McGarvey's Words: Journalist…Podcaster..Speaker

 

By Robert McGarvey

For Credit Union 2.0

 

The press release headline had me at go: “D3 Banking Technology Survey Finds More than Two-Thirds of American Digital Banking Users are Frust.”

Nah, I didn’t know what “frust” means either.  The Internet tells me a secondary slang meaning is frustrated.  

And, you bet, I too am frustrated with credit union mobile and online banking – and I’m not alone, per D3, and that should definitely worry credit union execs.

I have accounts at two credit unions. Digital products at both are inferior to Chase, where I also have an account.  If I could have only one account – and if I weren’t a big believer in the credit union movement – it would be with Chase.  I hate to say that. But it’s true and, thankfully, I am not limited to just one account.

Chase is forever improving its digital products. My credit unions aren’t (and, yes, I know they are locked into their vendors’ upgrade cycles – but why accept that?).  

Five years ago just having mobile banking was good enough.  20 years ago just having online banking, however feeble, was cause for a celebratory press release. In 2018 that definitely is not enough.

Not even close.

D3 proves that with its Harris poll that surveyed 1600 digital banking users (who had used it in the past 12 months) and they were quick to vent. Two in three – 68% – expressed frustration with their digital banking experience.

Count me among them. Yesterday I logged in to change the PIN of my debit card.  No can do in my credit union’s mobile banking app.  I eventually called an automated line and accomplished the task and how 1985 is that?

Why can’t I do a simple, mechanical task like changing a PIN on a mobile phone – and, really, do you think call centers do a better job of screening out fraudsters? Ask Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen about that.  

Nor is there evidence to suggest doing this via online or mobile banking is inherently riskier than via a telephone call.

So why can’t I do it?

A bottomline reality is that in 2018 an increasing number of consumers want – indeed demand – that their mobile banking app and online banking let them do anything they could do in a branch visit.

D3/Harris did find that there are age differences in expectations about mobile banking – but the differences aren’t as big as you might have hoped for. Said D3: “The survey revealed that digital banking users ages 18-34 are more likely than those ages 55+ to be frustrated with their digital banking experience, as 73% of the younger group indicated that they have been frustrated with their digital banking experience over the past year, compared to only 61% of adults ages 55+.”

Even tho credit union members skew older, it is safe to assume 6 in 10 of them are dissatisfied with their mobile banking experience.

For sure, too, members demand a feature rich digital banking experience: “The survey also found that more than half of digital banking users feel it is important for financial institutions to provide mobile deposit (70%), P2P services (66%) and mobile account opening (51%) as part of their digital banking offerings,” relayed D3.

Here’s the frightening kicker: “32% of digital banking users report that they are willing to leave their current bank or credit union for a better digital experience.”

That is blunt: one in three members who use digital services say they just may shift financial institutions to get better services.

Mark Vipond, CEO of D3, observed that that’s the real issue here is “the number of American digital banking users – 32 percent as found in our survey – who are willing to leave their current banking relationship for a better digital experience. As new types of technology continue to be introduced, financial institutions are going to need a strategy built on technology that allows them to innovate and introduce new features and functionality faster than they have to date.”

That’s the reality. Today consumers benchmark your app and website against Amazon, Netflix, Google and the other top digital services – and, sadly, at all but a handful of financial institutions the digital products are mediocre at best.

What’s the solution: commit, today, to improving your digital offerings just about daily, certainly weekly.  Word of advice: smart credit unions are committing to continuous improvement of their digital offerings.  The era of a once or twice a year update is over.  

The path to credit union extinction is paved with complacency.

Particularly with Millennials, credit unions have key positive attributes – they are local, they are community-minded, they generally are intimate scale, and they aren’t “big business.” All good. But will Millennials suffer a poor digital experience to do business with a credit union with bad online and mobile offerings?

Most credit unions seem to be betting that indeed Millennials will.

I don’t think they will.

Do you?

 

 

I know the feeling. When a trip looms usually it just seems simpler to make all required reservations in the same burst of activity, typically around two weeks out to get better airline fares. While I am at that, I’ll book a rental car (rarely nowadays in point of fact), make restaurant reservations, and of course book a hotel room.  But that last move may be a sure money loser.

That’s news from Concur, the travel management company, which said its analysis of data showed that a majority of hotel rooms are booked in the 15 – 30+ day window (a staggering 20% are booked more than 30 days out) – and yet, according to Phocuswire reporting, “during the 8-14 day period, most hotels start discounting heavily ahead of the stay date. This can often be to the tune of a 20% fall in the starting price for a property.”

Read that again. It says that waiting to book a room until shortly  before a trip can produce savings of perhaps 20% on the room rate.

