Meet Michele Dean, CEO of Suffolk Federal Credit Union on Long Island in New York and that is a $1.5 billion institution.
That makes Dean one of few female CEOs of big credit unions – and in this podcast she talks about that. She also talks about her credit union mentor, Kirk Kordeleski, who hired her when he was at Bethpage and who gave her increasing responsibilities that put her on the path to senior leadership. You know Kordesleski. He’s twice been a guest on this podcast, most recently talking about creative credit union compensation strategies. Link in the show notes.
Dean gets animated in talking about what Suffolk needs to do to stay competitive in a region where three credit unions are bigger, and one of them is much bigger.
How to survive? According to Dean it will be by harnessing smart tech and she is on the hunt for just that.
Proof: your podcast host met her a few months ago at an Austin Texas conference hosted by CU 2.0 – and, she says, she already is pursuing tech projects with three fintechs she learned about there.
In the show she mentions crypto expert Joe – that is Joe Keller, a digital guru and a past guest on this show. Link to his podcast in the show notes.
And there’s also a shout out for cannabis banking leader Sundie Seefried – and there’s a link to her show in the show notes.
Here’s a question for you: Do sharedraft accounts matter anymore? You want to hear Dean’s answer.
A final thought to ponder: is Dean a harbinger of a generation shift that is radically remaking the CEO office in credit unions as Baby Boomers punch the clock for the last time? And what would that mean?
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The Hotel Management headline caught my eye: What hoteliers need to know about protecting guest data. To be candid my instant reaction was one word: Everything. Given how many documented hotel data breaches there have been in this century, to call hotels data sieves is to flatter them.
Now matters may be worsening, mainly due to the labor crisis that is engulfing US hotels.
But hotel already are documented bad at data protection. Here’s a hotel breach timeline dating back to 2010 in Hotel News Now. What is stunning is how many breaches go undetected for many months. For instance, in 2019 Choice Hotels reported a data leak that “inadvertently” disclosed customer info to business partners. How often? Per Hotel News Now: “Overall, this issue occurred approximately 88,000 times from June 2015 through 12 November 2019.”
Read the HNN timeline and the victims are a roll call of hotel management companies, from Marriott to Trump, Hilton to White Lodging.
You want to laugh at their ineptitude but hold that chuckle because it is your data that is in play, your info that is getting sucked out and put in the hands of criminals.
Surely, matters are improving, data will be more scrupulously guarded. You might think so.
Lots of companies – including the several profiled in the Hotel Management article – offer contemporary data protection technology and practices. The availability of protection is not in doubt. The readiness of hotels to spend the money and the readiness of their staff to implement the procedures very much are in doubt.
How many stories have you read about hotel labor shortages? This impacts everything from front desk clerks to gardeners and housekeepers. It definitely means there is a shortage of IT security staff who probably have migrated into industries with better pay and superior technology. See this April 2022 Law.com article, Hackers’ Path Eased as US Cybersecurity Jobs Sit Empty. Per the article: “About 1 million people work in cybersecurity in the U.S., but there are nearly 600,000 unfilled positions, data from CyberSeek shows.” You can bet that a lot of those unfilled positions are in hospitality where, as a rule, pay lags. If you have an in demand skill, the smart move of course is to go where the money is and that will rarely be hospitality.
Assume any hotel you stay in has cybersecurity openings and it has struggled and generally lost out in efforts to keep their best cybersecurity staffers.
More bad news is that the professional cyber criminal organizations are in full gear to attack travelers and hotels because the criminals – who have been staffing up – believe the odds increasingly favor them.
Current events play into this. Attacks out of Russia are skilled and they are growing in number.
Your cyber safety depends upon an understaffed and possibly under talented workforce.
Check into a hotel and the property hoovers up lots of data from you – a credit card number, probably a driver’s license number, business address, possibly also home address. That is ample info to enable a crook to make purchases on your credit card, possibly to attempt opening new accounts in your name.
Know this: although it is tempting to use a fake id at a hotel most (possibly all) states have laws making it illegal. I am no lawyer but my guess is that without evidence of criminal intent, no one would prosecute a worried traveler who used a fake ID and a credit card in the same name to check into a hotel in order to minimize risks of data theft. And I seriously doubt many hotels would have any interest in a prosecution going forward when the guest did not defraud them and the guest intends to mount a defense built around hotels and their data leaks. But caveat emptor.
