Jon Voorhees has spent his work life optimizing branch performance. He has headed initiatives where an institution added hundreds of branches and he has headed initiatives where hundreds of branches were closed. His last job at a financial services company – he now is a consultant based in Washington State – was as a senior vice president at Bank of America and you can guess how many challenges he faced at that bank.
But he knows credit unions too and in recent years has worked with a number on a simple question: how to optimize the branch strategy. The question is easy to ask but hard to answer, especially since so much that impacts branching, from the pandemic to financial technology, keeps changing.
One thing Voorhees is adamant about: branches aren’t going way.
Another thing: branches make for remarkably effective billboards for financial institutions. Maybe you cannot afford a sizable ad daily in your local newspaper, but a properly positioned branch, with the right kind of signage. just may succeed in reminding your community that you are still thriving, still ready to help with their financial services needs.
This is a wide ranging conversation, something of a primer on branch optimization,
Along the way you will find out where in supermarket branches make sense (or not), what could possibly go wrong with a branch that featured a Starbucks, and exactly where a branch needs to be in a shopping center.
Personally, I went into this podcast thinking, close’em all. I had come to think that branches had served their purpose and were done. After giving Voorhees a listen, I now believe there is indeed a valuable place for branches in the credit union system – but only when they are smartly sited, tweaked for today’s times, and wear the right, eye-catching signage. And many institutions just aren’t getting that right.
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My bag beckons, it is half packed and you are likely doing similar with grand visions of a pint of bitters in London or an Armagnac in Paris or a Vinho Verde in Porto.
Sober up. It is not happening, not this summer.
Not unless you have a long held ambition to be an extra in Marat/Sade.
Tune back to May 7. That’s when the UK issued its list of so-called green light countries. That’s where UK residents can travel without ado and return similarly. No tests, no quarantines. Not on the list were France, Spain and the US. On it were the Faroe Islands, the Falklands (aka the Malvinas), Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei, Iceland, Gibraltar, Israel, and Portugal (plus a couple Portuguese islands).
No fools the Brits, this unleashed a stampede to Portugal (even in a pandemic would you crave an excursion to the Malvinas and, no, I have no idea how you would get to these remote south Atlantic islands).
Flashforward to June 3 and a reshuffled UK list of safe destinations excluded Portugal and from June 7 on Brits returning from Portugal need to self isolate for 10 days and take two PCR tests. Of course that change triggered stampedes at the Lisbon and Porto airports – some carriers even shifted extra metal there to appease the exiting mobs.
That paragraph captures why we aren’t going to Europe this summer.
Don’t think it’s a Brit thing that has nothing to do with us. Here’s the deal: a lot of how we travel to Europe will be impacted by what limitations the UK puts on travel. And there is no guessing that.
What’s more, just about every big nation now is behaving as erratically as the UK. Including us. Including much of Europe.
Nothing is certain, nothing can be counted on with international travel. What we know to be true today may be ancient nonsense tomorrow and the reason of course is that the pandemic keeps morphing, nobody knows how the vaccines will fare against still emerging variants, and nations are frantically trying to balance public health concerns with demands by their domestic travel providers to lower the barriers and let the cash registers ring.
A week ago when I looked, the sane way for me to get to Porto was to fly LAX to LHR, LHR to OPO and that was easy and modestly priced on BA – but with Portugal now demoted to the UK amber list, will the flights remain? Probably not. Because very probably most Brits will stay home – or convince themselves they really want to go to Iceland, a nation with twice as many sheep as people. Look it up.
And when the UK’s next list reshuffle is issued around June 24 will Portugal be upgraded to green and, who knows, maybe Iceland will have been downgraded to red as the virus has jumped to sheep.
Just kidding about Iceland’s sheep.
But no joking that there is no guarantee where Iceland will fall in the next reshuffle.
Just about everything else also remains uncertain. Spain, for instance, has said it will be open to all vaccinated travelers as of June 7 but hunt for details and there are none. Will it apply to Americans? Only vaccinated travelers are welcome.
Americans flying to France are welcome – if they arrive with a very recent PCR or antigen test. Only vaccinated travelers need apply.
A complication is that fake vaccination cards continue to be sold online so who could trust one? Especially at an overseas passport desk? We don’t know how foreign governments will validate CDC vaccination cards presented by Americans and we don’t know what additional proofs they may require. Thus the French solution.