Remember, at every hotel “revenue management” is the new Holy Grail but buttonhole most senior execs and off the record they will confide that their “competitors” suck at revenue management and that’s understandable because it’s a data science skill that requires serious analytical chops.  Airlines were the first to master revenue management, usually called yield in that trade. But they threw sophisticated computers and reasonably smart data scientists at a multi million dollar problem. They got results. Meaning they maximize the amount of money they pull out of every seat.

Few hotels have that sophisticated tech gear, or the brainy data scientists, and therefore revenue management in hotels is, shall we say, more informal.

Ten days out and there are way too many rooms empty and what do hotel managers do? Panic. And slash prices, obviously.

And so they do, said Concurs.

Note: these Concur data pertain to Europe, Middle East, and Africa – but you can be sure the same facts hold in the United States.

Book a hotel room for $250 20 days out and you wasted $50 plus room tax on the $50.

Booking early also leaves you more vulnerable to paying cancellation fee penalties – now in force at Marriott (Starwood), Hilton, Intercontinental and more properties.  To me, a traveler who came of age in the era of free same day cancellations (up until 4 p.m. at most hotels), the prospect of paying a night’s rate as a penalty for cancelling with less than 48 hours notice is horrifying.  So I have advised staying aware of the reality that very, very few hotels ever sell out and, therefore, book as late as your stomach allows you (the day before travel is about right, although I have booked on the morning of travel).  You’ll never pay an early cancellation fee.

This Concur rate data adds more fuel to the book a hotel room late position.

Particularly because you will save big money on the room rate.

Concur executive Chris Baker, in a blog post that is rich in data, showed especially dramatic savings for late bookers of high end hotels in Frankfurt and Paris.

Baker also noted that there are real differences in discounting from country to country.  “All three countries” – UK, France, Germany – “then experience a significant drop [in rates] between 0–3 days. However, prices in Germany are only 13 percent below the median whereas the U.K. sees a larger drop to -26 percent. Germany certainly holds truer when it comes to price fluctuation, but travellers and travel managers would do well to book later there in comparison to France and the UK.”

If you wait too long to book a room won’t you wind up sleeping on a park bench? Nope. Definitely unlikely.

Very few hotels ever are fully booked except during truly special events – the Super Bowl or the NCAA Final Four and a few blockbuster conventions.  Waiting until late to book is not that risky.

I am looking at 4:15 pm in Manhattan and tonight I see rooms at the five diamond Pierre ($338 on HotelTonight) and the Park Central near Central Park is $99. HotelTonight has many more Manhattan hotels to choose among.

In Washington DC – where there’s a large credit union convention this week  (GAC) – the Watergate is $299 and a one bedroom suite is $349.  The Kimpton Mason & Rook is $299.  The Washington Plaza, on Hotels.com, is asking $222 and that Thomas Circle place is my personal fave. Again, a lot more hotels are in HotelTonight. You would not sleep in Dupont Circle tonight if you were now arriving without a hotel reservation tonight. There is vast availability.

Bottomline: Book late. Very late. Save money on the room while ducking those hideous cancellation fees. It’s win-win for you.

 

 

 

by Robert McGarvey

 

The first batch of Alexa hotel skills is showing up in the Amazon library and the blunt question is: are they worth your time and bandwidth to download?

I am a big Alexa fan – there are three in my apartment, all different models – and have urged its adoption in everything from hospitality to banking.  Sure, I know the privacy concerns and I still say the cure is when you are having a convo you want to stay secret – really secret – unplug Alexa.  Poof, end of concerns.  I have never done that so assume what you will about my life.

In hotels I am very excited about the possibility that, soon, we will get answers not by calling the front desk or thumbing through an often out of date and neglected and incomplete hotel guest services guide, but by asking Alexa.

Alexa, can I have more towels? Will you turn down the room temperature three degrees? Alexa, set a wakeup call for 6 a.m.

At home I use Alexa – and also Google Home (Siri is seriously bad, imo; I never use it anymore) – to give me lots of info (what’s the weather? Will it rain today?) and also to perform simple tasks (turn on the living room light) and play music. I can also ask for BBC news briefs.

There are reasons to be optimistic about voice controls in hotel rooms. Lots of big players – Marriott included – have pilots. At least one third party developer – Volara – has taken big steps in making Alexa real and useful in hotel rooms.

So I was excited to see that at least some hotels now have their own Alexa skills – meaning you go to an Amazon page, click on the skill and the enable button and suddenly you have controls at a hotel.

Or don’t you?

This Hotel Business story really awoke my interest: Red Roof Intros Amazon Alexa Skills Technology.  

What’s important is that it is next gen.  It puts the Alexa hotel skill not only in the hotel room, but in your home and office.  For frequent guests at a particular chain or property, this could be a game changer.

Of course I immediately enabled the skill and got busy asking Alexa questions.

The Red Roof skill did not perform well, by my scoring.  The problem: a limited set of abilities.

I asked where the nearest Red Roof was. It told me to log into the website.