I am not presently using a fake ID but I put hotel related charges on a credit card where I check the activity frequently (several times a week). It’s also a credit card issued by a company with generally good security practices.
I suggest you do likewise. Put all hotel related expenses on one card that you check frequently. If you travel a lot this year – between hotel staff shortages and what seems to be chronic under investment in cyber by hoteliers – your data is at risk.
Keep that in mind with every transaction at a hotel. Incidentally, hotel bars and restaurants seem especially leaky – think hard about paying cash. Ditto hotel gift shops.
I wish I had better news for you but the best I can say is. assume your data may be breached everytime you stay in a hotel. With that attitude you will stay on the defense and that’s now a traveler’s must.
You know how savvy travelers brace themselves against pickpockets when in crowded train stations especially in Europe? Me, I will literally keep a hand on my pocket touching my wallet. Paranoid? Nah. Just careful.
Do likewise with your data in a hotel.
Maybe you can’t cuddle it but you can be mindful about it and that’s the next best thing.
The pandemic. The Great Resignation. Oregon wild fires. Tornados in Kansas. Face facts: it is tough to know how to deal with the next disaster that comes on your scene because who knows what that will be?
This century – from Katrina to the war in Ukraine – has been a wild ride filled with the unpredictable. It has become essential for every c-suiter to live by the Boy Scout motto, Be Prepared.
But that isn’t easy when there’s no knowing what you need to be prepared for.
This is where Tim Daugherty enters because in this podcast he tells what a credit union needs in a business continuity plan – and he also muses about the maybe 25% that do not have a realistic plan in place.
Joining him is Shane Butcher. a CU 2.0 Podcast veteran and director of CISO Services at OGO, who offers insight into where data and hackers figure into BCP.
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Just six months ago, BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) seemed to be on every lip in credit union c-suites as executives eyed the rosy reports of robust lending at fintechs such as Klarna and Affirm but then came May and Klarna laid off 10% of its workforce amid a souring of the global economy and soaring worries about inflation, certainly in the U.S. where a gallon of gasoline now is around $5, up from about $4.35 just a month ago.
Add in the fact that the CFPB has opened an inquiry into BNPL and formally requested buckets of information from leading BNPL players and, suddenly, that screech you hear are the brakes being applied to BNPL at many, many financial institutions, credit unions definitely among them.
What happens when you throw a bunch of ex-Googlers into an office in San Mateo California?
Enter Upstart, a new breed lending company that helps financial institutions – credit unions very much included – make more, better unsecured loans and also do auto refinancing.
Upstart comes at lending with a focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and doing a lot of data crunching. Using Upstart’s analytics an institution approves a higher percentage of loans – but also enjoys a lower default rate.
How can that be? According to Jeff Keltner, who heads business development at Upstart and is himself an ex Googler, lots of models plain look at the wrong data when making credit decisions.
Upstart has a page full of dazzling stats about how its models perform versus traditional lending models. Check it out.
20+ years ago I interviewed the Google founders for MIT’s Technology Review magazine. Here’s that story.
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Be honest now. Do you have a systematic way of measuring how effectively you are leading? Or is it all seat of the pants guesswork and, well, we have to be doing okay because the lights are still on?
Let’s be honest. A lot of credit unions are going out of business in the next decade. A lot.
Right now there is a flood of fintechs into the credit union orbit and many come with promises and promise – but a lot of them won’t be open in five years.
Ineffective management and leadership will figure into many of these demises.
Enter Julie Markee. She is a professional implementer – you haven’t heard that title before, have you – with EOS, a company that teaches what it calls an entrepreneurial operating system (this EOS).
In this podcast Markee – who has worked with a number of companies in the credit union orbit – offers up a fast view of EOS’ thinking and processes,
Case in point: are your executive meetings a productive use of time – or do you leave the room thinking why the heck am I spending so much time on this? EOS has a fast approach to meetings that will up effectiveness. You want to hear that.
Do you have the right people in the right seats? That’s a core EOS principle and when it’s not in place that organization will struggle to succeed. Find out how to get the right people in the right seats in this show.
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Seth Brickman’s career includes the US Navy (remember Top Gun? That was his motivator). Then he landed at Microsoft, he co-founded a startup Nicolette which builds tools to help parents make informed decisions about their baby’s health, then he was at Amazon where he earned a patent involving Alexa and the content delivered to its screen.
Now he is at QCash, a CUSO created by Washington State Employees Credit Union (hear CU 2.0 Podcast #56 with past QCash CEO Ben Morales).