Portugal, by the way, says it will open to vaccinated US travelers. “We are in a position to approve the opening of non-essential travel and flights to people from the U.S. to Portugal as long as they have a vaccination certificate,” Economy Minister Pedro Siza Vieira, cited by Portuguese radio Renascenca, said on June 8, per Reuters. But no details are known.
Meantime, all Americans returning to the US, vaccinated or not, need produce a current covid test result. There do not appear to be any countries to which this does not apply, although as with everything else in this column the facts change seemingly daily.
That border entry test requirement from the CDC dates to January 12, however, and there has been no motion to change it.
Are you beginning to feel just a little crazy?
Personally, I find myself thinking if maybe I would prefer a vacay in Yellowstone – is Yogi Bear still around? With the right laughs I just might forget how crazymaking and frustrating trying to plan international travel has come.
You know the headline – in fact you could write the story on the explosion in digital banking transactions during the last pandemic year.
But do you know this: there has also been an explosion in the use of digital self-service information gathering and problem solving.
That’s the surprising news in a report from TimeTrade SilverCloud, a provider of customer engagement solutions.
In this podcast Bill Clark, CEO of TimeTrade SilverCloud offers the specifics – and prepared to be surprised. Everybody knew members have been using digital to check account balances and pay bills but who knew members were making strong use of digital to investigate everything from PPP loans to how to get contactless debit cards.
By TimeTrade SilverCloud’s data, “Usage of online self-service increased 38% from March to April 2020 and has sustained a level 69% greater even a year later – demonstrating a shift in customer behavior to leverage self-service options before reaching out for live support.”
Another factoid: Usage of knowledge based in mobile banking apps is up 82% year on year.
A third blockbuster number: “Chatbot usage on bank and credit union websites and mobile apps increased 272% year-over-year.”
A last fact: Credit unions saw a 107% increase in year over year in pre-scheduling in branch appointments from Q1 2020 to Q1 2021.
The numbers tell the story: Something big has happened in regard to how we do our financial services.
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Call this the ultimate counterintuitive path to riches: right now, across the continent, tens of thousands of entrepreneurs are moving ahead with restaurant startups. Crazy? Maybe just crazy smart.
The crazy part is this: the country is littered with dead, closed restaurants, casualties of the pandemic. Food industry research firm Datassential has a gloomy obituary report. Its numbers show that 10.2% of all restaurants in the US closed permanently since the start of the pandemic when health policies in much of the country required restaurants to eliminate indoor dining. For many restaurants, that prompted them to shut down. Almost all had planned to re-open, but as the pandemic continued to play out — it’s now 15 months and counting — quite a few have just walked away from their leases. How many? Datassential says its count is 79,438 that have closed for good, and that’s as of late March.
Probably another 10,000 have closed since.
That’s why those who are jumping into new restaurants are thinking differently. The old playbook just won’t work today.
Consider this podcast everything you wanted to know about credit unions and their social media channels but were afraid to ask. Or maybe you just didn’t know to ask.
But the reality today is that social media have emerged as a crucial communications outlet – and for some generations they may be the most important way to communicate.
And yet the channels are so new. Twitter started in 2006. Facebook dates back to 2004. Instagram was launched in 2010. LinkedIn dates back 2003.
But for most credit unions it is safe to say their significant involvement in social media dates back maybe a handful of years.
And the media themselves evolve and change.
That’s why you want to hear from Michelle Asher, a marketing manager with a specific focus on social media at ENT, the nation’s 25th largest credit union with assets of $6.7 billion.
Asher is the first fulltime manager for social media at ENT but she came to the job with 25 years of experience in public relations and communications.
In the podcast she talks about the learning curve involved in joining the credit union industry – not so hard at ENT, she says, because there are many knowledgeable, helpful staff. She also talks about when and how legal and compliance weigh in on her content.
Along the way, Asher talks about a social media policy for employees – and know that there are times and places where an employee post can bring risks to a credit inion, even when the post is on an employee’s personal account. If you haven’t thought about that issue, now is the time.
We also find out how the various social media channels differ – and what works on Facebook might fail on both LinkedIn and Twitter. That’s why professionals do not post the same content on multiple channels. Who knew?
Of course new channels keep emerging – think Tik Tok and ENT is not presently on it. Asher tells why.
This is an approachable conversation – but it has plenty of content both for credit unions with well oiled social media programs and those that are just dabbling in it.
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I am still wearing a mask when indoors in public spaces – even though the governor of Arizona, where I live, has issued an executive order that lifted Covid-19 restrictions (such as capacity restraints) on businesses and barred local governments from enforcing most mask mandates. So now ever louder voices are raised insisting that we have a right not to wear a mask – even before the governor’s order a meeting of the Scottsdale school board dissolved into chaos as mask deniers bellowed out their refusals.