I asked how many locations Red Roof has. It told me over 500, then made a silly joke (“they all are special to me and call me on my birthday”)  It finished by telling me – you guessed it – to go to the website “to find an inn.”

The Hotel Business piece flagged this particular skill, do you have any deals?  So I tried that. It told me to go to the website.

What did Red Roof hope to accomplish with this Alexa skill? Hotel Business has the answer: “As consumers continue to rely more heavily on technology in their daily routines at home, we created the Red Roof skill for Amazon Alexa in the spirit of added convenience and ability to deliver important, decision-driving information directly to current and future guests,” said Kevin Scholl, director of digital marketing and partnerships, Red Roof. “Our technology is living and we’ll continue to add information to best support users based on consumer demand and aim to provide booking capabilities in the future.”

We’ll see about that last bit because the Red Roof skill really, really needs new powers.  It’s a rather lame skill right now.

A more fun Alexa skill is Lake View Country House – in Windmere, England, Wordsworth country. Ask how to get to the house – it even gives bus numbers from a nearby train station! It will tell you what room availability is on a particular date. It will not tell you prices, however, and neither will it accept bookings via Alexa.  But for a one-off country house in the Lake District, it’s a fun skill.

There really aren’t hotel skills much of use on the Alexa skills page.

It’s a better verdict for Flight Finders.

There you’ll find Kayak, United, Korean Air, Heathrow, Philadelphia Airport, and a few more.  They all have some uses.

Also with Alexa skills are travel advice company Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a growing number of concierge type services, and lots of information based skills.

Bottomline: Alexa is getting more robust. Can you truly plan and book a business trip using only it? Not now.  But soon.  Very soon.

Skills have to become much more powerful. But they will. They will.

How cool is that?

But I’m a sucker for anything that lets me dodge calling the front desk.  How about you?

By Robert McGarvey

 

For Credit Union 2.0

When it comes to account openings, credit unions increasingly find themselves caught between the proverbial Scylla and Charybdis, the fancy Greek mythology way to say between a rock and a hard place. In either direction lies complete devastation.

That’s because on one side, where credit union account opening barriers are high to prevent bogus accounts opened by crooks, big banks clean up by opening a lot more accounts.  Credit unions too often simply drive new business away.

On the other hand, when barriers are lowered, sometimes criminals pile on – like sharks sensing blood in troubled waters – and they get busy defrauding a credit union.

Indications are plentiful that criminals, increasingly, are honing in on account opening fraud. A lot of their activity is shifting into that realm.  

Credit unions, seeing that data, have doubled down on erecting barriers to fraud at account opening.

The upshots: potential members are frustrated when account opening barriers are too high and credit unions, too, are frustrated because they know they aren’t opening enough accounts.

There is a big data driven escape hatch that can save credit unions. But lots remain clueless.

They will suffer because what they are presently doing just isn’t current grade.

Personally, I know about the difficulties involved in opening a new account. It took me some weeks, of sheer tedious frustration, to open a new account at a credit union two blocks from my house in Phoenix.  If I hadn’t been a credit union fan, and if I weren’t something of a student of credit union practices, I would have walked long before I succeeded in opening the account.  Always it seemed another “proof” was required.  

My drivers license had a different address than my present address and that was the hitch.

But five years earlier, soon after I had moved to Arizona, I had opened an account at Chase with a driver’s license from another state and, in the bargain, Chase gave me a check for $300, just for opening a checking account.  The process was accomplished online. It took a couple days, max.

With the credit union, I eventually surrendered and visited the branch.  How 20th century. I did get the account open but the process left a bad taste of obsolescence.

Think about that. Chase paid me to open an account, the credit union inflicted aggravations upon me to do so.

Where will most potential customers wind up?

By now you may be saying, what should the credit union have done differently? What could it have done differently given government insistence on KYC?

Lots.

It could start by joining the 21st century.

Start by reading a very short ebook from Feedzai, a data science company with roots back to Carnegie Mellon University.  

It puts forth a lot of frightening ideas. For instance: criminals, increasingly, are opening crooked accounts but leaving them sleeping for some time – typically until a financial institution has stopped watching it as a worrisome new account. Think about that sophistication. The FI eyeballs a new account, crooks discover that, so they wait out the FI.

It gets worse.

Criminals know financial institutions love rules and so they learn them, they obey them – until the FI’s anxieties pass. Then they strike.

Machine learning can still give a credit union the edge, said Feedzai. “Banks can begin to keep pace with fraudsters with hypergranular, continuously updated profiles that pinpoint and connect fraud signals. There can be thousands of fraud indicators that alone aren’t enough to make a conclusive decision of fraud, but which a machine can thread into a complete view and an accurate decision.”

What Feedzai is using is very big data – but that’s how to thwart crooks. It’s found oddities that correlate with criminality.  For instance:  “Feedzai has found that devices with high battery power are correlated with high fraud. Fraud is three to four percentage points above the average fraud rate when emails have two to four consecutive digits. Certain email domains are more correlated with fraud behavior, including public domains. And when a device name is unknown or null, the likelihood of fraud is 78%.”

