Richard Crone is a longtime payments geek and when it comes to Libra, he has a particular spin. It boils down to this: forget the talk about crypto currency. Libra fundamentally is a pre-paid account and because it is a Facebook effort, it has reach into some 2.1 billion daily users of Facebook tools (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.).
“It’s a prepaid network with global reach – there are also 90 million businesses on Facebook properties,” said Crone.
His blunt message: every credit union needs a Libra strategy and you need it now.
Understand this: Facebook may not be looking to profit off Libra per se. Its strategy seems instead to be to use Libra to drive traffic to Facebook sites and thereby increase advertising revenues.
Which may make Libra yet more attractive to financial institutions.
The conversation includes Heidi Liebenguth, managing partner at Crone Consulting, and it took place in a public space at Caesars Palace, where Crone and Liebenguth were speakers at DN Intersect, the Diebold Nixdorf meeting. There’s minor ambient noise but audio quality of the podcast is good.
Crone finds it “bizarre” that not one FDIC insured institution joined in the launch of Libra.
He also is not deterred by the regulatory scrutiny Libra has won. In fact he sees it as a competitive advantage because it may deter competitors from plunging in with their own similar products.
Listen to this podcast and you definitely will want to dig into Libra and reach the decisions that are right for your credit union. Inaction is not a strategy.
Buckle up for big, explosive ideas. That’s what Douglas Hartung – senior director, business development & alliances at Diebold Nixdorf – specializes in and in this podcast he discusses Libra, bringing financial services to the globe’s underbanked and unbanked, and the exciting idea that just maybe all a person needs to send money anywhere on the planet is a smart phone.
How cool is that?
Know that just may be Libra’s promise.
While some scoff at the prospects of Libra – the Facebook backed new-style currency – Hartung believes that the sheer magnitude of the Facebook family of properties user base makes this a financial play that demands attention.
He also likes the idea of in-app payments – so in Facebook, for instance, what if you can without friction send $10 to a friend in Bali. With just a click. Without leaving the Facebook app.
Is Libra just another Bitcoin variant? Hartung says nope. He tells why in the podcast.
A bottomline here is: pay attention to Libra. You may regret it if you don’t.
Incidentally you will hear some taps interspersed throughout the podcast. That’s Hartung animatedly tapping on a table to emphasize his point. Get into his spirit, let the taps animate you too.
This podcast is one of a group of four recorded on site at the Diebold Nixdorf DN Intersect conference in Las Vegas, September 2019.
What are your members thinking about you? Say you don’t know and you are setting yourself up for failure. Say you do know and, no, you haven’t asked them because you, well, just know and you are on the fast track to extinction.
If you want to know what your members think and need, ask them.
That’s where LiveSurvey comes in. A credit union owned CUSO – developed by MAPS Credit Union in Oregon – LiveSurvey’s mission is providing realtime, instant feedback from members that lets credit unions better chart their next actions to better serve members.
When is the last time your credit union surveyed members? How many responded? Did you get anything useful?
LiveSurvey grew out of MAPS own needs. The credit union faced the horns of a dilemma. On one side were very pricey, consultant driven survey products. On the other side, there are inexpensive – even free – Internet tools. Neither gave MAPS the solution it wanted and out of that grew LiveSurvey.
About 25 credit unions now use LiveSurvey which gives them the ability to query members as they wish and on whatever topic they choose.
Prices range from $500 to $1000 monthly.
Who better to help you take the next steps to grow your credit union than existing members – who when asked right will tell you what they like and what they don’t.
MAPS make it easy and inexpensive to know.
Every credit union needs to be doing this or similar. It’s a competitive world out there and this is crucial intel. And it’s yours to gather if you just ask for it.
LiveSurvey CEO David Deckelmann tells all abut it in this brisk podcast.
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
Can a credit union serve more than one employer group? You know what today’s answer is of course. But to know the history you need to talk with Marc Schafer, CEO of Truliant, a Winston Salem credit union.
That’s because Truliant was sued by a banker’s group in the mid 1990s that claimed it was illegal for a credit union to serve more than one employer group. And the bankers won in the Supreme Court!
So how is it now legal? Listen to Schaefer and his tale of how HR 1151 became law – that’s the legislation that made multiple SEGs legal.
Along the way you will hear a great personal credit union success story. Schafer became CEO of the tiny FDIC credit union when he was 34 in 1986. In 1995 he moved to Truliant which then was a $400 million credit union.
