Walt Agius knows credit union lending. And he especially knows what credit unions need to to stay competitive in the 21st century.
Consider this podcast a deep dive into today’s lending.
The guest is Walt Agius, CEO of Lendsys, a fintech, and also CU Lending Edge, a CUSO that today focuses on car loans but, says Agius, he is looking to extend the portfolio.
In the past he was CEO of CU Sol, a CUSO, and also CEO of California Bear Credit Union.
He really knows lending, especially car loans.
In this podcast Agius offers tips about how to make indirect auto lending work for the credit union (and, yes, he knows many credit unions have grumbles about indirect lending).
He also throws out the idea that every credit union should be looking hard at syndicating every loan that comes in the door. That strategy dramatically limits risk. He said he would want to keep perhaps 10% of most loans but he would want to sell the other 90% of other participants – and this collaborative way is a particularly credit union mindset.
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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
Put your brainstorming hat on. You’ll want it as you listen to this podcast that serves as a preview of the January 20, 2022 CU 2.0 Brainstorm event that will gather together fintech leaders and credit union executives for a day of lively presentations (topics to be chosen by the attendees) and conversation.
Consider this podcast a mini preview of what the Brainstorm event will feel like.
Joe Cianciolo talks about how HomePace – a fintech that makes home equity investments that may be tapped by homeowners and buyers without taking on debt.
Chief information officer Kenzie tells about the tech priorities at Patriot Federal Credit Union, a $900 million institution – and he tells what he looks for in the fintechs he works with
Drake tells about the urgency of matching up credit unions and the right fintechs and the challenges of making it happen.
It’s a show that will leave you more informed and also energized.
Want more info on the Brainstorm event? Click here. There’s a sign up tool at the same site.
Want more from Cianciolo? You got it. Here’s an earlier CU 2.0 podcast with him from June 2021.
Want more on the CU 2.0 Mastermind group? Here’s a November 2020 podcast on it.
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
Every year, around this time, I have spent a few minutes mulling my travel plans for the new year ahead and, occasionally, doing a mileage run to grab a better elite status and almost always planning at least one trip for fun.
This year is different. Mainly because it borders on the impossible to forecast what my travel year will look like. If forced to guess I’d say pretty similar to 2021 which featured exactly one trip (to Spain in early fall; in 2022 I plan a trip to Portugal and Spain, from Porto to San Sebastian).
What about business travel?
Yeah, what about it?
I am looking at a report from polling firm Morning Consult on “The State of Travel and Hospitality – Q4 2021 Report” (free download here) that serves up immense gloom regarding business travel.
Just about all travel in fact.
Perhaps we are at a crossroad where – fueled by environmental concerns and triggered by the immediacy of Covid – our relationship to travel is undergoing immense change.
Keep in mind that the phenomenon of mass longhaul travel is recent – the first commercial trans Pacific flight was 1936 (Pan Am). It wasn’t until the late 1950s that commercial jet travel took root and deep into the 1960s when it became commonplace. Meaning we have maybe 50+ years of mass longhaul travel and that’s a speck in the history of human existence.
Don’t think we cannot turn off that desire. It’s happening. The Morning Consult numbers suggest as much.
One in three of us say it will be more than a year (12% say never) that they will travel for leisure.
Holding back an energetic return to leisure travel, per Morning Consult, is confusion and concern about Covid-related travel concerns and requirements. When do I need a Covid test, what kind, by when? Do I need to carry my vaccination card? Can I get into country X at all? Does the US State Dept. say it’s safe? Can I travel back home?
If you are not at least slightly frazzled by all this you are not paying attention. It’s a world of numerous and shifting rules, requirements, and restrictions.
Air rage is also keeping some of us on the ground – more of us than I would have thought. Per Morning Consult, 41% of us have traveled less because of concerns about the behavior of other passengers.
63% of us are at least slightly concerned about an air rage incident on their next flight. Only 36% are not at all concerned which, I guess, is where I fall.
63% of us also support a vaccine mandate for air travel (and 81% support it for international travel). These numbers tell me that the anti vaxxers may be loud but their numbers aren’t so high as to matter when setting policies. I urge the Biden Administration to listen to the people and to issue an Executive Order that mandates vaccines for air travel. That will help get more us in the air, more often.