Machines can also hunt for data across multiple channels to support, or deny, a new account opening.  In a matter of minutes, a machine can make a thin file fat and take a lot of worry out of an account opening.

In assessing a new account, a smart machine looks at both traditional sources (credit bureaus for instance) but also non traditional sources such as social media channels.  A full picture results, quickly.

That’s the thing. Many institutions continue to use only a small, limited data set in opening new accounts. Smart, contemporary institutions are using an array of 21st century data and, despite the volume, it is swiftly processed when machines do the heavy lifting.

How does this work in practice? Feedzai pointed to a case study – involving a large bank – where the institution had been approving only 40% of new account applications. With machine learning and big data on the case, it upped that number by 74% – with no increase in fraud. None. And the process itself was streamlined.

Can you say similar about your account onboarding?  Talk with any of a growing number of companies such as Feedzai that are targeting account opening fraud and how to do the screening better, faster and smarter. Many companies – mainly small, very tech in orientation – are now in this space. Talk with a few.

If you can’t open accounts as well as big competitors, you won’t long stay in business.

Put the machines on your side and stay in the game.

 

 

By Robert McGarvey

 

First there was the peacock – a purported emotional support animal rejected by United Airlines.  Then there was the emotional support hamster, supposedly flushed down the toilet at the direction of Spirit Airlines crew.  

Question: what gives with all the “emotional support” animals?

Question: Do they belong on flights?

Somehow – suddenly – this topic has become one of travel’s hottest buttons. There are many who say the animals have no place on the plane. There are others who insist depriving them of their animal is cruelty.

Heated words get tossed around.

Sometimes passengers loudly squabble and punches are threatened.  

Where do you stand?

Personally, I can’t see a business traveler traveling with an emotional support animal – if I’m wrong about that, tell me in the comments – but we are all nonetheless impacted by this.

Know this: emotional support animals are not protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), landmark legislation signed into law by George H. Bush. Service animals are but service animals – dogs primarily – “must be trained to take a specific action when needed to assist the person with a disability. For example, a person with diabetes may have a dog that is trained to alert him when his blood sugar reaches high or low levels. A person with depression may have a dog that is trained to remind her to take her medication. Or, a person who has epilepsy may have a dog that is trained to detect the onset of a seizure and then help the person remain safe during the seizure.”

The US Justice Department specifically pointed out that emotional support animals are not service animals. “Because they have not been trained to perform a specific job or task, they do not qualify as service animals under the ADA.”

It added: “some State or local governments have laws that allow people to take emotional support animals into public places.  You may check with your State and local government agencies to find out about these laws.”

The flap on airlines is not about service dogs – they have a clearcut right to accompany their owners aboard –  it’s about emotional support animals, where, a kind of wild west rules and just about anything can be claimed to be an emotional support beast.  

Third question: do you want to bring Rover on your next flight?  Dress the part. Amazon sells a nifty Emotional Support Dog Harness for $32.95. It even comes in XL; go ahead, bring that mastiff!

Up until now, it has been relatively easy to bring an emotional support animal on board. That is changing.  Effective March 1, United, for instance, will require documentation for accepting on board an emotional support animal.  The carrier elaborated: “In addition to providing a letter from a licensed medical/mental health professional, customers will need to provide a veterinary health form documenting the health and vaccination records for the animal as well as confirming that the animal has been trained to behave properly in a public setting.”

United said it carried 76,000 emotional support animals in 2017. That was up a staggering 77% from the year before.

Delta requires that paperwork be filed 48 hours before flying with an emotional support animal.  

Pretty much all carriers can be expected to tighten the rules for emotional support animals.

Delta, by the way, has said it carries 700 emotional support animals daily and the beasts, it said, are wandering cabins, biting passengers, and relieving themselves wherever.

If you think some airplanes have become aviation equivalents of Noah’s ark, you’re not entirely wrong. Snakes, ducks, even ferrets have been brought aboard as “emotional support” animals. Squirrels and rats, too.

Airlines had been hoping the federal government would step in and regulate emotional support animals but that isn’t happening. A federal ACCESS Advisory Committee has been unable to agree on rules governing emotional support animals.  The Dept. of Transportation has said it intends to draft its own regulations but there’s no sign of them.  

So now the airlines are seeking to step into this void.

Given airline past behavior it is impossible to see any of this going smoothly, or even rationally.  That’s just not how they work.

If you want to bring an emotional support animal on board, be sure to have your paperwork in order and talk early and often with the carrier before takeoff. Rules are in flux. Don’t get caught in the middle.

If you are on the plane to do business and the idea of sharing your row with a python makes you nervous, speak up. Tell the flight attendant.  Tell the python’s owner.  Say Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer. 