Why QCash? In the podcast Brickman tells why but the short version is that he had reached a point in his life where he wanted to do a lot of good and he joined QCash because it seemed to him to be the vehicle that could make that happen.
Listen to this section of the podcast multiple times. Take notes. You want to get highly talented techies into your organization. Brickman tells how.
At QCash, his dreams are big. The CUSO presently serves 50 credit unions. His goal is to double that number by year end.
Partly it’s that Brickman has tweaked QCash’s product messaging. It no longer refers to itself as an alternative to payday lending. Now it’s about helping members through what QCash calls life events.
Don’t think QCash is abandoning the people it was created to help. It isn’t. The QCash focus remains making loans – oftentimes to individuals who might not qualify for traditional lending products – to help members deal with life events, from a blown car transmission to false teeth.
What’s exciting about QCash is that its loans do not involve a traditional application. It connects to the core and that gives it ample insight into this member who wants a loan.
Brickman also is expanding the QCash toolbox – for instance there now is an emergency response loan that will let a participating credit initiate lending to community members after a natural disaster – an earthquake, fire, even Covid-19 – literally within minutes of the event. How cool is that? The credit union can legitimately call itself a financial first responder.
What could be more in the credit union spirit than that?
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That’s because today’s guest, Barb Lowman, president of CUNA Strategic Services has a huge portfolio of responsibilities – and she need to succeed to keep the credit union sector thriving.
We are in existential times. Break out your Kierkegaard because, honestly, the future of thousands of small and even mid sized credit unions does not look bright as pressures grow in technology, in regulation, in compliance and you know the lengthening list of issues that credit union CEOs wrestle with.
Lowman’s job as CUNA Strategic Services is to find ways to give credit unions competitive edges and she is looking hard at technology. For instance: how can small credit unions have good, contemporary core systems? We talk about exactly that issue.
We talk a lot more tech too – but know we also talk executive compensation and board recruitment and those are issues that smaller credit unions in particular fight with.
Can you guess the typical CEO retirement package at a small credit union? Listen: Lowman tells us.
And when you hear it you will know why many credit unions struggle to survive when a long serving CEO retires.
Lowman is a lifelong optimist. This is a cheery podcast.
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You know the numbers. In just the first three quarters of 2021 the NCUA approved 117 mergers and there will be more this year. In the mix is an ever growing number of credit union acquisitions of banks.
Here’s the million dollar question: post merger how many members (or bank customers) will flee to a new institution. If you are going to have to learn how to deal with a new institution, why not make it a completely new institution?
Hmm.
Then I saw an article by Glia CEO Dan Michaeli in Credit Union Times that put out an entrancing thesis: “Credit unions undergoing a merger can benefit from modernizing member service with a digital-first approach..”
What if?
What if you not only can lose fewer members but get more wallet share?
Just maybe, says Michaeli, you can do exactly that.
In this podcast he talks about the 2022 credit union imperative to master digital member experience.
It no longer is nice to have. It’s an authentic must have and do.
Incidentally, Michaeli also believes that a good member digital experience can help boost employee satisfaction. That’s news you want to know in the era of the great resignation.
You say you think you heard Michaeli on this podcast before? Bonus points are yours. Episode 115 was his first appearance.
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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
The company name flows much more smoothly off the tongue: Engageware.
Before it had been TimeTrade SilverCloud and that was its name a year ago when CEO Bill Clark guested on this podcast. Now he’s back for an encore.
The company’s business remains helping companies – credit unions very much included – get more member engagement through whatever channel and tools the member chooses to use.
Engagement is critical today. You know that. That’s also why Bill Clark is a man to talk with because he knows engagement and he also knows that credit union execs are tempted by many new shiny objects but do they deliver?
This year he is back with a new report with new findings and some of what you will hear in this podcast will blow your mind.
Such as? Chew on this: Consumers will stay skeptical. We just aren’t as trusting and believing as we had been and that changes a lot. Including relationships with credit unions. Clark elaborates on that theme in this podcast.
Another finding: 40% of bank customers say they are willing to leave their primary financial institution for digital banking that compares to a great online shopping experience. Do your digital channels measure up against Amazon’s? They better.
35% of bank customers nationwide say it is not easy to find even simple answers on their banking institutions’s mobile app or website.
You and your peers say digital is the priority in 2022. But what does that mean? Clark talks us through this.
Listen up: this is a podcast that will refresh what you really know about digital and member engagement.
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
