Tech

by Robert McGarvey

Every day a dairy cow makes a mountain of manure. An average cow excretes a staggering 120 pounds of feces and urine daily, and that means odors, which leads to complaints. Then there are complaints about the methane emissions associated with cow manure. The average cow produces 250 to 500 liters of methane a day. And experts say cutting methane is a key in today’s climate fight.

Dairy cow manure — and know there are over 9 million dairy cows in the US — is a problem, except maybe it isn’t.

Just maybe it is a source of real profits for entrepreneurial dairy farmers who are finding ways to transform manure into money in their pockets while also solving genuine consumer problems in their communities.

Continued at Startup Savant

You know the income of many of your members.

Now here’s the big question: do you know what they are spending it on?

Down to the SKU level – that is, on exactly what are they spending?

You want to meet Izabella Gabowicz, COO and a founding team member at Toronto based fintech Sensibill, a company built around the insight that financial wellness is not one size fits all.  Joe’s financial wellness might include a craft beer a day, wile Susie’s might favor a non alcoholic kombucha a day and, yeah, knowing such differences night help a financial institution deliver more customized financial wellness programming.

Says Sensibill about itself, “At Sensibill, we’re working to make financial services personal—you could say, more human. We build products that reveal insights into everyday spend that can be used to truly personalize financial services. And in doing so, help people achieve their unique version of financial wellness.”

Focus on that: insights into personal daily spend.

It all adds up. A newspaper, a cup of coffee, a short taxi ride and who is keeping track?

Sensibill can.

How?  Listen to this podcast where Gabowicz extols the benefits of SKU level spending data.

Know too that Sensibill’s products touch 60 million people worldwide.

Call this financial wellness 2.0.

Listen up.

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

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

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

by Robert McGarvey

Don’t think that SPAC is just another four-letter word. For increasing numbers of startups and entrepreneurs, it just may be the abracadabra that unlocks wealth in fast motion.

Continued at Startup Savant

 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.

Listen up.

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

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

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.

Hosted by Robert McGarvey

Anil Aggarwal is an entrepreneur who knows a thing or two about providing venues where executives come together and good things happen.  He was co-founder of Money 20/20, an event that redefined how financial services executives and fintech executives could profitably come together.  After that venture was sold, he co-founded Shoptalk, a meeting venue for retail execs and technologists. That was sold off. And now he is creating his next new thing, Fintech Meetup, and you want to know about this June 15-17 virtual event that will link financial services execs with fintech execs in double opt-in meetings that last 15 minutes.

Why 15 minutes? Aggarwal says he has found that’s the optimal time.  If the two parties find they have more to talk about they can arrange it.  Or they can part with smiles on their faces because it was only 15 minutes.

And you did notice these are dual opt in meetings.  Both parties have to accept for the meeting to be scheduled.

And it’s all virtual in our pandemic era.

Understand too that the tools and technologies are battle tested.  That’s a big plus.

Joining Aggarwal in this podcast is CU 2.0 founder Kirk Drake who has thoughts about why this event is a must for credit unions and free admission is just one of the attractions for credit union execs. There’s a link in the show notes to how to claim free admission.  

Know this. Your host is a grumpy, cynical veteran of too many financial services events to count, most of which were tedious.  I am a huge fan of the early Money 20/20 events so when I heard the guy behind Money 20/20 was the force behind Fintech Meetup my interest went from tepid to torrid.  

And credit union execs get in free.  

That is a great deal.

Listen up.

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

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

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.

by Robert McGarvey

Want to know a magic trick to wrapping your arms around startup wealth? One word is the superhighway to startup riches today: fintech.

What’s that? It’s companies that blend financial services money matters with high tech, and this is the moment for that marriage. Forever banking has been a high touch sector — lots of human to human interaction — but buckle up; the sector now is riding a tech rocket to provide better services, faster and typically at a lower cost. The pandemic is the fuel for this, as more people do much of their banking digitally. Yes, the pandemic will end, but most experts now believe the changes it has brought to financial services will persevere because we have grown to plain prefer them. Why drive to an ATM to deposit a check when you can just take a photo with your phone?

Create a startup that makes our financial lives better, and it just might become a wealth machine.

Case in point: Stripe, a payments startup primarily focused on ecommerce. In mid-March, the company jumped to a $95 billion valuation and is now the “most valuable startup in the United States,” per The New York Times….

It’s worth noting that Stripe has been around since 2010, but only now has its valuation gone stratospheric. But those riches are why interest in fintechs has soared, and they come in a rainbow of shades nowadays.