A private business can insist on masks but still there are protests that this robs people of their rights.
There is no such right and it is also simply dumb to insist on such a “right.” We are not out of the pandemic yet. As “As long as there is some degree of activity throughout the world, there’s always a danger of variants emerging and diminishing somewhat the effectiveness of our vaccines,” said Anthony Fauci in an interview with the Guardian.
That’s why it is crucial that we still wear masks, certainly in indoor public spaces, and practice social distancing. To fail to take such simple steps is to endanger ourselves and others. It will also slow the recovery of the travel and restaurant sectors.
That is reality.
But I expect the wars to get louder, angrier, more violent.
Especially in the places travelers congregate.
As we begin to travel again we will be on the frontlines of these battles. I am looking forward to travel, but not to these skirmishes.
Even in the skies – where a federal mask mandate remains in place until September – there is increasing anti mask violence. There is no exception for the vaccinated (although many think there is) when it comes to mask wearing on airplanes.
Matters are so heated in the skies that both American and Southwest have halted booze sales in coach, mainly because drunken passengers just are more obstreperous and violent.
Airports, too, are mask required zones – although reports multiply of maskless offenders testing the readiness of authorities to act on the ground. Busses and trains also have many mask refusers.
But transportation isn’t the worst place when it comes to mask issues.
Matters are getting more perilous at restaurants – places not covered by the federal mask mandates and where many governors have been erasing mask requirements. Even Starbucks and Chipotle have dropped their mask requirements wherever they can, saying only the unvaccinated are required to wear masks.
The problem with that – at least going by what I am hearing – is that it is the vaccinated who are still wearing masks indoors. The unvaccinated, taking advantage of the reality that there is no easy way to prove vaccination status (I don’t carry my CDC card and know nobody who does, at least when we are not traveling), are stripping their masks and pretending they have gotten the shots.
They of course are threats to the rest of us and to each other – and, sadly, it is they who will prolong the pandemic even though they often are also pandemic deniers who also deny the 600,000 who have died from the disease just in the US.
Employees in retail naturally have rising concerns as they interact with maskless, unvaccinated customers. Will many quit? That’s a good guess.
One sector where I expect the mask wars to only get hotter in restaurants. For instance, in Mendocino CA, a place called the Fiddleheads Cafe charges diners who wear masks a $5 surcharge. What’s weirder is where this is happening. Biden got two-thirds of the county’s vote in 2020. Mendo is, shall we say, a laid back place. It has long had an anarchic streak, however, and I suppose that’s what is playing out at Fiddleheads.
I get it, too. In restaurants in particular masks are a complication (when to wear it, when not?).
I have eaten in a restaurant exactly once this year and that was on an outdoor patio.
I do not expect to eat indoors at a restaurant this summer. Why? To be a witness to anti mask stupidity? Besides, I am growing fonder of Uber Eats and good food is getting brought to me. I eat it in peace at home.
Will I next cross air travel off my list because of the mask defiers? We will see as the summer plays out.
Used to be, as I planned a trip, I’d look at a weather report for the destination and, in very special cases, I’d consult a crime report for a foreign destination at the US Dept. of State. That about did it for my information curiosities and, note, I don’t believe I ever consulted crime data for US cities, only for some international cities.
But now as I find myself contemplating travel to several destinations, both domestic and foreign, I suddenly want more data – and that is why I am creating new travel bookmarks that I will share with you because you just may have similar needs.
The big difference in my 2021-2022 travel planning: disease, particularly Covid-19, looms large in my thinking. There are places I just will not go to because I would not feel safe and, yes, I am dually vaccinated. Plus I had the disease 15 months ago so I have antibodies and probably am resistant to Covid-19.
But resistant to all variants? To new strains? I don’t know and I am not going to risk a trip to a place where I might run into a Covid variant I have no immunity to.
About 5% of the world’s population presently is fully vaccinated – which means 95% aren’t. It is going to take at least a couple years to distribute vaccines widely and that is a wildly optimistic estimate.
That means international travel will slowly rebound and it will be on a destination by destination basis.
Bookmark this page via Statista that shows Covid infection and death rates by country and offers fine tuned date for the last 7 days. Places I don’t want to go to right now include Hungary, Peru, and Brazil – too many cases, too many deaths.
