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Quick now, no Googling, what’s an ADU?

In the next half hour you will learn a lot about ADUs - which, by the way, are accessory dwelling units and recently California law has made it much easier to site an ADU on an existing homesite.

That’s good because California’s homeless crisis only worsens and one step in the right direction is more housing.  

Other parts of the country - from Portland OR to Connecticut and Austin TX - also are embracing ADUs.

By the way, you surely have heard other names for ADUs. They’ve been called granny flats, casitas, in-law units, and lots more.  Thy have also been part of the housing scene for many decades but what’s happening now is a regularization of the concept.

Enter Anthony Dedousis, founder and CEO of Revival Homes in Los Angeles, which he created to help more homeowners more easily fund and build ADUs on their property.  Revival Homes does this in two ways. It has a vetted roster of contractors and it also wants to help homeowners get financing for their ADU project.  Central to the approach to financing is that value will be based on value with the ADU in place.

Where do credit unions come in? Dedousis sees credit unions as ideal partners in putting financing packages together.  ADUs, in many ways, are being promoted as a way to alleviate various social issues and that kind of concern has long been central to the credit union mindset.

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

Think back - when did you first hear about financial wellness tools - maybe paper workbooks, possibly websites, and of course now apps? Years and years ago, right, certainly as regards the paper tools.

What success did those tools deliver? For individuals with financial challenges, also for the financial institutions that offered them?

The blunt answer is that in many instances the outcomes fell far short of the initial expectations and hopes.

This is where Kevin Cimring enters. Co-founder and CEO of Paperwork, a new toolkit that Cimring says will in fact deliver positive outcomes, both for the credit unions that adopt it and their members.

What’s different now, explains Cimring, is that the digital tools have gotten so much more sophisticated.  “Credit unions now have the opportunity to do so much more than had been done in the past.”

He added: “We can personalize the experience and we can automate tasks.”

The key, he added, is “to make all this actionable. To get well people need to take actions.”

This is huge. Traditionally the tools have been one size fits all - but now it is straightforward to deliver tools, info to meet this member’s needs, now.

It couldn't happen at a better time. Maybe two in three American adults are financially unwell. 

And Cimring is convinced that financial wellness can become a powerful credit union differentiator.

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

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Name the last big innovation in mobile banking.

No rush.

It's understandable if you are stumped because, well, there really haven't been many in the past half dozen years.

Ken Kondo, newly appointed chief innovation officer at Troy, Mich. based Maholo Banking, is on the show to tell his plan for upping innovation in mobile banking.

And he believes more innovation is critical if credit unions are to win more members from the younger demographics.

Quick now, do you know what a magic eight ball is in tech speak? Or Konami Code?

If you do, know that you will hear Kondo's take on these topics. And if you don't know, know you are going to have fun learning how such concepts just might help credit union code writers innovate more.

How about the so-called fart* feature built into Tesla cars - know about that? Kondo loves the outrageous, unexpected nature of the feature - and believes it is features like that will help credit unions create excitement for their mobile baking apps.

By now you have probably realized this is a show that it, well, different from many of the others in our catalog.

That's all the better reason to 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



* Alas, fans of whoopie cushions and similar pranks will be disappointed to learn that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has put the kibosh on Tesla's flatulence.  Explanation here.

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Here’s the blunt news: the market for mergers and acquisitions involving fintechs now is very, very slow.

What’s that mean for credit unions, CUSOs, and fintechs themselves?

On the show is Martin Walker, an executive with both Next Level Ventures and Curql which puts him at the epicenter of fintech funding especially in the credit union/CUSO sphere.

A past podcast guest - link to that show in the show notes - Walker brings some very good news but not all of it is good.

The IPO market, for instance, is comatose, he says.

But he is very upbeat that there is a lot of capital available for early stage fintechs - especially ones with tools to help credit unions bring in more deposits and operate more efficiently in today’s highly competitive environment.

If you have 15 minutes, you’ll learn what you need to know about this topic.

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

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Here’s a secret you don’t know about the CU 2.0 Podcast. Just about in every show there are some minutes of talk before the show really starts  Most shows do similar. It helps get the guest comfortable and, importantly, it lets the host do a sound check to make sure all is working.

Those minutes almost always are deleted in editing.

Not in this show with Amy Travers, a regional vice president with NA Security focused on biometrics - voice - in financial services. That’s because we started by chatting about her personal background, growing up in County Donegal in the northwest of Ireland and earning degrees at the Institute of Technology in Sligo. And then…she’s in Florida where she founds a contact center company.

Understand that a good part of what her present employer does is equip contact centers to help authenticate incoming callers and to blow an alerting whistle if the caller seems fraudulent.

Travers knows that work from the inside.

Nowadays, the NA tools - which grow out of the wildly popular Dragon Naturally Speaking tools - are used in a range of applications to improve security and screening.

But a fundamental starting point is that the voice is indeed something that can be used to authenticate and almost all of us are comfortable with the procedure.

You’ll hear exactly how slick the tools have gotten - and indeed says Travers they pay for themselves at most FIs.

 It’s a wide ranging talk about what’s happening right now in biometrics and voice - listen up.

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

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Discover software as a relationship.

That’s the tagline used by Austin TX based Tailwind which says it thrives on handling the knottiest IT problems and also that it is human based - and isn’t always so in IT.

