How International Travel Can Be Safer than Domestic

by Robert McGarvey

My trip across the Atlantic looms and a big question popped in front of my eyes: how crazy am I? Everywhere I look people are cancelling international trips, even some domestic travel, mainly as fear of the delta variant spreads fast across the country and hospitalizations, ICU usage, and deaths are all climbing. Is it nuts to cross the water?

And then I remembered the numbers and as I parsed the math I realized what is nuts is staying in Arizona.

About 53% of us in the US are fully vaccinated. My home state of Arizona comes in at 49% (yeah, a lot of dummies in the desert).

Spain, my European destination, is 74.4% fully vaccinated. That is right. Three in four Spaniards are fully vaccinated and they are taking the same good, high grade vaccinations we are in the US.

Better still, Spain now requires US residents who are travelling to Spain to have proof of full vaccination. No proof, no entry.

And the US requires us to present a current negative test result to re-enter the country.

Think what those facts mean. On my flight from JFK to Madrid it is reasonable to assume most passengers will be vaccinated. On the flight from Madrid to JFK, ditto for a preponderance of vaccinated and definitely everybody has a current negative test result.

I am safer on the international flight than I am on the PHX to JFK leg and god help me if that routing were to get shifted to Atlanta where anti vaxxers are boisterous and plentiful.

That is right: selected international travel just is safer than domestic.

Sure, I know the White House has unleashed a push to get many more of us vaccinated but even optimists believe it will be some months before we can match Spain’s present number (and by then Spain probably will be over 90% vaccinated).

The anti-vaxxers are creating our travel miseries. The blame is theirs.

And some are rising to slap them down.

Some airlines – Qantas is a for instance – say they will require all international passengers to be vaccinated. Canada is requiring similar of air passengers effective at the end of October.

Right now, no other airline has a broad requirement for vaccinations among passenger – but many countries now do. Expect more countries and airlines to join these lists. Travel just won’t truly restart until there are broad vaccination mandates and as airlines eye the many empty seats in their international flights you can bet that they will begin to agitate for vaccination requirements.

Don’t the unvaccinated have rights? Perhaps. But I have a right to not want them on my flights, in my hotels, or in the restaurants where I am eating. And many of us are beginning to share that thinking.

Even with my confidence about the health of my fellow travelers on the international legs of my travels, I will be wearing upgraded KF94 face masks which are a sharp step over conventional cloth masks (which I still wear in stores but some airlines have banned them and I am fine upgrading my air travel masks).

What about eating inflight, and bathroom use? I believe I will skip eating and as for the toilet I’d like to say I won’t use it at all but doubt that is realistic for a 7 hour flight. Stay masked, wash hands, maintain distances from other passengers and very probably this will be a safe trip.

But I wouldn’t have the same confidence about a flight to Wyoming or Alabama.

It’s domestic travel that I now see as risky. Talk about a paradox.

Look who you are flying with! And check the vaccination rate of states into which you are flying.

Yes, I know the CDC advises us to avoid ravel to Spain – and many, many more countries. I am just counting on my ability to stay health by traveling smart, avoiding the unvaccinated wherever possible, and also I come to this fully vaccinated and as a Covid survivor who probably has many antibodies from the actual disease swimming around my veins.

I am betting I do okay.

We’ll find out if that is a smart wager.

CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 166 Jill Nowacki on the Credit Union War for Talent: HR in 2021

 It’s tough out there.  That’s a paraphrase of how Jill Nowacki, a 20 year veteran of the credit union industry and presently CEO of Humanidei + O’Rourke where she focuses on talent recruitment for credit unions.

When fast food outlets are advertising starting pay at $15 and up per hour in much of the country you get a hint of how tough it is right now to recruit for credit unions.

But the problems aren’t limited to entry level jobs.  In this podcast Nowacki talks at length about issues in filling c-suite jobs (even CEO slots) and also the increasing challenges in recruiting new members for the board of directors.

One takeaway from this podcast: start thinking strategically about employees and board members.  Random just isn’t going to hack it anymore.

Also focus in on the credit union advantages in hiring – for instance a genuine community focus and a focus not on profits but on doing good.  Many of us – and especially many younger people – put a high priority on those attitudes and credit unions have the right stuff.