What about India? It happens not to be on the Statista page I am looking at today and that’s important to understand, No site I am aware of is comprehensive – all crunch data using their own methods and own feeds. So you have to look at multiple sites.
But any reader of the international news knows India is afire with Covid-19 and the end does not appear near. It is one of the scariest places on the planet right now.
And then there are countries that have released no data. Tanzania is a case in point and I know I won’t even think about traveling to a place where its Covid infections and deaths are state secrets (or, even worse, just not counted). Sadly, much of the undeveloped world fits into that category. They are not hiding information so much as they just don’t know their incidence rate, death count, or when vaccines will be available to their populace.
Another, useful tool is from the Lowy Institute and it allows us to compare countries in terms of Covid responses. Search for Portugal and Spain, for instance, and to my eyes their Covid patterns have been quite similar. That’s useful to know especially since many of us are probably weighing options for either/or trips – Jamaica vs Dominican Republic, for instance, and today the differences seem minimal.
Of course the facts are fluid. Countries that once seemed to have Covid under control now are messes. The Seychelles is a case in point; it had ranked among the most vaccinated countries. But a majority of the people had gotten China’s Sinopharm vaccine and questions swirl around its efficacy. Now there are lots of active cases in the Seychelles. It’s not a place I would visit.
But fluid facts mean we have to check frequently. Last week’s reassuring research may take a deadly turn today. Or a country with a bad bout of Covid infections may turn a corner.
Another new twist for me: I plan to check US infection and vaccination stats before traveling to domestic destinations. Some parts of the country just are stubbornly anti-vax and while I won’t argue with them, I also won’t mingle with them.
That’s why I’ve bookmarked a widget at Becker’s Hospital Review that shows the percentage of a state’s population that has been vaccinated. Mississippi and Alabama bring up the rear but that’s no surprise. They have vaccinated fewer than one in three.
Also useful is a CDC Covid tracker that lets us drill into county specific infection incidence data across the US. Get specific when looking. Incidence can multiply within a few miles.
Do I enjoy this data crunching? I do not. But I would enjoy being bed-ridden with an encore battle against Covid even less.
But at least, data in view, I am newly confident about traveling. I just plan to do it as the numbers guide me.
File this under trends that will rock the ground beneath your feet. The next wave in financial services will be self-direction, says Vince Bezemer, head of strategy at Backbase, whom you know from CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 110 (and the companion, 111, with Wildfire Credit Union, a Backbase customer).
Now Bezemer is back with a big message: members no longer want you to tell them how to do what they want to do. You can’t offer 90% account origination online but in the last mile insist a branch visit is key.
In a similar vein, the money centers banks no longer will be able to bully customers into using digital solutions when what they want is high touch analog.
There’s a revolution coming, warns Bezemer, and the FIs that thrive will be the ones that get the message that today’s member calls the shots.
And for the FIs that resist this, there’s the reality that at least some FIs already have heard this message and are charging ahead.
For credit unions, Bezemer’s message is that it’s not enough the digitize, say, 25% of your products and tell members that for the rest, come to the branch.,
It’s something of a different challenge from that facing the mega banks, where cost cutting and branch closures are accelerating a drive to push digital.
Wherever you are on the digital-analog continuum, there are warnings to be had in this podcast – and action steps to take. But this isn’t a stern lecture, it’s a breezy, fast, fun talk about what financial services need to look like soon, like tomorrow.
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It was the members’ personal stories that hooked Samira Rajan early in her employment at what then was known as the Bushwick Cooperative and now is the Brooklyn Cooperative. When she started there it was in 2001 as a volunteer via AmeriCorp Vista in 2001 when the recently founded credit union had assets of $299,000, four employees (including her), and a membership of under 1000.
Rajan has been there ever since. Today it has assets of $50 million, 2600 members, 16 employees, and two branches (one in Bushwick, the other in Bedford-Stuyvesant).
As for those stories, Rajan spent her early years at the institution as the loan officer and the stories she heard were from this member as to why she needed a $10,000 loan for her business, or from that member on why he needed a $5000 home improvement loan. These are stories about hopes and dreams and Rajan found it exciting to think about making dreams come true and also protecting the credit union’s solvency.
As for how she wound up at the credit union in the first place, listen to the podcast. You need to hear the story from her but I will tell you it involves a bachelor’s degree at Bryn Mawr where she doubled majored in economics and Spanish (and the Spanish matters in Bushwick where over half the residents are Latino). She then worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve in New York. But she got restless, she wanted to see if financial services could in fact help address economic inequalities. So she went to Harvard and earned a master’s degree in public policy at the Kennedy School.
