That’s your word for today and it is complements of Jesse Boyer, COO of the $600 million NIH Federal Credit Union in Maryland which is moving at a high speed to open a new branch in Silver Spring that is biophilic in design – meaning it puts you in touch with nature and, in this case, there’s a living moss wall.
Of course you want to hear more about this.
What this podcast is about is a search for a new, more welcoming branch format and, at the new NIH FCU location, ITMs – interactive teller machines – replace ATMs and oldfashioned tellers.
The idea is to produce a comfortable setting that is both warm and techie.
Some balancing act but the NIH FCU folks think they have the roadmap and in this podcast you will hear about it.
You will also hear candid musing about what a $600 million credit union has to do to insure longterm survival. Think acquisitions.
This podcast revolves around extremely candid and frank assessments of what needs to be done – in terms of branch reinvention and credit union survival.
Do you want to talk about money – or would you prefer to talk about sex?
Many of us today would choose the sex conversation, mainly because we know we don’t know much about personal finance and we also know we don’t anybody to ask for advice.
Enter Tropical Financial in Florida which has introduced a new website Get Beyond Money where the purpose is to provide people (target audience: older millennials) with the financial education they need and want so that they can make smarter, shrewder financial decisions.
The website has plenty of blogs, quizzes, and even offers a free appointment with a financial counselor.
This podcast offers an insider’s view of how this campaign was created – and know it was three years in the making. There were stumbles along the way but that enriches this story.
Also know that Tropical Financial is willing to share its content with non competitive credit unions. Don’t be shy about asking.
Today’s guest is Amy McGraw, the first repeat podcast guest. Last year she starred in episode 10 on the student loan crisis and what Tropical Financial is doing to help.
Now she’s leading the charge in bringing meaningful financial education to older millennials who – in many cases – really don’t know who to ask for advice. Tropical Financial wants to step into that role.
You bet. So many of the frequent travellers I know don’t exercise enough, eat badly, drink too much booze, and, for sure, this translates into a panoply of unwanted health consequences.
A 2018 Harvard Business Review article put it this way: “we found a strong correlation between the frequency of business travel and a wide range of physical and behavioral health risks.” Frequent travelers are more likely to be obese, to have high cholesterol, even to have a cardiologist on speed dial (and, yes, I have a cardiologist so I am not pointing fingers).
But you read this article’s headline so you know another penny is about to loudly land on the floor. Correct. And we are not talking just burnout which, incidentally, is a not uncommon byproduct of a lot of business travel. Some of us just quit because we cannot or will not tolerate the pace.
Data grows that some of us also are suffering significant psychological stresses because of so much travel. According to Skift, “Mental health is making up a rapidly growing number of calls to risk management companies, with stress-induced symptoms of anxiety and depression as one of the top issues travelers report. International SOS, perhaps the largest medical assistance and security company worldwide, fields 4.5 million calls a year, with about 40 percent involving issues of mental health.”
That number – 40%, four in ten – has to grab you. If I had been asked to guess how many traveling employee SOS calls involve mental health issues, I would have said in the single digits. And I would have been very wrong.
Life on the road has built in stresses. For instance: lack of routine which, for me certainly, is the biggest problem. That and difficulty sleeping in a strange bed. Even though nowadays I eat fine and drink little or no alcohol when I travel, I drink way too much coffee, in part because of that poor sleep, and my fitness routines are on hiatus.
Maybe you too.
Understand, researchers say that the amount of business travel needed to trigger significant adverse psychological impacts is huge – around two weeks monthly which is 120+ nights on the road yearly.
How much does a lesser travel load impact us psychologically? That’s a research question waiting for an answer.
Experts however say the truth may be much worse than we think. Dr. Robert Quigley, a senior vice president at International SOS, told Skift that the 40% number cited earlier is just the iceberg’s tip. “When I say 40 percent, that’s what we know of. I’m going to guess that the number is actually much higher than that because people are reluctant to reach out for assistance because of the stigma that’s still associated with a mental illness, and the fact that they’re uncomfortable declaring that they may have a problem, which, which is (a) sad case of reality, but that prevails in this mobile workforce community.”
What should you do about this if you are in the crosshairs? About now in a column I usually offer up a fast solution and sign off. I can’t here and that’s because business travelers who are suffering psychological distress deserve more and better. See a psychologist. Talk about what bugs you. Explore if it’s time to reorder your work so that you can travel less (and I know several people who have done exactly that in the past couple years).
If you are not comfortable using an employee assistance program, I get it. Spend your own money instead. But get help – at least explore if you need to get help.
Bottomline: if you are feeling very down and you travel a lot, just maybe there’s a causal relationship. And just maybe seeing that causality is how to begin to feel better.
Credit unions are buying so many banks the Wall Street Journal refers to this as a “spree.”
Just in the first eight months of 2018 there were 21 transactions, compared to 12 in the prior five years, by the WSJ count.
What is going on here?
We put that question to John Weinkowitz, Head of Product Strategy, Community
Markets, Finastra, and himself an m and a expert.
Is this doing business with the devil?
Should this put into jeopardy the credit union tax exemption – as many bankers are insisting?