Truliant now is a $2.5 billion credit union.
That’s a remarkable growth story and of course you want to hear it.
Why is Schafer telling his story now? He retires at year end.
His is a terrific story of how to make credit unions work better, for more people.
As for Blaine, the retired CEO of SECU in North Carolina, he too has a story of being sued over multiple SEGs. In an email he wrote this: “few know that the “original” FOM law suit was filed against SECU in state court (SECU is state-chartered) in 1977 by the NC Bankers Association when SECU added small city/county local govts to our FOM. The bankers beat us in the NC Supreme Court (on a split decision with the Chief Justice writing an ‘icy’ dissent!) and we had to divest about 9,000 local govt employees who had joined. We did so – being the ornery, stubborn folks we were! – by forming a federal credit union (today’s Local Government FCU @$2.5 billion) which immediately contracted for all services through SECU. LGFCU had a board and staff of 1, but immediately had a full array of services and about 50 branches at that time! Needless to say our state bankers were ‘not pleased’ and sued in federal court (we forced it out of our state courts since LGFCU was federally chartered!). LGFCU/SECU won on appeal in the 3rd District (Richmond) and the bankers decided not to appeal to the US Supreme Court. When they later came gunning for Marc, the bankers made sure it got heard in the 4th District (DC) which is far more ‘business friendly’ – the 4th ruled in favor of the banks, which led to the adverse Supreme Court decision, the Campaign for Consumer Choice, and HR 1151.”
For some years I have reported on cybersecurity fails on the part of airlines, hotels, and miscellaneous other travel players. In the background always a question haunted me: why are so many travel companies so bad at cybersecurity? Sure, hackers hack just about everything but travel companies seem favorite targets, in part because they are indeed sources of valuable data of affluent people but also because, somehow, they just seem less capable at protecting their digital valuables (our digital valuables).
And now there’s a suggestion from Bitglass, a cloud app security broker, that just maybe hospitality companies are in fact utterly deficient in cybersecurity. In its report An Analysis of Cybersecurity in the Fortune 500, Bitglass said it “conducted research on the 2019 Fortune 500 in order to identify whether the world’s leading companies are prioritizing information security and customer privacy. Their websites were scoured for keywords, phrases, and executive security personnel in order to learn about the steps that they are taking to protect personally identifiable information (PII) and customer privacy.”
Bitglass added: “The results demonstrate that many organizations lack an authentic, lasting commitment to enhancing cybersecurity.”
It gets worse. Bitglass found that 77% of Fortune 500 companies “make no indication on their websites of who is responsible for their security strategy.”
Guess what sector is most derelict. Hospitality. 0% – none – have a named executive in charge of cybersercurity on their websites. And that’s despite the industry’s many breaches. Eight hospitality companies are in the Fortune 500, all failed.
Manufacturing is next worse. Only 8% name a cybersecurity exec on their websites. Telecom comes in third worst with 9%.
Hair splitting time. In this context “hospitality” refers mainly to hotel companies and some restaurant groups. Not airlines which are grouped under “transportation.”
Hospitality also comes in at the bottom regarding the percentage of companies with website info “about how they are protecting the data of customers and partners.” Just 25% of hospitality companies offer this info, tied at the bottom with oil and gas companies and construction companies.
That double fail wins hospitality a starring role in Bitglass’ list of least security conscious industries.
Transportation, by the way, does much better. 57% list an executive in charge of cybersecurity and 36% have a statement. This is not to say breathe easily at airline sites (loyalty programs have had their hacker problems). But they do do better than their hotelier brethren.
Here’s the question that matters: What are we to do to stay safe? The start is accepting it is our job. Hospitality companies don’t have our backs. If we are to be safe it is because of what we do (or don’t do).
Rule one: Assume that any hospitality site you use will be hacked. Take that seriously. It means that any data you leave at the site may end up in criminals’ hands. Personally I am just as suspicious of airline sites. I follow the same precautions at both kinds.
Never use passwords that are used at important accounts – a credit union or bank, for instance – at a hospitality site. Hackers use computers to automate testing of stolen passwords at leading banks precisely because they know many of us are lazy and dumb and use a password at multiple locations. Just don’t.
Personally I use Google generated passwords at most hospitality and airline sites, mainly because I generally log in on a mobile phone with a fingerprint and a long, complex password is fine. Either way, though, remember that a hospitality site probably will be hacked.
