McGarvey's Words: Journalist…Podcaster..Speaker

by Robert McGarvey

I never thought I would say this so loudly and emphatically but now I have to: Europeans are smarter than we are. Here the proof: Starting August 6 Italy will require proof of vaccination (a so called health pass) to gain entry to bars, restaurants, concerts, museums, and just about all places where large numbers congregate. To get the pass there must be evidence of at least one vaccination shot.

Also in August, France will enforce a similar requirement. France, understand, had had a reputation of being something of a vaccine skeptic but, obviously, that was before. Now the government is all in with vaccines.

Greece already has in place a vaccine requirement for those who want entry at indoor restaurants, cafes, bars, or movie theaters

Understand: neither country has issued a broad requirement that residents get vaccinated. But they have said that for those who choose not to get vaccinated there is a price to pay and that price involves exclusion from most social venues.

Bravo. Globally Covid-19 is on a rampage. It is absurd to think we are on the other side of this pandemic. We are still in the thick of it. Nine nations – nine, count ’em – claim that more than 50% of their people have gotten at least one shot of a vaccine. On that list are Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, United States, Saudi Arabia, Argentina.

Globally only around one in four of us has gotten at least one vaccine shot. That means 75% have gotten none.

Meantime it is plain that the leading vaccinations are effective – especially Pfizer and Moderna. There is no rational basis for being a vaccine skeptic.

And yet in Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas – to point to the bottom three US states in terms of population percentage vaccinated – only about one third of the population is fully vaccinated and indications are that it will be very hard to persuade the vax deniers in those states to roll up a sleeve.

According to Politico, “many people…in the Southeast are turning down Covid-19 vaccines because they are angry that President Donald Trump lost the election and sick of Democrats in Washington thinking they know what’s best.”

I have no idea if that is right but what I do know is Covid is having its way in Alabama, where already 11,483 of them have died from Covid and more will, probably lots more.

Arkansas and Mississippi are doing no better.

But getting vax refusers vaccinated isn’t my mission. I have no suggestions about how to encourage them, especially when they are surrounded by sickness and death of neighbors, friends and family and that isn’t persuasion enough.

My mission is getting the US to implement a health pass a la France and Italy and Greece where those who are vaccinated get privileges that will be denied the vax refusers,

That seems a simple ask – but it is anything but.

Lots of US governors are implementing high barriers to prevent discrimination against the unvaccinated.

In Arizona, for instance, Governor Doug Ducey in June signed an executive order prohibiting public colleges and universities from requiring students to get vaccinated and they cannot require proof of vaccination to attend in person classes. What prompted that other than sheer stupidity? Ducey offered this feeble explanation: “The vaccine works, and we encourage Arizonans to take it. But it is a choice and we need to keep it that way,” said Gov. Ducey said in a statement. “Public education is a public right, and taxpayers are paying for it. We need to make our public universities available for students to return to learning. They have already missed out on too much learning.”

Ducey also signed an order banning “vaccine passports” at businesses.

The Arizona Covid-19 rate is ticking up right now. Rates are climbing so fast Ducey recently issued a statement urging residents to get vaccinated.

In Florida, meantime, Governor Ron DeSantis doubled down by signing into law a bill that bans businesses from seeking proof of vaccination by customers.

The Florida Covid-19 rate is really spiking upward, by the way, and if you are keeping lists of where not to go, put Florida high on that list.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbot signed into a law that bans businesses from requiring proof of vaccination by customers. It’s sweeping legislation with real teeth: “In addition to banning private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination, SB 968 provides that any business that does require proof of vaccination will not be permitted to engage in state contracts, and some state agencies that regulate different business sectors may screen for compliance with SB 968 in issuing licenses and permits,” explained a Texas law firm.

Covid-19 rates are climbing in Texas too.

Sigh.

And now you understand why – obviously – Europeans are smarter than we are. They are taking steps to safely re-open their economies to those who are vaccinated and, no, vaccination is no guarantee against infection but right now it is the very best thing we have. As I said before, I see no need to require vaccinations – as long as we are willing and able to exclude those who refuse the shot.