Nowacki admits that at senior level jobs banks have a powerful attraction – stock options that can produce personal wealth.  Credit unions do not have options.  Bur they have that powerful draw of a culture committed to doing good. And that will bring in job applicants.

Nowacki does not underplay the difficulties in today’s hiring marketplace but she nonetheless is upbeat. That’s the attitude that just may prevail in today’s talent wars.

Listen up.

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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 21st Century Elevator Pitch: New Rules for New Times

by Robert McGarvey

Three words about that elevator pitch you have spent many hours polishing, owning, practicing: tear it up.

The rules for creating a winning elevator pitch suddenly are different today. Very different. You need a concise presentation, that is true, but the elevator pitch from yesteryear is about as current as a beehive hairdo, according to many presentation experts and seasoned entrepreneurs who have been laboring in today’s pitch marketplace. That’s because three huge things are different today: video, attention spans, and COVID-19.

Continued at Startup Savant

CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 159 Kelli Ellsworth Etchison LAFCU and Gary Lee MDT CUSO on DEI DEI 4 2021

 Kelli Ellsworth Etchison,  chief marketing officer and chief diversity officer at the $950 million, Lansing, Mich.-based LAFCU and a member of Michigan’s Black Leadership Advisory Council, and Gary Lee is Chief Client Office at MDT, Member Driven Technology, a tech focused CUSO, are in this podcast to tell why DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – matter to credit unions.

Here’s the big question Lee addresses: how does MDT explain to its owners, customers and prospects that it – a CUSO that specializes in delivering cloud based core processing – puts a large emphasis on DEI?  What business is this of a tech focused CUSO?

It’s a central concern, explained Lee in the podcast and he added that MDT has even signed new customers who said their preference is to do business with companies that share their concerns about social justice and equality issues.

As for Etchison, she puts a DEI concern on the table that we have not heard before in over a half dozen DEI focused podcasts.  Her idea is that we have to stop looking at DEI simply as a concern inside the four walls of the credit union and instead look at it in a bigger community orientation.  Her point: until there is real DEI in the community, a credit union’s DEI focus can produce only so much good.

That is a huge idea and a huge challenge. Many credit unions are doing very well in regard to DEI inside walls – but how about in the community?

The mammoth idea here is that systemic racism results in, for instance, low credit scores for many – and so they become prey for payday lenders rather than good credit union members.

Help more people in your community achieve the successes they deserve and the result will be a stronger. more successful credit union.

How large is that idea?

You might sat the subtitle for this podcast is do good for your credit union or CUSO by doing good for the community.

Listen up.

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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

CU2.0 Podcast Episode 135 Joel Schwartz DoubleCheck and NSF Fees

by Robert McGarvey

 Overdraft fees are big business for most financial institutions and it’s estimated that 20% of credit union members, one in five, have an NSF annually.

The worse news is that the credit union’s NSF fee is just the start of the consumer’s pain.  Joel Schwartz, founder and co-CEO of DoubleCheck, a Los Angeles company with an innovative spin on how to best handle NSFs, estimates that the NSF can lead to perhaps $175 in ripple charges such as a returned item fee imposed by the payee of the bounced check.

Ouch.

DoubleCheck has an alternative – and, hold on you protest, your institution wants to maintain its NSF income, especially in today’s economy where loan interest rates are anemic.  

Schwartz gets that. He describes DoubleCheck as the financial equivalent of traffic school in the context of a speeding ticket.  Go to traffic school and, usually, that wipes out the pain of an increase in insurance premiums.

What DoubleCheck’s tool does is offer the consumer realtime options for dealing with the consequences of an NSF such as offering the opportunity to use a credit card to make good on the check or ACH, therefore it doesn’t look like a bounced item to the payee. Whoosh, that $175 in ripple charges may vanish.

DoubleCheck charges $20, an amount it typically splits with the credit union – so in fact the credit union income goes up.

Sounds good? It gets better. The DoubleCheck tools – which make the NSF process transparent to the consumer – may help a credit union duck class action suits that claim discriminatory processing of NSFs.   

There’s a link in the show notes to a recent Navy Federal $16 million settlement involving NSF charges.