On the show today is partner Andrew Tull who explains exactly what Tailwind means when it talks about software as a relationship and also about how Tailwind genuinely takes the people side of the business to heart.

A key point Tull makes is that one size fits all simply does not work when it comes to credit union tech. Many - most - credit unions are very individual and so are their memberships.  That’s why the human part of the calculus has to come into play and it’s what Tailwind does well, says Tull.

Tull also hosts a video blog show called Humanizing Software - there’s a link in the show notes.  He takes very seriously the concept that humans are involved in software and they need to be.

You don’t have to guess that he is rooting for Neo in the Matrix, do you now?

In the show we also briefly discuss People’s Credit Union’s move of much of its IT into the AWS cloud.  That’s a topic explored in depth in a podcast with Sean Daly, CEO of People’s. There’s a link in the show notes.  The pertinence to Tailwind, although it wasn’t involved in the People’s project, is that this kind of cloud migration is exactly the kind of project Tailwind thrives on, says Tull.

Listen up.

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Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email [email protected]

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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

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In the cloud. That’s is where People’s Credit Union CEO Sean Daly shifted much of the IT of the approximately $600 million in assets institution and in this podcast he tells why, how it went, and what the early benefits are.

In this show you will often hear the initials AWS - Amazon Web Services.  Yep. Amazon. Aside from being a giant retailer, it is one of the biggest players in providing cloud services and tools to companies.  

Daly is a big fan of AWS. He tells why in the show.

Daly also tells how to persuade a board to go into the cloud.

And how to bring employees - including existing IT staff - along on the journey.

He is very candid about difficulties suffered, lessons learned - and he also tells of the benefits to People’s and its members.

This is not a show only for propeller heads.  It’s plenty down to earth.

Mention is made in the show of Arkatechture, previous guest on the show - episode 223, link in the show notes.

If you crave more details about this IT project, here’s a link to a useful NAFCU piece.

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here.

Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email [email protected]

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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

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Lucky you. You negotiated a satisfactory SERP (Supplemental Executive Retirement Plan) or maybe it was a 457F bonus package.

Just one problem: Ballooning prices in today’s economy coupled with the fast paced growth many credit unions have experienced in the past five years probably have rendered those plans as woefully too small.

Remember, the standard goal of much retirement planning is to give the retired executive an income equal to about 65% of his/her last three years’ income.

Plans that fall well shy of that mark make for unhappy retirees.

Such plans - if offered in a package to help hire new c-suite executives - will likely fall significantly short of offers from other suitors.

Are you stuck with that outdated plan? In this episode of Money Talks, Kirk Kordeleski, past CEO of Bethpage Credit Union, one of the nation’s biggest, and now a consultant specializing in retirement plans with OM Financial.

Want to know more about SERPs - or other matters raised in this podcast? Email Kordeleski [email protected]

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

Hear episode one in Money Talks here.  Episode 2 is here. Episode 3 is here. Episode 4 is here. Episode 5 is here. Episode 6 is here.

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

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You know about CRM. Now learn about CXM, a new approach to knowing and managing your members' journeys.

OvationCXM is on the show today and Vaneet Grewal, head of banking and financial services, is here to tell us about the emerging field of CXM, customer experience management. 

Here's what OvationCXM says about what it does: "OvationCXM is the first platform to take your uncoordinated internal, customer and third-party interactions and turn them into exceptional journeys in the moment, start to finish. No rearchitecture required."

Understand: CXM is not CRM. CRM is what Salesforce and many more companies do. With CXM, CRM is an element in what it manages but there are many more pieces of data that go into its management of the customer's journey or, put in credit union speak, the member's journey.

This is still early days in CXM but just think about how many touch points today's member has with a credit union. In years past the touchpoint was the branch and maybe a phone. Now added into the mix are a website, a mobile app, maybe interaction with mortgage and credit card services. Possibly a car loan. There just are so many places and ways that members interact with a credit union today but who is mapping this journey?

No one in most cases.

Now the biggest banks are all in on CXM and at least some credit unions are following.

In this podcast you will hear what's involved in implementing CXM - and what the payoff is likely to be.

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here.

Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email [email protected]

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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

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Amarildo is head of Harness FI and, yes, he has a last name that you will hear him pronounce in the opening seconds of the podcast.  

Here's the good news about what Amarildo - a longtime Mastercard employee turned fintech exec (and he talks about that transition) - and his team are doing at Harness giving credit unions tools that let them add new powers to old credit cards.

Such as? Harness - literally in days - created a tool that allowed participating institutions to implement a program where members could opt in to allow their credit card to donate money to be dispensed in assistance for victims of California's wild fires.

They have similar tools for hurricane and tornado relief programs.

More broadly, what Harness has are tools that let credit card issuers enable members to roundup purchases to help fund local charities - participating credit unions designate the eligible charities - and also to add gamification to further help keep users using their credit cards.

It gets better. Harness requires no core access, not even access to payments systems.  Amarildo explains in the podcast how they access the information Harness needs - and he stresses that Harness houses no member card data.

Implementation at a credit union usually takes a week or two, he says. 

He also said that Harness can do everything involved in rolling out Harness at an institution - including marketing - or it can pare down its involvements for a credit union that wants to take a DIY approach.

Ask yourself this? How many credit cards issued by your institution are inert bricks in members' wallets?  Wouldn't you want to know about tools that just might bring those slabs of plastic back to life?

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here.

Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email [email protected]

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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