the Power of Push Notifications to Engage Members

Who opens email anymore and as for phoning members, forget about it.

Diminishing returns from once mainline communication channels have many credit unions pulling  their hair out in frustration.

Enter Larky.  Larky delivers context appropriate push notifications from inside the credit union mobile app.  It's not SMS, these are notifications in the mobile banking app.

In fact Larky itself is invisible to the member.

What kinds of notifications are available? They are customized by and for the credit union. It might be info about auto loans if a member is inside a car dealership. Or it might be a 5% discount on Culver ice cream or burgers in Grand Rapids MI when a member uses an MSUFCU Visa card to make the purchase.

Tap rates, as you will hear in the show, are staggeringly high.

On the show to offer the details about Larky are CEO Gregg Hammerman and Ami Iceman Haueter, Chief Research and Digital Experience Officer at MSU Federal Credit Union.

Incidentally, Larky is another company where Tom Shen is a board member.  If you haven't heard his podcast there's a link in the show notes.

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Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email rjmcgarvey@gmail.com

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Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

CU 2.0 Podcast Kirk Kordeleski Money Talks Episode 3: CUES and Its Executive Compensation Bombshell

 The latest CUES executive compensation numbers for credit union executives are out and this explosion still reverberates across the industry. Total median executive comp in 2022 was up 14.9%.  

For CEOs the total median compensation was $515,602.  

Understand: those numbers are from a time when inflation was not a concern and most workers in most industries were happy to get a 2 or 3% pay hike.

Now every worker wants a big pay hike to stay even with inflation. You can bet credit union c-suiters will too.

How did this happen in the credit union c-suite? And what does it mean for credit union exec comp committees on the board and indeed for all other executives in a credit union?

On today's show to explain what's going on and to offer predictions about what this means for your pay packet is Kirk Kordeleski, onetime CEO at Bethpage Federal Credit Union, one of the nation's biggest, and now an executive at OM Financial Group, which specializes in SERPs which are building block retirement plans for key credit union executives.

Kordeleski's firm prediction is that you ain't seen nothing yet. Credit union c suite compensation had long been a sleepy topic but now there is a war for top talent - the talent needed to compete in today's fierce financial services world - and top talent demands and deserves top money.  

The credit unions that are in this to win are opening their coffers to hire the leaders they need.

Are you?

Want Kordeleski's one word summary of today's credit union compensation landscape? "Dynamic."  

Who thought anyone would ever say that?

Hear it on today's show.

Want to know more about SERPs - or other matters raised in this podcast? Email Kordeleski Kkordeleski@om-financial.com

This show is in a Money Talks series where credit union compensation is untangled.  This show will help some executives negotiate better pay packages and will also help some board members understand the ways in which 2022 credit union compensation is utterly different from 1992 comp plans, even 2012 plans because now competition for talent is so much fiercer.

Hear episode one in Money Talks here.  Episode 2 is here.  1948

Have suggestions for topics to explore in this show? Email me, Robert McGarvey - rjmcgarvey@gmail.com

This episode was recorded at a conference. There is some background noise.  Tune it out, just as you would if you were holding a conversation at that conference.

CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 215 Robert Johnston CEO of Adlumin on Cyber War and Your Credit Union

 Robert Johnston was a Marine and that is where he honed his skills at waging war in the cyber dimension - and you better believe that is where a lot of warfare now happens, from Russia knocking out ATMs in neighboring countries through nation state hackers targeting financial institutions, both to fuel widespread anxiety and simply to plunder others' money.

Johnston has a pedigree at this. He led the investigation into the Russian Intelligence Service breach of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 and before that he worked on the hack of the Joint Chiefs of Staff email in 2015. That is cyber war at its highest levels.

Nowadays Johnston and Adlumin, the company he co-founded and where he serves as CEO, is an active player in helping credit unions in particular bolster their cyber security and that means dealing with everything from Denial of Service Attacks (DDos) through Ransomware, which is today's flavor of the moment. Along the way Johnston also works with helping credit unions stay compliant with cybersecurity requirements set out by the regulator and they are voluminous.

It's a fast changing field and in this podcast Johnston gives a glimpse into its challenges and its excitement.

Think of this podcast's subtitle as Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Cybersecurity But Were Afraid to Ask..