 Kelli Ellsworth Etchison,  chief marketing officer and chief diversity officer at the $950 million, Lansing, Mich.-based LAFCU and a member of Michigan’s Black Leadership Advisory Council, and Gary Lee is Chief Client Office at MDT, Member Driven Technology, a tech focused CUSO, are in this podcast to tell why DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – matter to credit unions.

Here’s the big question Lee addresses: how does MDT explain to its owners, customers and prospects that it – a CUSO that specializes in delivering cloud based core processing – puts a large emphasis on DEI?  What business is this of a tech focused CUSO?

It’s a central concern, explained Lee in the podcast and he added that MDT has even signed new customers who said their preference is to do business with companies that share their concerns about social justice and equality issues.

As for Etchison, she puts a DEI concern on the table that we have not heard before in over a half dozen DEI focused podcasts.  Her idea is that we have to stop looking at DEI simply as a concern inside the four walls of the credit union and instead look at it in a bigger community orientation.  Her point: until there is real DEI in the community, a credit union’s DEI focus can produce only so much good.

That is a huge idea and a huge challenge. Many credit unions are doing very well in regard to DEI inside walls – but how about in the community?

The mammoth idea here is that systemic racism results in, for instance, low credit scores for many – and so they become prey for payday lenders rather than good credit union members.

Help more people in your community achieve the successes they deserve and the result will be a stronger. more successful credit union.

How large is that idea?

You might sat the subtitle for this podcast is do good for your credit union or CUSO by doing good for the community.

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

How many more articles must I read that document flamboyantly stupid and obnoxious behavior of passengers? The latest one is headlined: Unruly airplane passengers are straining the system for keeping peace in the sky.

What is wrong with these mask refusing idiots?

One fact: the Federal Aviation Administration is incompetent. Per WAPO: “despite launching a ‘zero-tolerance’ enforcement policy in January — amid a rise in conflicts often tied to mask requirements in the air — the agency said that as of mid-July it had ‘completely closed’ just seven cases.”

What is wrong with those idiots?

There are two things I know about all this and the first is that until something like peace returns to the skies we will not resume full tilt flying and among the holdouts I believe will be business travelers. Lots of companies just will not feel safe putting employees on planes where fellow travelers include dazed and drunk mask deniers who joyfully slug flight crew, attempt to open emergency doors, and pee in their seats. Nope, most companies will hesitate to push employees onto planes until tranquility is restored.

The second thing is that I am unconvinced government intervention is the best option.

Airlines for America and some nine other trade groups disagree. In a letter to the US Attorney General, they said, “The federal government should send a strong and consistent message through criminal enforcement that compliance with federal law and upholding aviation safety are of paramount importance,.”

Is this necessary?

To me, the surest route to better inflight behavior is for the carriers to ban unruly passengers. Instantly. Over 4000 passengers have been banned in the last year and more should be. Besides, the feds can still prosecute. In many cases they should.

But the airlines can act much faster and can issue a ban without much rigmarole.

That’s appealing.

Meantime. however, I do ponder exactly how bad it truly is the skies, despite the many unruly passenger stories I have read. As of July 13, the FAA said it had 3420 unruly passenger reports. Let’s say the real, unfiltered number ought to be 10,000. (I’m assuming many reports just didn’t get filed because the flight crew had other issues to deal with and the paperwork never got filled in.)

On July 18, 2021 passenger throughput reached 2,227,704. That’s just one day of flying. The 10,000 unruly passenger number over six months is a rounding error, an inconsequential number.

There is just a smidgen of unruly behavior in the air. Annoying, unnerving, perhaps frightening if it is on your flight? Undeniably. But odds are slender that it will happen.

Now go back and look closely at the FAA graph that charts the incidence of unruly behavior from 1995 to 2020. Today it may seem high but there were 50% more FAA investigations initiated into unruly behavior complaints in the period 2000 to 2004. Initially I wondered if this coincided with the ban on inflight smoking but, nope, that happened in stages from 1988 to 1990.

Of course there were the horrific 9-11-2001 flight incidents and afterwards there were unfortunate and wrong acts of hostility on airplanes towards many people who somehow seemed Middle Eastern. But enough to warrant a spike in unruly behavior filings and investigations?