There’s also a class action suit in progress. Link in the show notes.  

Meantime, Schwartz predicts there will be Congressional action to limit NSF charges, a topic of much interest to Senator Cory Booker. See the link in the show notes.  

DoubleCheck tools may help a credit union recoup some income that may be capped by federal action.

Mentioned in the show is SECU’s NSF policies. The charge is $12 but the member gets a two day window without charge to clear up the issue.  (Here’s a link to a podcast with Jim Blaine, the retired SECU CEO.) 

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

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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 “Old” Normal Is Never Coming Back

By Robert McGarvey

Ian Schrager (The Edition, The Public Hotel, et. al.) unquestionably is a hotel innovator but I will tell you this: His crystal ball is broken and he doesn’t know what is happening, or not happening, in tomorrow’s travel.

What triggers this is that I have recently been bombarded with emails and calls from friends and colleagues telling me I am wrong in my predictions that our travel lives after Covid-19 will be very different from what we had before. I am no pessimist – indeed I think great times are ahead, starting probably in 2022. But they will be different.

Where Schrager comes into the frame is in a speech he gave at the 2020 Boutique Lifestyle Digital Summit where he said that when the hospitality industry recovers it will return to “not a new normal, but the same normal we’ve always had.”

He added: “I don’t believe in paradigm shifts.”

An odd comment because the world of 20th century travel is a world of paradigm shifts, where the car made it possible to travel hundreds of miles, quickly and in comfort, the plane extended the range, the jet made intercontinental travel accessible and reasonably comfortable, and mass market hotels (think Holiday Inn) redefined who would stay in hotels, for what reasons.

I understand why my hospitality industry friends take comfort in Schrager’s viewpoint – a comfort zone is a frightening place to exit – but to my eyes those in hospitality who cling to old paradigms will perish. And some who recognize that things are different today just may find a path to a new prosperity.

Covid-19 has unquestionably triggered what will be enormous paradigm shifts in travel.

Three legs of a stool of change say this will be so and they are all coming together at the same time.

The duration of the Covid-19 crisis. It takes time to form new habits, new attitudes. We have that time with Covid-19. People are still dying. World Bank forecasts show 2.5 million dead globally by January 1, 2021. That’s more than double today’s 1 million death toll.

Yes, there are those in Washington DC who insist we will have vaccines available before year end (by all means, take mine; I won’t, not this year when the process has been tainted by toxic politics). No rational person thinks we will have any significant distribution in the US of a vaccine until mid 2021 at the soonest.

And then there is the rest of the world to vaccinate. When will that happen? And know that the US has said it will not participate in a WHO effort to distribute a vaccine globally – leaving that up to, I don’t know, maybe imaginary beings?

But if the rest of the world is sick, we will never be healthy. Not in today’s interconnected society.

Count me as saying Covid-19 will continue to hold back travel through 2021 and into 2022. Meaning we will have two years of training how to live a Covid-19 lifestyle and most of us already have adjusted to it. We may grumble but we wear masks, we don’t go to movie theaters, we don’t eat in restaurants (we do love take-out), we don’t fly in planes (especially not internationally) and we don’t stay in hotels. You know what, this “new normal” isn’t so bad and I know few people who really, truly want to get back to how travel was.

The Revenge of the Beancounter. Corporate bookkeepers have always hated business travel, which they have seen as a giant boondoggle that paid for golf, booze, steaks and to what end? Covid-19 just may have given them the ammo they need to dramatically lower travel budgets longterm.

That’s because most companies are learning that they can continue to make sales and develop relationships without travel and face to face meetings. For how many decades have I heard that if we don’t travel we can’t close deals? And yet deals are getting done even with what amounts to a near total ban on travel in many companies.

This has not gone unnoticed by the beancounters.

Face it, some business travel has indeed been important, maybe essential. But a lot happened because we always have done it.

The business world hasn’t ended even though a lot of travel has stopped.

There also is a simultaneous generational change. Baby Boomers may have grumbled about business travel but in our guts we kind of liked it and we prided ourselves on being “road warriors,” a label that glamorized bone crushing monotony and somehow made airline food seem, well, edible.