What drives the transactions? The need to grow, said Weinkowitz. FIs below a certain size find it more difficult to compete. So some put themselves up for sale. And others go hunting for acquisition partners.
The allure for credit union execs is an immediate increase in members, deposits, and also – in many cases – branches.
But are they factoring in predictable attrition?
Do they have a strategy for employee retention – which may be critical to making an acquisition work?
Before buying a community bank listen to this podcast. You don’t want to ignore that advice.
The podcast is here.
Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available.
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
Carla Bienz is CEO of Partners 1st Credit Union in Fort Wayne IN – an institution where she has worked since she graduated from college and where she now is CEO. And she has keen insights into the plight of smaller credit unions and what they need to do to survive and prosper.
Frequent flyer programs now are in the crosshairs of climate activists who insist the programs contribute to global warming, the melting of polar ice caps and are greasing our slide into an environmental armageddon. Is it time to cash in your miles?
What’s fueling this fire is a report by Richard Carmichael of Imperial College London that explored how to change behaviors that contribute to too frequent flying, at least as judged by Dr. Carmichael.
Among his recommendations is this: “Introduce a ban on air miles and frequent flyer loyalty schemes that incentivise excessive flying.”
Carmichael’s argument is that the airline loyalty schemes encourage us to fly more, in order to collect the perks associated with accumulating miles, everything from status through, of course, more trips that become “free” because they are paid for with miles.
Eliminate the programs and that eliminates the incentives that fuel behaviors he wants to minimize (namely, flying more).
Of course that suggestion caused the frequent flyer internet to erupt in an angry holler – but here’s the real deal: maybe this missed the point entirely. The purpose of frequent flyer programs is not to reward passengers, it’s to make money, lots of it, for airlines.
There is no way the carriers will go along with significant changes in how their frequency program work, mainly because these programs are their golden geese. Passengers are forced to deal with ever higher miles totals to cash in for free trips – and more seem to settle on trading miles for merchandise such as fitness watches and computers and also gift cards.
But never forget: airlines are profiting immensely from these programs.
In a recent half year, American Airlines alone made over $1 billion peddling airline miles wholesale to partners. Per Skift: “While American reported the most marketing revenue for the year’s first half, other airlines showed larger year-over-year gains. None had a bigger increase than Hawaiian Airlines, which reported a 52 percent increase, though at just $34 million in marketing revenue, it was last among the airlines…. JetBlue also showed a major gain, raising its marketing revenue 23 percent year-over-year to $80 million.”
The LA Times headline neatly sums up the reality: “Frequent flier programs generate profits for airlines and frustration for travelers.“
Meatime, airlines increasingly award miles not for travel but for spending on credit cards that offer miles rewards. Per the Travel Weekly story: “Airlines’ credit cards in ‘arms race’ to profits.”
According to Travel Weekly, “airlines have much to fight over in the lucrative credit card market. The carriers earn income from the co-branded cards by selling reward miles or points to the issuing bank. So, for example, Citibank will purchase American AAdvantage points to award to new holders of the companies’ co-branded credit card. Similarly, banks purchase the airline loyalty points that they award cardholders for making purchases. “
A twisted irony emerges. Today’s email brought a warning from American Airlines that I had miles that would expire soon – but I know I need only take my AA card to Starbucks and buy a latte to win a reprieve because that brings me a miles reward and the clock resets.
Millions of miles are earned by people who never set foot on a plane. But their credit card gives them “miles” because they buy stuff and the airlines make money because they sell those miles.
Does it matter if nobody flies?
What business are the airlines in? Transportation – or financial services?
Personally, I wrestle with the environmental impacts of flying and I ponder how to reduce my carbon contribution – but I am pretty sure that frequency loyalty schemes are not a significant contribution to the planet’s environmental problems, certainly not on my part. Do we fly too much? Yep. Do we fly when we should get there another way? Yep. Do we fly places we shouldn’t go to any way? Yep.
But each us us deals with such issues in our own ways. A crackdown on loyalty programs by governments isn’t the way forward – and it isn’t going to happen because airlines and Wall Street will howl that the primary business is becoming not flights but selling miles. It may not be quite there yet. But it’s getting there.
There is much for us to gnash our teeth over. A looming end to loyalty programs and miles isn’t on the list.
There was a time when community financial institutions owned the home mortgage market. No more. Fintechs dominate and mega banks aren’t far behind. Most credit unions are left to squabble over crumbs.
But just maybe there’s hope. At Finastra, Steve Hoke, Vice President, Product Management, Consumer and SME Lending, says the company’s Fusion Motgagebot Data Insights puts the power of data analytics in the hands of a community financial institution and the upshot is just maybe it can compete – successfully – against the fintechs and mega banks when it has data at its command.
What percentage of your mortgages actually close? How does that compare with competitors? Don’t guess. Know. That’s the promise of this data.
Understand, the data is anonymized. You cannot ask it to tell you how you fare against a specific competitor. But if you want to see how you do against others, it has the answer.
This is powerful stuff. Hoke said Finastra is adding capabilities and hopes to extend it to more types of lending (auto loans for instance).