Color me uncertain exactly what triggered so many FAA investigations in that period. But the lesson is that what we have now is not so much worse than what we have been seeing for many years.

But my more pressing concern is how to get today’s skies friendlier and the recipe seems simple: ban booze in coach (alcohol is intimately linked with bad inflight behavior and some carriers already 86 hooch) and encourage carriers to drop the flight ban on ever more passengers. and publicize bannings, FAA fines, and all manner of punitive actions against inflight miscreants. Make them understand that their actions will have consequences and at least some will play nicer.

Misbehaving at 30,000 feet has consequences – when it does, the misbehavior will decline.

That’s my bet.

If you agree forward a link to this column to any and all airline employees you know. They can give us friendlier skies and the key just is to be unfriendly to a handful of rude morons who are violating our right to peace in the skies.

by Robert McGarvey

Newsflash: ask the experts and they will tell credit union executives that a tidal wave of fraud very likely will be crashing into them and soon.

Why? For the past year criminals have been kept busy attempting to cash in on the various federal and state government pandemic related relief programs such as PPP loans.  That money is drying up so they are casting their eyes in search of new targets and you just may have a bullseye on your back.

That’s why you need to hear this wide ranging conversation with two Jack Henry fraud and financial crimes experts, Rene Perez and Nat Southern.

This is a conversation about crime trends and also about crime trends that remain largely ignored.

A big trend for instance is that as financial institutions, especially the big ones, have toughed their perimeter defenses, criminals have shifted focus and are eyeing credit union members for vulnerabilities – which they very often will find.

Perez says a trigger for this is that many financial institutions have simply gotten very sophisticated, often in response to prodding from regulators.

But he adds that he talks with maybe 10 small financial institutions a week that are still doing a lot of their fraud work on paper, with humans doing the reporting.,

That increasingly is just not adequate, not when smart criminals enter the battle.

You will also hear a phrase – “willful blindness.” That’s a term regulators are using to describe an institution’s failure to detect fraud perpetrated by insiders or perhaps by friends or community leaders.  

This is not a technical conversation.  It is more in the nature of cops and robbers and what you need to know about the robbers who want to steal your credit union’s money.

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.

The Travel Weekly headline screamed the obvious: “Vaccine hesitancy is slowing the reopening of the U.S.”

Just about daily I am seeing multiple reports and predictions auguring a brisk and quick return of business travel. Today for instance Bloomberg observes that “Business trips coming back faster than expected in the U.S.” And United’s CEO “voices optimism” including a prediction that business travel will rebound in the fall: “We expect the demand to pick up in September, October.”

Nonsense and the reason I say that is that the US vaccination rates have fallen off a cliff. As of today 48.4% of us are fully vaccinated and with the Delta variant multiplying that simply means we are unsafe in crowded places and, to me, that means just about any meeting or in person event I can imagine. Experts say that with the emergence of variants we need perhaps 85% of us to be fully vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. Some say maybe we can get by with 70% vaccinated. But nobody thinks we will reach a 70% rate in every state this year. States like Mississippi, Louisiana, Idaho may never reach 70%.

As Travel Weekly noted. “Go back to April 21, and 40.2% of the U.S. population had received one vaccine dose, compared with 26.1% of Canada’s population and 20.1% of the population of the EU, to cite two prominent examples. As of July 4, however, the U.S. had only increased that figure to 54.5%, while Canada’s single-vaccination rate had soared to 68.6% and the EU was fast catching up to us at 52.1%, according to an analysis by Our World in Data. Barring an unforeseen turn, of course, Canada, EU countries and other wealthy nations will eclipse our fully vaccinated rate in due time.”

I told you we had fallen off a cliff. There now are plenty of vaccine shots available but there are too few willing arms.

Actions have consequences or, in this case, inaction has consequences. Those who decline to be vaccinated are in effect telling travelers to stay home.

And I think many of us will do exactly that. Or they will opt to go to destinations where the residents are more levelheaded.

Any way you parse the numbers, the reality is that anti vaxxers just are saying nope and a consequence is that travel just will not rebound as more of us are cautious about mingling with the unvaxxed.