Don’t think Millennials and Gen Z are on board with this. They aren’t. They see much business travel for the drab, uninspiring slog that it is. Of course they will travel when there is a reason. But a lot of business travel has happened without reason and, as for these younger generations, hell no, they won’t go.

Sustainability and climate change. The elephant in the room when talking about travel is the negative impact it has on the environment, especially the impact of air travel. The era of flight shaming will only grow in volume and intensity as the economy heals and Covid-19 retreats.

The reality of climate change is undeniable, as is the damage and destruction it is bringing.

Millennials and Gen Z are especially concerned about longterm environmental impacts, understandably so. They will question the need and desirability of air travel and these will not be generations that hop on a plane to weekend in Paris or for a lunch meeting with a prospect in Tulsa.

Add up duration, frugality, and climate change and it’s a trifecta for change in how we travel. The new normal will be different. Very different indeed, and I applaud the Millennials and Gen Z who are creating this reality because they will have to live in it.

CU2.0 Podcast Episode 113 Sherif Hassan on The Opportunity in Small Business Lending

 

Call this Part 1 of our smarter lending duet.  Part 2, posting tomorrow in podcast 114, is on smarter car loans with Nicholas Hinrichsen. You don’t want to miss that one. 

PPP loans just may have awakened credit unions to the immense opportunity there is in small business lending.  That’s what Sherif Hassan, CEO of fintech Capiform, believes.  The opportunity is there.

But to win that business credit unions need to speed up their lending process, said Hassan, and they also need to create a more efficient process that cuts costs.

Automation – smart technology – is the key.  At many credit unions, the typical cost for funding a small business loan is around $3600, said Hassan.  Capiform’s tools  get that cost down to maybe $360.

At that cost, suddenly making smaller loans – maybe $50,000 or $75,000, loans that often are what small businesses want – is realistic.

Community banks have long had a lead in small business lending, but CU2.0 Podcast listeners recently heard Steve Bruyn of Foresight Research say that his data shows a huge drop in customer satisfaction at community banks. That’s an opportunity for credit unions.

Add in the comfort many credit unions gained in the PPP program – where they learned they could successfully deal with small businesses and also with the federal government – and the path to more loans for credit unions is clear.

It comes at an ideal time. Many credit unions are drowning in deposits. Small business loans are a profitable path to safety.

Don’t many fintech lenders want that same market? They do. But credit unions – with their community focus – have a fast track to succeeding in that battle. Listen up as Hassan tells why.

You may have heard Hassan’s earlier podcast. Here’s a link.

Listen up to this new podcast here.

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CU2.0 Podcast Episode 111 The Omnichannel Voyage, Part 2 with Mark Schuiling Wildfire Credit Union

by Robert McGarvey

No more cookie cutter solutions.  And put a branch in the member’s hands with mobile tools that allow the member to do pretty much anything he/she could do in a branch.

When Wildfire, a $900 million credit union in Saginaw Michigan, set out on its omnichannel journey four or five years ago it dreamed big, says Mark Schuiling, VP of technology.  

A lot of the process was doing hard thinking about what the institution wanted to be and what it wanted to provide members. From the start, however, Wildfire knew its future would be digital and it also wanted to provide members with a unified consumer experience, not the fragmented experience many credit unions offer because they have pasted together solutions provided by third party vendors.

At $900 million, however, and with only three programmers, Wildfire also knew it had to carefully pick a vendor and a tool that would suit its budget and its internal skills.

About a year ago, the process turned serious and Wildfire went all in on its digital transformation, working with Backbase as its technology partner.

Listen up to the Backbase podcast, number 110 in this series. 

This Wildfire podcast tells the story from the institution’s perspective and Wildfire candidly tells about its hopes, its challenge, and also why it now is going slow in the roll out of its omnichannel solutions to members (because it wants members to want the solution and to know they want it).

Listen up here.

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If We Sue Them Will Hoteliers Know We Mean It

By Robert McGarvey

I applauded when I saw the headline: “Marriott International faces class action suit over mass data breach.”

The lede sets the table: “Hotel group Marriott International is facing a class action lawsuit in London’s high court from millions of customers, who are seeking compensation after their personal details were stolen in one of the world’s largest data breaches.”