As for business travel, the forecast is gloomy – and it is especially gloomy coming from people who had traveled for business at least three times a year. 39% of that group in the US now say they will never travel for business again.
Never.
48% of Germans say likewise. 62% of French. 39% of Canadians.
Of the business trips that do occur, one in five will be day trips, says Morning Consult. And 55% will make business trips by car. 15% will travel by bus. 16% by train.
Only 50% say they expect some trips to involve a plane.
Another shoe dropping – not reflected in the Morning Consult data – is that sustainability concerns may further deflate travel, especially long haul jet travel. Accenture data say that 66% of us are “ramping up” their sustainable/ethical purchasing. Wall Street and thus the C suite also are climbing aboard the sustainability wagon.
That bodes poorly for jet travel.
Back at Morning Consult, it’s forecast is pure gloom: Business travel will never return to prepandemic levels.
I agree. And the dramatic word is “never.”
We definitely don’t know what the new normal will be regarding business travel. But it will be different. Lots different. We know that much.
BNPL. Remember that because you soon will be using that abbreviation often.
It stands for Buy Now, Pay Later and it is just about the hottest trend in payments at retail.
Today’s US market is small, maybe $50 billion but forecasts show the BNPL market crashing into the many hundreds of billions of dollars by the middle of the present decade. And then the numbers start to get dizzily huge.
Why so much interest? Oldtimers will recall that BNPL was a staple of 1950s retail but as credit cards proliferated it receded into the background. But now it is again hot and that’s because it speaks to the purchasing needs and desires of Gen Z and young Millennials. Why don’t they just slap down a Visa card and put it on credit? The advantage of BNPL to them is that they know the total cost of purchase when they make it. The full payments amount, spread out over an agreed upon number of months, is there to see.
Pay the minimum on a credit card purchase and suddenly the total amount paid can vault much, much higher.
So the younger generations are hopping aboard BNPL which, right now, is largely used for consumer purchases of a few hundred dollars to maybe a few thousand.
Right now it’s mainly fintechs that are playing hard in this space.
But Scottsdale AZ based equipifi is a fintech that wants to enable credit unions in particular along with some banks to play in this space.
In this podcast with co-founder and CEO Bryce Deeney you will hear about equipifi’s secret sauce which is software that can approve and fund a BNPL loan at retail in under a minute.
No application is required. No FICO score is checked.
The basis for the loan is knowledge of the history of the member’s checking (sharedraft) account and insight into how much surplus money generally is in the account. So that’s a solid basis for forecasting that this consumer can in fact handle this monthly payment.
In the podcast Deeney tells in detail exactly how equipifi works along with how it is integrated into the core.
Any credit union that wants more members under, say, thirty years of age needs to listen and take notes.
Keep listening and you will hear the equipifi has plans to roll out a BNPL service for SMBs too. How cool is that?
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
That is the loud message from Cameron Madill, CEO of PixelSpoke, an Oregon headquartered marketing agency that primarily serves credit unions. He also hosts “The Remarkable Credit Union” podcast.
Too many credit unions simply want to fit in, he says.
Dare to be different and that just may get you noticed.
That’s just one take-away from this podcast – there are many more.
Want to know if your website is good? Madill tells us the main way credit union websites go bad. Use it as a checklist to judge your own.
Do you do member testing of your site? You probably will want to after listening to ths podcas because Madill tells the enormous benefits of testing with even a handful of members.
He also tells why credit unions need to embrace storytelling in their marketing, a topic he has written about for CUInsight.
Buckle up because he also tells why PixelSpoke is a worker owned cooperative and why it is a certified B Corp. The latter is a credentialing program that designated businesses that put greater emphasis on purpose, not just profit.
As for worker owned cooperatives. that’s a comparatively small slice of the cooperative pie in the US but it also is fast growing. Hear why PixelSpoke now is owned by its workers.
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
We know boo about Omicron – not how deadly it is, not how effective our vaccines are in warding it off, not how widespread it already is in the United States and globally. But there is one thing we do know: lots of new travel restrictions are coming, lots of travel gateways are erecting tall barriers to entry, and lots of meetings and events – which had been edging into in-person events – will be reverting to virtual.