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email rjmcgarvey@gmail.com

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

CU 2.0 News Flash A Quick Payments News Recap with Jason Bohrer of the US Payments Forum

 Quick now, are you current on what's happening in the fast changing payments universe? Can you ace a pop quiz on the hot topics in payments such as

*         Contactless payments’ role in a post-pandemic economy (Tap to Pay, Digital Wallets, etc.)

·         Faster payments and key considerations for the FedNow service

·         Emerging payments fraud concerns

·         QR codes and alternative payment rails

·         Credit card trends and the travel spending resurgence

 

 

Do you have a half hour? If you do listen up to Jason Bohrer of the US Payments Forum who gives us a quick update of the need to know headlines in today’s payments news.

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CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 214 Tom Shen, Malauzai Founder and Fintech OG

 Tom Shen is a fintech OG, one of the originals who got his start in the industry 40 years ago when it was still called just financial services.

He's had glittering successes.  He was EVP at Digital Insight when Intuit bought it for $1.33 billion in 2007. Earlier he founded Software Dynamics Inc. (SDI). More recently he founded mobile app developer Malauzai which was bought in 2018 by Finastra.

Now he is an active investor and a board member of five companies, including Sensibill and ZSuite, both of which have been featured on this podcast.

In this show Shen revisits his earlier days in fintech but - crucially - he spells out in detail what a fintech needs to know to work successfully with credit unions and also what a credit union executive needs to know to work successfully with fintechs.

His advice is sound, it's levelheaded and, importantly, it's rooted both in what worked in the past and what he sees working today.

Listen and you will hear pointed advice that says credit union execs today want fintech that delivers measurable and quick benefits. Talk about an 18 month build out and, guess what, that is an audience lost.

Know too that Shen was a guy who was working with credit unions literally decades before many fintech execs saw this as a good market. He tells what attracted him - and these are strengths that credit unions still have.

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email rjmcgarvey@gmail.com

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 211 How $130mil River City FCU Became a Small Business Lender

Talk about miracles.

River City FCU in San Antonio knew it wanted to make small business loans - many of its members owned and/or worked in small businesses - and you have to know how hard it is for any small business to snare a loan. Then up the degree of difficulty if the small business is minority owned (and River City's membership is majority Hispanic).

How can those typically small loans be profitably made?

And then the miracle happened.

Compliance Systems, a provider of compliance documentation tools, realized that CDFI credit unions - community development FIs - were looking for ways to get more involved in business lending.

Along the way Hawthorn River, a developer of community banking software, hopped into the action.

So did IMM, a develop of e signature and digital transaction tools.

For Jeff Ivey, CEO of River City FCU it was put up or shut up time and he did not blink. He was all in.

The exceptional deal sweetener - Compliance Systems, IMM, and Hawthorn River agreed to donate their work, both because it simply was a wonderful thing to do but also because they now have available a tool kit that will let them put into place small business lending at many small credit unions.

This sounds like a Christmas fable? Indeed. But it is a reality and in this podcast you will hear how it came together, how it is working out, and Ivey as well as executives from the three tech companies all offer perspectives.

Here's a link to a press release with all the details.

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email rjmcgarvey@gmail.com

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 212 Chris Doner CEO Access Softek on Why You Need a Robo-Advisor

 A machine just maybe can pick stocks better than a human - and just maybe credit unions can augment their investment services by offering a new robo-advisor service from longtime fintech Access Softek, a 36 year-old Berkeley CA based fintech that offers online and mobile banking and more to hundreds of FIs.

Now Access Softek founder and CEO Chris Doner wants to put a robo-advisor service as well as self-directed brokerage tools in the credit union investment toolkit.

The timing couldn't be better. With inflation galloping, cash in a savings account increasingly looks like a money losing proposition and, for sure, some members will be investigating shifting money out of savings accounts and into stocks - which often means shifting that cash out of the credit union and into another kind of institution.

That gets more perilous because many of those institutions already offer things that look like checking accounts.

Not only might member wallet share be lost it might come close to vanishing.

Sure, right now just a handful of credit unions offer robo-advisor services - but it's a trend that is catching on elsewhere.

Plus, many credit unions are scrambling to find new sources of fee income and robo-advisory tools plus tools for self-direct brokerage accounts may be just the ticket.

Even better, Doner's investment tools are based upon fees paid by the members who use them and those monies are split with the credit union.  The pricing is very favorable to the institutions that climb aboard.

In this podcast Doner tells about his investment tools for credit unions and he also disclosed why he has never sold his company.

Listen up.