Flashback to 2001 when she earned that degree and she was back home in New York, the economy was sluggish, New York City was still recovering from 9/11, and she heard about this start up credit union in Bushwick and decided to check it out.
Next thing she knew she was a volunteer and soon that became a staff job.
In 2008 she became CEO.
In this podcast you will hear about the day to day challenge of keeping a small credit union vital, about the help Brooklyn Cooperative has gotten (or not gotten) from large banks and credit unions, and why it matters to be a CDFI, a community development financial institution.
Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email rjmcgarvey@gmail.com
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Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It’s a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto.
I hear the buzz – you do too – all around us now is the sound of travelers planning, packing, moving. After 16 months of no travel (in my own case), it is plainly exciting to be again thinking about hitting the road.
But in my own case – and I am not preaching to you, just relating – I plan to travel in a much more sustainable way. Climate change is real. It’s nonsensical to deny it and where I live, in Phoenix, it is easy to see. KTAR sums up the numbers: “[In 2020] Phoenix broke records for the most 95-degree days (172), 100-degree days (145), 105-degree days (102), 110-degree days (53) and 115-degree days (14) in a year with daily heat records being shattered 18 times throughout 2020 and tied another 15 times.”
Meantime, we are depleting our groundwater reservoirs and the Colorado River, which supplies much of the water that irrigates the west, just is coming up short.
In Arizona, climate change is not a parlor game word. It’s become a matter of life or death, for many plants and animals and very possibly, in the long term, even humans. Don’t snigger about the last. A 2019 Sierra Club Magazine headline told why: Can Phoenix Remain Habitable? It asked. The article is a good read and it spells out how Phoenix could dodge this bullet. But it is not optimistic that sanity will prevail because the city talks a good game…but real steps are fewer.
Which is why it comes down to me, by which I mean all of us who live in Phoenix – and since the planet is facing the same climate changes, pretty much all of us everywhere
That is why I am mulling where, how and why I travel.
Understand, I remain deeply skeptical that we will soon see a vigorous return to 2019 level business travel. Between the frugality of CFOs and the lethal state of Covid-19 around much of the globe – to say nothing about the one in two Americans who are not yet fully vaccinated – there simply is no rational forecast that sees business travel rebounding this year and possibly not next. Will there be more business travel in the second half of 2021 than there was in 2020? Of course there will be and that is because there were less than half as many business trips in 2020 as in 2019. It won’t take much to log higher numbers in the second half of 2021 and that won’t prove much, either.
Personally, my position will be that I will take business trips where and only where an in person appearance (as opposed to a virtual appearance via Zoom) is likely to produce better results. Face it, hitherto, we took a lot of trips because, well, that’s how it always had been done. But the long travel hiatus has made it easy – necessary – to experiment with alternatives and, guess what, often they work.
Before booking a business trip I will ask is it necessary? Is it wise?
A lot of times I probably will decide the trip simply isn’t needed. That will save money, save my time (business travel is hideously wasteful of the traveler’s time), and perhaps help save the planet.
Flying is bad for the environment. According to the BBC, “Around 2.4% of global CO2 emissions come from aviation. Together with other gases and the water vapour trails produced by aircraft, the industry is responsible for around 5% of global warming.”
That seems a small number? Perhaps. Indeed, buildings and cars are by far the biggest producers.
But I already am very mindful of how much I drive (just a few thousand miles per year) and where the thermostat is set. So I will also do my bit to cut out unnecessary business travel too.
Another target will be unnecessary leisure travel – and already there is talk of a lot more of exactly that. I cannot tell you how many people I know who are dreaming of a trip to Antarctica and that has to count as perhaps the most unnecessary trip imaginable. Watch the Bourdain show and if you want realer sensations, stick your head in an icebox for a few minutes and finger the ice cubes.
In 2019-2020 about 74,000 of us traveled to Antarctica and, according to research published by Cambridge University, “The average tourist trip to Antarctica results in 5.44 t of CO2 emissions per passenger, or 0.49 t per passenger and day.”
OK, maybe some travelers in fact have good reasons for this trip. I don’t get it but that might be my failing. We each have to do our own calculations.
But the point stands: my commitment going forward is that the leisure travel I take will be done with a mindfulness of the environment and I won’t take the trip if there are other ways to gain the experience.
That means I won’t be taking impulse weekend trips to Madrid, as I have done, or Berlin. But travel I will…just not so much and only after I weigh the pros and cons.