Do keep tabs on anything of value that you have at hospitality websites. Loyalty programs have for some years been hacker targets. Your points may already have been stolen. A corrective is to regularly monitor balances. How often is enough? It depends upon how valuable a stash is. I think I have some Delta miles but couldn’t tell you when I last looked because I know there aren’t many.
But with the sites where I have large deposits of loyalty points I log in at least monthly. I can’t say I have personally seen miles stolen but I nonetheless do check regularly.
Personally, just this week I ignored my advice because my cellphone hotspot was anemic and I had free hotel WiFi via Hilton Honors and I was traveling with an old Chromebook that had no personal data on it. I also didn’t access any sensitive sites (banking for instance).
But whenever possible, use something safer than hotel WiFi.
Can you travel and not get hacked? Maybe. Sure in fact. I don’t believe I ever have been. But my inflexible advice is to always assume you will be hacked. That’s how to stay safer on the road.
Hoteliers know they have a problem in their little used lobby spaces and their similarly unused business centers but now they believe they have a solution and it involves a bet that we are dumber than they are. Here’s the Travel Weekly story. The subhead lays it out: “Hotel companies, recognizing that their public areas are often used as coworking venues anyway, have followed the example of WeWork and its temporary office spaces by renting out portions of their facilities as communal workplaces. But will guests pay to use space that has been free until now?”
It’s that last sentence that boils my blood.
Understand, I do not dispute that hotels might – perhaps even should – seek to impose charges on non guests that use their public spaces as offices. It is one thing to stop into a hotel lobby and have a coffee or a cocktail and do a little business. It’s another thing to park in the space for six hours and do a full day of work. A hotelier has every right to seek to monetize that occupancy. But charging guests?
I applaud the hotelier quest to monetize otherwise under-used spaces – but not at the expense of paying room guests.
Fine by me, too, if hoteliers want to open their fitness centers to the public. Most aren’t much used anyway and if the public can be lured in, why not?
But charging guests for what has been free is where a line needs to be drawn.
Personally I prefer working in my room, I also do not much use hotel wifi and instead create a hotspot on my phone – it’s much more secure internet access. So I’m not exactly the target market for this use of public spaces.
Indeed, I have never parked myself for a workday in a Starbucks – although I know many who do and who enjoy it.
At least one hotel group seems to be doing this right: Crowne Plaza. The chain’s Plaza Workspace program offers – free – access to spiffy work pods. But for those who need more privacy there’s The Studio which is available for booking by the hour (and there’s a dandy online tool for that). Cost where I looked was $50/hour – but, remember, there’s no need to incur those costs unless you need that privacy. The free workspaces look quite inviting and comfy.
Why do some hoteliers believe they can gouge guests for use of what amounts to public meeting spaces? Don’t ask me, ask them. All I can guess is that they think we are dumb enough that we will pay for spaces that had been free (and largely underutilized in recent years – despite the outlier and outsized successes such as enjoyed by Ace Hotels). And to pay when there almost certainly is a Starbucks, or other coffee shop, a block away from the hotel and with free work space in the bargain.
Travel Weekly did quote one skeptic about our willingness to pay, Filipa Pajevic, a grad student at McGill’s School of Urban Planning: “Coworking has already been happening at hotels, in the sense that they’ve already been providing people a place to work while they’re away from their official workplace or home. So for hotels to say, ‘Look, we’re also going to offer coworking spaces,’ I don’t know if that’s going to necessarily go well. You’re asking me to now pay extra for something that I’ve already been doing in your hotel for free.”
And that just may apply to non guests as well. Why indeed would a person who has been using a nearby hotel for business meetings in the lobby – something done for many years by Manhattan dwellers, also San Franciscans – now suddenly dip into his/her pocket for lobby access? I don’t begrudge hoteliers their desire to nick those non guests for $20 or $50 – it’s just that I don’t see people doing this when there are those other nearby, free work spaces (Starbucks).
The bottomline here, however, is that when you are a guest don’t even think about paying to use hitherto free public spaces. Just say no. And walk outside and into a coffee shop (and, yeah, the java probably is better than the hotels’ too).
I went to the September DN Intersect conference in Las Vegas – hosted by ATM company Diebold Nixdorf – expecting to hear a lot about ATMs but I did not expect to have my mind changed about Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra and that is exactly what happened.
I had written off Libra – you probably had too. Too much immediate pushback from regulators and politicians, both in the US and also Europe. But think again.