But, right now, probably nobody is going to be entirely happy when it comes to emotional support animals. Not those who want to bring them or those who want them banned.  

I don’t blame you if you want emotional rescue – but don’t you know promises were never made to keep?

 

 

By Robert McGarvey

 

For CU2.0

 

A new report from RemoteDepositCapture.com makes plain that mRDC now is a must for credit unions.  Declared the report: “mRDC is no longer a competitive differentiator, but instead a ‘must-have’ offering Financial Institutions need simply to remain competitive.”

Without mRDC you just may not be competitive. That’s a stinging reality.

This claim, incidentally, is underscored by a separate report, led by the Federal Reserve of Boston, that claimed 73% of the institutions it surveyed already offer mRDC and another 18% “plan to offer.”  Just 9% don’t have mRDC on their dance cards.

Small credit unions are very much included among the adopters. Said the Fed: “ Even among the smallest respondents, 78 percent support or plan to support mRDC within two years “ It defined “smallest respondents” as < $100M in assets. And just 22% of them have no plans to offer mRDC.

Big institutions are all aboard. Among institutions with assets >$1 billion, the Fed said 92% already offer mRDC and only 3% have no plans to follow.

mRDC has become a must have.  That’s a key reality in today’s new reality where we have entered the era of mRDC 2.0. Now the focus is on new uses, more usage by members, and there also is a wholly new kind of thinking around mRDC fraud and how to combat it.

A lot has happened to mRDC since 2009 when USAA debuted mRDC.  A handful more joined the chase in 2009-2010. But by 2011 the race was on at full speed inside most CUs to offer mRDC.

Initially many credit unions grumbled about the fees associated with mRDC – fees charged by third party processors – but, by now, most larger institutions have simply decided to suck up the added costs, which incidentally usually are much, much lower than the costs associated with a paper check deposited at a branch.

That’s a fact: mRDC saves a credit union money.  While expanding the convenience and utility of the account to members who now can make deposits while dressed in their PJs and sitting at the breakfast table.  That is cool and it ultimately is why mRDC usage will remain popular as long as paper checks circulate and these days about 17 billion of them get written in the US annually.  That number continues to slip down but it will be years before checks vanish (and aren’t we all waiting for the long predicted death of cash?).

Face it: checks are hanging around and so will mRDC because it just is so much better than driving to a branch or to an ATM.

John Leekley, CEO of RemoteDepositCapture.com, said many institutions have gotten increasingly more skilled at their mRDC offerings.

A plus: Leekley pointed to data that shows a 35% year over year increase in mRDC transactions which means more checks are getting deposited this way.

Are more fraudulent checks also getting deposited? Roll back the clock and that was a huge fear among many credit union execs, some of whom stalled when it came to rolling out mRDC.  

Today’s take is very different, said Leekley, who indicated that his survey found that “the vast majority (74%) of respondents indicated they had no losses directly attributable to mRDC.”

That means zip.

The big fear still revolves around duplicate deposits – depositing the same paper at multiple institutions – but the numbers don’t show there is a threat of any real magnitude. Leekley’s report goes on: “Exclusive to RemoteDepositCapture.com, the industry’s mRDC Duplicate Loss Rate in 2016 was just 0.035%, or 3.5 in every 10,000 items. To put this in perspective, according to the Federal Reserve, the industry’s overall return item rate was 0.4%, or approximately 40 out of every 10,000 checks deposit.”

What’s next for mRDC? Most credit unions now appear to want to get more consumers depositing more items with mRDC.

Leekley also indicated many institutions are giving a re-think to mRDC deposit limits. Traditionally, some institutions set very low limits, to manage exposure to fraud. But, said Leekley, more effective and more consumer friendly approaches involving smart use of big data are taking hold.  

Many institutions also are looking to increase business use of mRDC, added Leekley.  Exactly how will be a huge topic of discussion and exploration this year but know this: now is the time for you to begin to seek to push mRDC usage into new arenas.

It’s a good tool, it works. Let its success fuel your institution’s.

 

By Robert McGarvey

 

For CU 2.0

 

Wake up to a frightening reality: very probably your credit union is falling behind in the race for digital talent and that just may be a sound of impending doom.

Consulting firm CapGemini, working with LinkedIn, recently issued a report on The Digital Talent Gap and the takeaways for credit union executives have to be frightening.

According to CapGemini, six in ten banking executives acknowledge they face a widening talent gap. The report pinpoints banking as a sector where that gap is especially high.

The money center banks, almost certainly, are not pointing to themselves. They are busily hiring top digital talent as they chart their paths into a 21st century where digital is seen as the core of banking.  They see that future and they are preparing for it.

Down a checklist, CapGemini sees less skill than is needed in a range of digital activities that are central to banking today. Included on the list are cybersecurity, mobile apps (where a big skill deficit is cited), data science, and big data (another huge deficit).