Let’s take a capsule view of three different fintech startups: Nav.it, which focuses on financial health; DoubleCheck, a new toolset for lessening the damage done by an overdraft; and Breach Clarity, which scores data breaches by how truly severe they are and who is likely to be most impacted.

Continued at StartUp Savant

by Robert McGarvey

This is not an infomercial for Scienaptic, an AI vendor with a particular focus on lending.  

There are two guests on the podcast –  Eric Steinhoff, a Scienaptic executive vice president, and Kevin Willborn, vice president of consumer lending at $3.3 billion Gesa Credit Union.

Essentially you will hear that Scienaptic’s tools are a way to speed up loan decisioning and also to make the decisions very possibly better.  It’s hard not to like better and faster.

Willborn also tells what loans he plans to run through Scienaptic – lots of different kinds.

This is a tight podcast but in it you will hear how Scienaptic in fact creates better tools for smarter underwriting.  It’s a short course in the secret sauce of an AI engine.

Steinhoff also tells why he prefers to work with credit unions over community banks.  You will want to hear this.

At Gesa, meantime, the determination is to up its lending game and that is why Willborn took a look at new tools for smarter processing.  When he heard the Scienaptic presentation he knew he had found the vendor for Gesa.

 Right now, Scienaptic has multiple credit union clients but it is looking for more.

Find out more about AI in CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 138, a lively talk with CU 2.0 founder Kirk Drake. Link here.

Listen up.

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

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

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

 Start today, really embrace AI – artificial intelligence, where machines think and they are good at it when fed enough of the right data – and, guess what, you are already four or five years behind the leaders and that group includes most of the money center banks and maybe even a few credit unions.

Sounds gloomy? Well, it is, kind of, but CU2.0 founder Kirk Drake is here with a new book, FinAncIal, which aims to tell credit union executives what they need to know about AI and also what they need to get doing, right now. This book is not so much about theory as it is an action manual and, know this, AI is something every credit union needs to be exploring right now.

The good news is that there are many hundreds of AI focused fintechs that are actively hunting for credit union customers.

The better news is that those fintechs can be met through the CU2.0 Mastermind Group.  Drake talks a bit about the CU mastermind in this podcast – and he and a few members exhibit a bit of what it’s like to be in one in this podcast, #121.  An earlier podcast – #106 – lets Drake and executive coach Dr. Patty Ann Tublin talk about what a mastermind group is and how it works.

But back to AI.  The Matrix is now and you can choose the blue pill (blissful ignorance) or the red (confronting the sometimes unpleasant realities ahead ) abut the deal is that AI is the red pill and it is the future no matter how many blue pills you munch.

Why do so many credit union execs want to dodge the unpleasant uncertainties of embracing AI and the wholesale institutional changes it will deliver? We talk about that in this podcast and a lot of it is simply that credit union people are nice people but they sometimes don’t want to dive into changes that will discomfit many.

Except with AI there is no choice. It is coming your way no matter how tightly shut your eyes are.

In the podcast Drake tells why – and what you need to get doing, like this afternoon.

Buckle up, it’s a fast ride.

Listen here.

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

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

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

by Robert McGarvey

Breach Clarity, a startup headed up by onetime Javelin Strategy + Research co-founder Jim Van Dyke, could help cybersecurity journalists, bloggers, and PR professionals write more clearly about data breaches.

Breaches are commonplace. There are four significant ones per day, says Van Dyke.

They often affect financial information, such as bank account or credit card data, protected health records, personally identifiable information (PII), or intellectual property.

In 2020, the total number of records exposed in reported breaches exceeded 37 billion, a 141% increase over 2019. This number doesn’t even include yet 2020 data breaches reported in Q1 2021.

But what does that mean for individual consumers and their personal data in each case? “The biggest challenge breach victims face,” says Eva Velasquez, CEO of the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), “is understanding the risks associated with a particular breach, and what steps they should take next.”

Data breach press releases from lawyers, for lawyers

Ask any cybersecurity journalist what they do not like about data breach press releases of, say, financial services firms or health care providers, and the answer is: everything.

Continued at Cybersecurity Writers blog

by Robert McGarvey

The recent Harris Poll numbers are a splash of icy water on our faces: three in five Americans believe identity theft will likely cause them financial loss in the next year.

That is a finding of a poll done for the American Institute of CPAs.

That number is up from the 50% who in 2018 said they feared a likely loss due to identity theft.

Partly, the jump seems to be pandemic related—there just are a lot more online scams in the internet ether—and partly, too, it’s because all of us are shopping online much more than we had, also because of the pandemic.

Immediately, too, blaming fingers are pointed at consumers. How dumb are we? How do we let this happen?

Continued at CU2.0