“We are giving community institutions insight into data that before they were flying blind about,” said Hoke.
What would it be like to go from being Head, Digital Customer Experience at Lloyds Bank in the United Kingdom – a trillion dollar institution – to being the VP for digital innovation at Colorado-based Canvas Credit Union, with assets around $2.5 billion?
Ask Lucy Donaldson, this week’s guest at the CU 2.0 Podcast. Listen here.
She made exactly that journey and she candidly talks about what a money center bank can do that a credit union usually can’t – but she also talks about the huge advantages a credit union has, from much better agility to strong, genuine community ties.
She’s seen both sides and she says what she likes about credit unions.
A key point Donaldson makes in this podcast is that it’s time to stop talking about a credit union’s digital transformation – and time to accept that has become its business transformation. A credit union is its bits and bytes and knowing that makes the job of plotting institutional success that much easier.
Here’s a related podcast with Tanan Miles of ENT, Colorado’s biggest credit union.
The question isn’t does meetings and events wifi suck – of course it does – the real question is why and maybe, honestly, the realer question is so what?
Let’s unravel this. For at least a decade event attendees have kvetched about wifi – mainly its slowness, sometimes its plain unavailability. I still recall, with a crooked smile on my lips, a travel tech conference I attended around 10 years ago at a plush Scottsdale meetings hotel where even the press table lacked wifi. Picture a half dozen travel tech reporters cursing and, well, you have the picture. Personally I giggled because I knew what I was witnessing was a lot better story than what I would have filed had the press table been equipped with functioning wifi.
The venue simply had underestimated demand for wifi and the demand crushed the inadequate signal that was provided.
How funny is that at a tech conference? Of course even I started to curse when I discovered my cellphone hotspot had no signal in the hotel basement where this event was held.
Incidentally, I don’t think that hotel was doing anything nefarious to block my hotspot – I believe it was just the location. But know that in the past some hotels in fact have blocked hotspots and had their wrists slapped by the FCC. Marriott even paid a $600,000 fine for such misdeeds.
Flashforward to now and I believe the usual wifi problem remains too many devices accessing too anemic a signal. Why? Usually it’s an unwillingness to spend what would be required to provide an adequate signal. That was true in 2009 and it is true today. In fact not much has changed over the past decade. Ask event planners and some 58% of meeting planners say weak or unavailable wifi has negatively impacted their events, according to data via EventMB.
This is an occasion for much teeth gnashing – vide the recent Skift article, Why Is Wi-Fi at Events Still So Bad? Reported Skift; “Sluggish internet speeds, a network that suddenly cuts out, and odd corners of the room that somehow have adequate service as long as you hold your phone at a specific angle. These are the problems that nearly every conference attendee, trying in vain to use the provided Wi-Fi, has faced at least once, especially at a large event.
“In fact, providing good Wi-Fi is one of the top challenges meeting planners face, with over half reporting ongoing issues with it.”
But maybe it is for the better entirely.
How so? There’s a long history of fake and malicious event wifi that usually aim at harvesting user log in data, sometimes have loftier aims such as downloading malware to users’ computers. It’s easy enough. Under $1000 in gear, usually put in a cheap travel bag, will create the wifi network, then name it, Free Event WiFi or [Hotel] Meetings WiFi.
If you build it, and say it is free, they will log in.
There’s also no real guarantee of safety when using genuine event wifi. Public wifi networks – especially at hotels (airports too) – have a long history of hacker eavesdropping. Public wifi just is not safe. Is it fine for checking scores on ESPN and the front page at WAPO? Probably. How about your checking account? Nope.
What about company email? Nope.
Here’s the deal: I don’t whine about feeble event wifi because, very probably, I won’t use it. I prefer to use a cellphone hotspot. Sure, I pay a few cents in data use – but to me that is a small price to pay for enhanced security.
When the cellphone hotspot isn’t powerful enough, lately I’ve used the built in VPN on my Google Fi phone to add protection to wifi access. Sure, I know VPN isn’t the security fix-all – but when public wifi is all I have on my cellphone I will use VPN to add at least a little security. And I will still mind what sites I access. My rule of thumb: if you don’t mind if a cyber criminal is looking over your shoulder as you surf, the sites are fine for access via public wifi with a VPN.
Bottomline: event wifi sucks. But that is okay by me. I don’t trust it, I urge you to similarly approach it with suspicion, and that is how to stay safe. If use it you must, use a VPN – even better use a secure browser such as Silo.
But stop complaining. Accept that wifi at your next event will suck, and be thankful. When you don’t use it you are safe.
Ask Allan Brown – a VP and GM, Digital Community Markets at Finastra – what keeps him up at night and his answer is simple: it’s trying to stay on top of the digital revolution that is transforming credit unions and community banks. Brown also is very optimistic. His belief: community institutions that partner with the right fintechs can not only keep pace with the big banks digitally, they very well may be able to beat them at this game.
Along the way Brown discusses mega trends that are changing how financial services are delivered and two key trends, he says, are real time banking (it’s coming!) and much shrewder use of data to deliver better and smarter services to consumers.
“The future of financial services is going to be phenomenal,” says Brown.