Wishful thinking may want to deny everything in that last sentence but wishful thinking isn’t reality. We saw the reaction to delta earlier this year and we will see a rerun now, maybe with even more restrictions, especially if Omicron jumps the vaccine-booster barriers.
Know this: I am planning a trip to Portugal and Spain in this coming fall. I am reasonably confident it will happen in 10 months. But I am also very confident – indeed more confident – that the next three to six months are going to be full of chaos because of Omicron and the new variants that are likely soon to follow.
Just assume meetings and events that had been scheduled for the next three months will be virtual. It is hard to see many organizations encouraging employees to travel to in-person events and they won’t.
That’s just the beginning of the changes. Now New Year’s Eve celebrations have been canceled in the Algarve, The UK is requiring everyone to show a Covid test on arrival – that includes us, the Irish, the fully vaccinated. In the Netherlands, facemasks are now required in lots of places, from hairdressers to restaurants and bars and of course public transit. In Germany vaccinations are about to become compulsory, despite a vocal anti vax minority. In Spain support is growing for requiring a digital vaccination certificate to gain entry to many public places such as restaurants.
That last is a good idea, by the way. In the US we should require proof of full vaccination status (and very soon boosters too) to gain entry to restaurants, supermarkets, and, yes, airports. So far the political will to do this via Executive Order is lacking in the White House but that may change if the pressures grow on hospital capacity and deaths begin to mount again. Both seem very possible – hospitals already are strained in much of the country – including Vermont which once had been a poster child for doing the right things regarding Covid.
Of course the Biden Administration already has imposed a new 24 hour rule for tests required of all incoming international travelers including US citizens who are fully vaccinated. Many say that is sharply reducing the readiness of US citizens to travel abroad and probably that is true. In reality the requirement may not be that huge a hurdle. When returning from Spain in October I had to produce a test result that was no more than 72 hours old upon takeoff and that was no big deal. Madrid Airport has a very good testing facility – my test was around 100 Euros – and I think mine was within 26 hours of takeoff. I could easily tweak my timing and do it inside 24 hours – and, word of advice, definitely book an appointment in advance and pre-pay. At least in Madrid there was a long line of those who showed up without appointments and tests are administered to that group on an as available basis. Those with appointments were ushered in.
When will this end? Nobody knows, obviously.
But a guess is that we need to get the world up to maybe 75% vaccinated. Best guesses are that it will take at least five more months to get the global fully vaccinated near there.
For something like normalcy to return we also need wide distribution of booster shots. Maybe 10% of us in the US have had a booster. That number needs to ramp up much higher, soon.
We also need to return to cautious conduct – mask wearing, crowd avoidance, etc. Stop whining, it’s keeping us safer.
You thought all this was behind us? Who didn’t? But here we are again and I am not expecting much improvements for many months to come. Improvement will come, when we have taken the steps needed to get there. Until then it will be one step forward, two back. So keep your travel bags unpacked. I know I am.
You probably know names like Flippa, FE International, Dealasite, and Sedo — they’re marketplaces where owners of online businesses list them for sale. With a few clicks you can buy an online business. It’s that easy!
Maybe it is a cockamamie pie in the sky of a dreamer’s idea.
Or maybe it is a key to showing the future relevance and importance of credit unions.
Focus on the target: solidifying the credit union reputation as the welcoming place for the presently unbanked – about 6% of us – and the underbanked, another 19% of us. That is one in four Americans who are ignored, wholly or in part, by traditional financial institutions.
USAlliance, a $2 billion credit union that has grown out of the legacy IBM employees credit union, wants to change that. And the vehicle is Bank Dora, a branchless neo-bank powered by an app (find it in Google Play and the Apple App Store). Or sign up here.
It is tiresome – so many press releases and executive interviews spewed out by airlines and big hotel chains prognosticating that business travel will return to 2019 “normality” in 2022, probably by mid year.
These predictions are to fact based estimates as manure is to meatballs.
And I really like a good Italian American meatball (with the trinity of meats, please).
But I am no fan of fake news releases and Panglossian interviews.
Or fact free forecasts by business travel fanboys. You know who they are. Because they like travel they fervently believe everybody does. But it ain’t so.