A lot of what has become core in delivering financial services is now emerging as areas where many, many credit unions and community banks are just not keeping up because they don’t have the talent to stay in the game.

Employees know these realities. According to the survey data, 30% of banking employees believe their skills will be redundant in one to two years. 44% believe their skills will be redundant in four or five years.

That suggests a frightened, anxious workforce.

Employees also express dissatisfaction with trainings offered them by their organization.  45% say they are not helping them attain new skills.  42% say the trainings they attend are “useless and boring.”

Ouch.

Question: does your credit union leadership know their own employees fear their institution is lagging in the race for digital competence – and that they despair over the viability of their own skills?

It gets worse. You just may lose the digital talent you presently have. The CapGemini survey found that “over half of digital talent (55%) say they are willing to move to another organization if they feel their digital skills are stagnating.”

The good news: CapGemini offered concrete suggestions about what organizations need to do to remain players in the race for digital talent.

A suggestion not on the list is blunt: credit unions often will need to find their digital talent through third party vendors and CUSOs.  No shame in that.  At a certain institutional size, the savvy survival strategy is to know where to go outside to help chart the credit union’s digital path.  There still needs be digital skills internally – especially a sharp sensitivity to what matters digitally inside the c-suite.  But a lot of the digital heavy lifting can and should happen through third parties at all but the very largest credit unions.

But the biggest credit unions need to be sure they are nurturing internal digital talent. And smaller institutions need to know what they can do with the talent they have and they also need to stay watchful of their third party vendors and their talent development efforts.

Just because a CUSO was spot on technologically in 2010 doesn’t mean it has a clue today. Things move very fast in this world.

That’s where the CapGemini suggestions about how to develop digital talent come in.

And step one is Attract Digital Talent where CapGemini points a finger at the institution’s leadership.  Specifically: “Align leadership on a talent strategy and the unique needs of digital talent.”

How does your credit union measure up there?

Does your leadership see the ultimate importance of digital in charting the institution’s future?

The next steps are no easier: “create an environment that prioritizes and rewards learning” and “align leadership on a talent strategy and the unique needs of digital talent.”

Digital warriors go where they are loved and wanted.  It’s that simple.

One more step: “Give digital talent the power to implement change.”

This doesn’t sound easy?

Nope. It all is very hard, especially for small and mid size credit unions.

But the alternative just may be planning to go out of business.

That makes the choice easy.

 

 

By Robert McGarvey

Recent data from Certify, the corporate expense management company, underlines a reality I have known for decades – as have you, probably – but it is one unknown to many of our friends and even co-workers who don’t do much business travel.

You know what I mean. Non travelers always think that business travel means luxury. It is comfort squared.  They seem sure that I regularly bunk down in Ritz Carltons – I remember doing that exactly once on a business trip and indeed I was impressed. That I fly in first class (never but even business class is ever more uncommon today).  That I eat in Michelin starred gourmet restaurants (sometimes but only on my own nickel and never for business).

My travel reality is much more Spartan – but the Certify results say that yours are too.

Certify breaks out results by restaurant, hotel, airline.

We travel much more modestly than many believe.

Big news – a sea change in how we get around – also is in the recent Certify data.  Certify noted that use of ride hailing services by business travelers has exploded.  “Review of the past four quarters compared to 2016 data shows an accelerated shift in corporate travel expenses to ride-hailing services, underscoring the industry disruption and change in business traveler preference. Ride hailing picked up 68% of the overall ground transportation category last year led by Uber and rival Lyft, respectively with 56% and 12% of the total. Uber also claimed 9% of all expenses and receipts processed by Certify in 2017.”

Certify indicated that so far services such as Airbnb have not caught on in a major way with business travelers, in contrast to our embrace of Uber and its ilk: “alternative accommodations with Airbnb have nearly doubled each year in the Certify data since 2014, yet it still represents just under .5% of the lodging category overall today.”  I’m with this. I remain unpersuaded that Airbnb is a business travel accommodation that will be liked by many of us.  

But this is prelude. What really intrigues me is where we eat and sleep, be it ever so humble.

Here are the most expensed restaurants, showing percent of the category captured:

Starbucks: 5.22%, averaging $12.94

McDonald’s: 2.91%, averaging $9.34

Panera Bread: 1.71%, averaging $44.35

Chick-Fil-A: 1.41%, averaging $26.63

Subway: 1.4%, averaging $20.26

 

Our favorite restaurants are these, on a five star scale:

Chick-Fil-A: 4.4

Jimmy John’s: 4.3

Panera Bread: 4.3

Starbucks: 4.3

Chipotle: 4.3

Personally I am all in with Starbucks and Subway, I’m okay with Panera and Chipotle, and, yep, this is about the category and prices of restaurants I expense.  Some of these totals, obviously, have to be meals for several people (you can’t spend $20.26 on a meal for one at Subway, I don’t believe; I spend half that).  