There’s nothing new here. Hoteliers suck at data security. From Trump to White Lodgings, the roll of shame grows louder.  Hotel News Now offers a catalog of the worst offenses going back to 2008 when Wyndham suffered the first of what became three breaches extending into 2010.  

Give a hotel your credit card and you put your finances in jeopardy. Hand over a debit card – with its weaker consumer protections – and you have entered a high risk zone.

So it is about time that consumers are banding together in a class action suit to seek to exact a reputational pound of flesh, plus some actual lucre, from Marriott. The source of the breach is Starwood.  Reported Hotel News Now: “For approximately 327 million of these [breached] guests, the information includes some combination of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest (“SPG”) account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences. For some, the information also includes payment card numbers and payment card expiration dates.”

What’s stunning is that the breach appears to have gone undetected from 2014 to 2018.

Was no one minding the store? Obviously, uh, no.

Alas, as I read about the suit it seems to involve only guests from England and Wales.

Even so, some of us who cannot join the suit still might want to savor Schadenfreude and watch the action. The Internet makes this easy.

This is 2020 so of course there is a Twitter feed about the suit.  

And there’s a website with plenty of information about the suit and the breach that caused it.

Want to be updated on the status of the suit? Here’s where to register.

Michael Bywell, one of the lawyers involved in filing the suit, explained the why of the suit: “Over a period of several years, Marriott International failed to take adequate technical or organisational measures to protect millions of their guests’ personal data which was entrusted to them. Marriott International acted in clear breach of data protection laws specifically put in place to protect data subjects.”

Martin Bryant, who brought the action, added: “I hope this case will raise awareness of the value of our personal data, result in fair compensation for those of us who have fallen foul of Marriott’s vast and long-lasting data breach, and also serve notice to other data owners that they must hold our data responsibly.”

The sad bit is that exactly the same could and should be said about many other hotel management companies because indifference to data security is the industry norm.  Go back and look again at the Hotel News Now database of breaches.  It is only a minor exaggeration to say that if you stayed in a US hotel in the past decade, very probably you are a victim of a data breach.

I wish I could say that because of the publicity over breaches, the fines, and now the lawsuits, hotels are safer today.

But they aren’t. If anything, in the pandemic with the resulting collapse in bookings and revenues, the fear is that many hotels and management companies are cutting back on data security.  And criminals live to exploit weaknesses.

For some years I have said that, sadly, protection against data breaches when traveling is on us.  That’s all the more so now.

That means giving hotels the least amount of information possible.  If asked for information you don’t believe they have a valid need for, lie.

Always use credit cards with the smallest possible balances.

Monitor loyalty accounts with a regularity that suits your balance.  I never check my Bonvoy account (an Amex plat perk) because I have not had an eligible stay. But if I had many thousands of points I’d check weekly.

Assume that when you travel, your data may be hacked. It could be the restaurant where you eat that is breached.  It could be a nation state breaches your cellphone

But in my eyes it’s hotels that pose the biggest security risks.

It’s dangerous on the road, my friends, act accordingly.

CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 104 Brad Powell Redboard the Smarter Audit Software

You know the feelings – powerlessness, exasperation, maybe even anger – and know that these are typical for credit union staff involved in audits conducted by regulators.

Those audits are routine but for many credit unions they are an ordeal.

Why?  Maybe 8 in 10 credit unions still handle issues that arise in an audit the same way they did in 1990, that is, a  lot of email flies around to staff (“Handle the attached request from the auditor”) and everything is logged into a tracking spreadsheet.

Except some items never make it into the spreadsheet.  Some emails go missing. And anxiety and frustration boil over.

Those credit unions are drowning in minutiae.

Here’s the life preserver.

Enter Redboard, a software tool that automates the process and, says Redboard CEO Brad Powell, the software pays for itself in reduced staff time alone.

Some audit software is hard to use. Not Redboard. When asked, Powell said it’s “so easy even a caveman can use it.” 

He added that “we build our software on the same principle that Apple builds the iPhone,” that is, there is significant sophistication but, for most users, what they experience is how easy it all is. 

Hear the Powell podcast here.


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