Interlude: this blog has no comments on omicron because I have nothing useful to say other than the sooner the world gets vaccinated, the better.
Back to the present musings:
Now Google has weighed in and where data is concerned, Google is the motherlode.
That has always been the company’s business plan. Hoover up every scrap of data, sort it, and draw fact based conclusions. Google knows you are interested in travel to the Maldives over Christmas because you searched for exactly that 10 times this week. When Google talks it has data to back it up.
Here is Google’s prediction: Per Travel Weekly UK, “The decline in the volume of business travellers may continue beyond the pandemic, Google’s latest travel data suggests.”
Google’s Meg Elzea, global travel industry manager, added that while a majority of business travelers will be back on the road in 2022, companies and travelers are in fact “making changes.”
Like what? Per Travel Weekly, “She told Abta’s Travel Trends conference that Google expects business travel to return in the next year to ‘70% of pre-pandemic levels’.”
That sounds exactly on target to me.
Roughly one-third of pre-pandemic travel is not coming back and it isn’t because we have concluded t isn’t necessary and companies have decided they can save that money.
He elaborated: “We’ve all moved on to Zoom or Teams and a proportion of that is going to stick.”
“He acknowledged that a certain amount of business will still have to be done in person, but maintained that ‘a proportion of the services sector is not going to revert back to the [business travel] ethos it had.’”
Personally, while I think the virtual meeting technology – Zoom and similar video calling tools – will erase some meetings, I think bigger factors are in play.
For me, at least, Zoom seems to be replacing oldfashioned phone calls and, frankly, I prefer the latter and often stick with a phone without video. Why comb one’s hair when one has no need? But that is what Zoom is replacing: phone calls.
As for what is driving the reduction in meetings, I agree with Google’s research that pinpoints three triggers: the global outcry over climate issues – and air travel is a prime offender, an employee search for better work life balance, and a corporate bean counter hunt for cost savings.
That’s a perfect storm that, I believe, will sideline just about that 30% of travel Google sees getting trimmed.
Many employees will be happier (substantial business travel is a factor in ill health as well as significant family issues in many households). The CFOs (and Wall Street profit counters) will be overjoyed. And the planet will be in better shape if we cut back on travel.
What trips are not on the chopping block? I see sales calls and customer service calls returning to normal when the present health issues vanish and a lot of the complicated and ever changing travel requirements (such as PCR tests) are simplified, or at the least regularized. A world of fast changing rules is a world where we stay home.
But the day travel gets simplified will come, possibly in mid to late 2022.
What travel will be eliminated?
The kinds of trips that will be sidelined are the intramural, getting to know you get together, small meetings (often in Chicago or Dallas for big national companies).
Oh, do I remember them,some from as far back as 1976 and were they tedious and pointless! They doubtless still are. Erase them from the calendar and nobody will cry.
The organization can also put out press releases – true ones – about decreased carbon load. And there can be whispers to Wall Street and investors about profit gains.
Nope, that one-third of travel will be forever lost. And no one will much miss it.
What you don’t know about digital marketing can be your undoing. That is 2021 fact.
For some years credit union c-suite occupants have shrugged off digital marketing – it’s just for kids, our members skew old. Maybe that was true (maybe it wasn’t as true as the c-suiters believed) but what now has become indisputable in our pandemic era is that digital is here and it has become a significant part of just about every life.
That includes credit union members.
Where’s a credit union to get started in digital marketing? That’s what you will hear about in this podcast with Amber Callahan, VP of marketing at 1st Advantage FCU in Virginia, and Kristin Harrison, director of business development at Web Strategies, also in Virginia.
They have had a multi-year journey together and you will learn how to get started in digital marketing and how to go to next, higher levels.
Do note: this is pretty much a tech free podcast. There’s no need to have a techie at your side for this one.
And accept the reality: we have entered the zone where tech is what matters. To quote the New York Times about Google and Facebook: “these tech companies are rich and powerful because they are the biggest sellers of advertising in the world.”
Digital already accounts for more than half of global ad spend. Many billions of dollars get spent on digital advertising. There are good reasons for that. You will hear about that in this podcast.
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