As for lodgings, here is where Certify says we stay:

Hampton Inn: 8.95% of total lodgings, averaging $240.59

Marriott: 8.48%, averaging $272.15

Courtyard by Marriott: 7.4%, averaging $193.11

Holiday Inn Express: 4.63%, averaging $234.64

Hilton Garden Inn: 4.47%, averaging $227.87

Again, yep.  Personally, as I seek to duck early cancellation fees, I have been looking outside the big name brands.  

I don’t recall spending over $300 on a hotel room in the past four years.  So the Certify prices seem right on.

Here, by the way, are our top rated hotels (on a 5 point scale):

Hyatt 4.4
Marriott: 4.4
Westin: 4.4
Hilton Garden Inn: 4.3
Homewood Suites 4.3

No real complaints about those scores on my end.

Note what’s missing from these lists: Ritz Carlton, Kimpton, all the boutique brands.  We just usually sleep in plain jane, mid priced digs.

With airlines, this is what we fly:

Delta: 20.32% of flights, averaging $396.66

American: 18.68%, averaging $316.55

United: 14.44%, averaging $369.67

Southwest: 11.42%, averaging $274.32

Alaska Airlines: 1.6%, averaging $253.14

 

Your faves aren’t on the top five lists? Here are more extensive results.  

Add all this up and we are flying in coach, staying in one and two star hotels, and we are eating in fast food joints.

Sound glamorous to you?

Of course not.  But next time a friend or family member expresses jealousy about your high flying lifestyle just point them to the Certify data.

Personally I have no gripes about bunking at a Hampton Inn and grabbing dinner at a Subway but luxe they aren’t.

 

 

By Robert McGarvey

 

It was 10 years ago that you probably first experienced inflight WiFi and if you are like me you remember that moment with delight.  GoGo rolled out WiFi to a handful of flights on a handful of carriers (American Airlines, Virgin America, Delta, Air Canada, Air Tran Airways and United) in 2009 and, pretty soon, I was picking flights based upon my guess about WiFi availability.

How cool was it to email at 30,000 feet? Very. And, honestly, the speeds just didn’t seem slow back then – in part because users were few.

Meantime, think about today where there’s WiFi in coffee shops, homes, fast food restaurants and – you know what? – it is pretty much ubiquitous. In Phoenix there’s even free WiFi on the lightrail ($4 to ride all day), just about every coffee shop offers it, and so do apartment house lobbies, doctors waiting rooms, and I could on on.

Where we are, WiFi is.

Except on airplanes.

Let’s put aside the issue of how bad – slow, overpriced, unreliable – inflight WiFi has become. There also very real issues around security (or lack thereof), where everybody from crooks to government agencies may be eavesdropping on your keystrokes. We’ll get to that momentarily.

For now what grabs me is that WiFi is very far from ubiquitous inflight – indeed odds are that any given seat will not have WiFi, according to a report from Routehappy. That report says that 43%
of available seat miles (ASMs) worldwide have at least a chance of Wi-Fi on board. Note that hedge – at least a chance. That’s because many planes claim WiFi but it may not in fact be actually working.

That 43% is up from 39% last year – which highlights the slow pace of upgrades.

This means 57% of seats have zero chance of providing WiFi.

US carriers are better than the rest, per Routehappy: “U.S. airlines offer at least a chance of Wi-Fi on 86% of their ASMs, with 85% of ASMs fully rolled out.”  It added: “Non-U.S. airlines offer at least a chance of Wi-Fi on 32% of their ASMs, up by 14% from the 2017 report.”

Now chew on this: “Three carriers now offer Wi-Fi on 100% of their flights: Icelandair, Southwest, and Virgin Atlantic.”  That means many, many dozens don’t. By Routehappy’s count, 82 airlines globally offer WiFi, so that means 79 don’t offer it on all flights.

A morsel of good news is that “13 airlines globally offer Wi-Fi on 100% of long-haul flights: Air Europa, Delta, Emirates, Etihad, Eurowings, EVA Air, Iberia, Kuwait, Lufthansa, SAS, Scoot, United, and Virgin Atlantic.”

Another morsel: “While passengers have come to expect Wi-Fi on large global airlines, many smaller airlines have now begun offering Wi-Fi as well. Air Astana from Kazakhstan, Air Côte d’Ivoire from Ivory Coast, and Air Mauritius from Mauritius are just a few of the numerous smaller airlines that began offering Wi-Fi in 2017.”

Nonetheless, the bad news is that when flying overseas, you have a better than even chance of not having WiFi access.

Despite the rising global ubiquity of WiFi.

Routehappy, by the way, holds out hope for the disgruntled passengers – myself often among them – who no longer even try to use inflight WiFi.  My usual preference is to read a book on my iPad – and I carefully insure the books I want to access are downloaded before I leave for the airport.

At most I will do a fast email session inflight.  But not usually.

But there are glimmers of hope that our increasingly loud kvetching about WiFi quality will be dealt with by the carriers. Said Routehappy: “Best Wi-Fi is now available on 16% of ASMs worldwide, representing a staggering 129% increase from the 2017 report.”  

It defines “Best WiFi” this way: “Fastest Wi-Fi systems currently available, capable of advanced media streaming (whether allowed by airline or not); comparable to a home connection.”

That is good news on first glance but on second what it says is 84% of ASMs don’t have “best WiFi.”

In the 2017 Routehappy report, by the way, it noted that 6% of flights offered “best WiFi.”

There has been progress in bringing “best WiFi” to more passengers globally – but not a lot, not really.

And airlines plan to get us viewing movies and such on this “Best” WiFi – and how good is your cable connection at home when you try to stream a movie on Friday night?

Right.

Don’t expect better even from “Best” WiFi on long, packed flights.  I know I’m not. I saw the drop in inflight quality circa 2012 as more of us discovered it and started using it. Similar will befall “Best” WiFi and it will surely deteriorate.

That’s why for now I’ll stick with my plan to read books on my iPad, maybe make notes in my paper calendar-planner.

How 1999.

But has anything really changed?

 

By Robert McGarvey

For CU2.0

 

Think very – that’s the question’s answer. But maybe you already have in hand the exact weapons you need to defend your position.  Surprised?

Read on.

Triggering this discussion is a recent Snarketing post by Cornerstone Advisors’ Ron Shevlin that  offered hard data about Amazon’s potential popularity as a consumer bank. 

Cornerstone had surveyed 2015 consumers – with both a bank account and a smart phone – and asked two questions: would you bank with Amazon for a free checking account?  Would you pay, $5 or $10 monthly, for a premium checking account that bundled in perhaps cell phone damage protection or roadside assistance?

Before guessing the answers – they will surprise you – feast on this recent headline from the Evening Standard newspaper in London: Is data the new oil? How information became the fuel of the future.

That question is deeply intertwined with Amazon’s possible banking play.

Ask yourself: what US company knows an incredible amount about you, probably more than any other?  Hint: it’s a company that sells just about everything, much of it delivered free within two days.

Amazon, very quietly, has emerged as a real king of the data mountain.  Google may know what interests you, Facebook may know who your friends (and enemies!) are, and Apple knows what tech bling you will splurge on, but Amazon – in many households – knows everything you buy, from groceries to clothes.

In 2017 Amazon tells me I placed 107 orders. Many were for multiple items.  From cat food to an Echo Look.  

Think how well that data resource positions Amazon to pounce into banking.  It knows its many millions of customers, it’s already providing credit cards and purchase credit to millions of them, and CEO Jeff Bezos has never shied away from offering discounts if he believes doing so will produce longterm profits.

Will Bezos take the plunge into the slow moving financial services world? Do we – consumers – want him to?

A free Amazon account just might seem to be a threat to a credit union sweet spot. According to Bankrate.com, 84% of credit union checking accounts have no monthly maintenance fee, up from 72% a couple years earlier. For many credit unions, this is a key marketing difference.

And yet Cornerstone’s research found something interesting.  Asked if they wanted a free Amazon checking account, 42% of consumers said nope.  Just 26% said they would open it.  Another 32% said they would consider it.

Matters get more intriguing when Cornerstone asked if they wanted a premium, bundled account with a small monthly fee of $5 or $10.  Only 34% said no thanks – that’s sharply down from the 42% who rejected the free account.

And 29% said they would open it, up from the 26% who said they would open a free account.

Does free carry less weight than you thought?

Is it maybe time to rethink using free as the centerpiece of the institution’s marketing?

Shevlin stressed that, at least superficially, the institutions that would be most impacted by an Amazon entry into banking would be the money center banks, mainly because they are courting millennials who, Cornerstone said, are the ones most attracted to the Amazon potential products.

But Shevlin tossed out this poisoned dart:  “The smaller financial institutions are already challenged in attracting younger consumers to their institutions. An Amazon entrance into banking will only make it harder for them.”

And remember this: Amazon may well know your members better than you do.

Frightening? You bet.  But there is that solution that already is in your hands.  The solution is to fight back by diving ever deeper into member data.  The data will tell you your next steps – if you learn to listen to it.

Plenty of credit union focused big data experts are adamant that credit unions can fight back against the Amazons.

Fight data with data.

You have lots of data, from sharedraft accounts, credit and debit cards, maybe car loans and home mortgages. Use the data you have to prepared a battle plan.

You will need it because, whether Amazon takes the plunge into consumer banking or not, other non banks will.  They already are circling this pond and they act as though they smell blood in the water.  

You have the data. It’s the only weapon you need.

And remember that in the 21st century data is indeed the new oil. Let it power your institutional growth.