About half the country’s states are simply unsafe. But CDC makes the data more useful by offering county level reports and, gulp, I find where I live, Maricopa County in AZ, has a “substantial” risk of community transmission and, worse, just 41.2% of us are fully vaccinated. That is why I still generally wear a mask when around others.

If I were you I would not come to Maricopa County – and I think many of us will be making decisions based on these data.

Personally I saw this vividly when, contemplating a possible trip to east Texas, I impulsively decided to look up the particular county I might go to. Just 27.4% of the people have gotten at least one shot. How about neighboring Arkansas? Only 34% of the residents are fully vaccinated, the Delta variant is galloping around the state and, no, I would not even think about going there.

Scratch that trip.

My prediction is that when confronted with a possible business trip we will include in our calculation a look at the state’s vaccination rate and also the particular county’s. See a high number and that nixes that trip.

The number’s look bad in much of the country. Just 47% of the residents of Clark County – where Las Vegas schemes about rebooting business meetings – have gotten even a single shot and that is nowhere near good enough. Erase Nevada off the go to list.

There are successes – Chicago for instance has been smart about vaccinations. So is San Antonio. But for every success, there is a failure.

This is mid 2021 reality. Vaccination rates will make our travel choices for us. Here’s a list of the most and least vaccinated states

And as more of us study such lists before booking a trip that will be very bad news for many destinations. Case in point: Fox 17 TV in Nashville asked this question: “With 10th lowest vaccination rate in US, is it responsible to tout tourism in Tennessee?” I can’t speak for leisure travelers but as regards business travelers my advice to Nashville is promote vaccines first, business travel second.

Or just look at the empty beds around town.

Welcome to the CU2.0 doubleheader podcast where you will hear two perspectives on DEI and the industry. 

“We are stronger together.” That is what Emma Norman, director of learning and development at Local Government Federal Credit Union and also chief diversity officer at the African American Credit Union Coalition, has to say when asked why LGFCU is all in when it comes to supporting the Credit Union DEI Collective.

She adds that what she tells credit unions is that “DEI has to be part of your strategy.”

Think on that.  DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion, a movement that gained force in the past year as evidence multiplied that the United States is a country with deep, lingering racial divides – just maybe is a whole lot more than a nice to do.

“DEI is a business imperative,” said Lynn Heckler, chief talent officer at PSCU. Her point: the credit unions and allied companies that want longterm success will be very sure they look much like their communities and across America those communities are increasingly diverse,

This is a wide ranging podcast, with two very different voices and perspectives but the two women agree on this: DEI is a real, important concern.

Local Government FCU of course is a powerhouse. Its assets exceed $3 billion.

PSCU is the nation’s leading payments CUSO – it supports 1500 credit unions and their many billions of payments annually.

These are two important institutions – and that is why it matters that they are saying DEI is real and it is real  for any business.

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

If you hold an Amex Platinum card – guesses are there are around 400,000 of us, but Amex does not confirm these numbers – it now has become unavoidable that you do a big, deep rethink: Is this the card that best suits me?

If you don’t have it but are mulling applying – there’s a lush 100k miles sign up bonus right now – do the same rethinking because nowadays there are options at the lofty Plat level, notably the Chase sapphire reserve. The era of Plat hegemony is over.

That rethink maybe is all the more urgent because, as the pandemic loosens its grip on our psyches, many of us are facing up to the reality that we will be doing less business travel for the foreseeable future. How much less, for how long? I do not have a crystal ball that can answer those questions. But for now I am assuming I will do minimal business travel in the remainder of this year and I did none in the first half.

I mention that because for years I justified paying for Amex Plat as a business expense that made tedious business trips a mite more tolerable. The club access alone justified the cost but then Amex lost access to all but Delta clubs among the domestic carriers and the Centurion, while lovely, were few in number and then became vastly too popular. The Centurion became the Venice of airport lounges or maybe it embodied that Yogi Berra line, nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded. But, for me, the pleasure of Centurions had vanished amid overcrowded lounges and a scarcity of seats.

Then there’s the question of guest access at Centurion. Amex plans to begin charging for guest access (up to $50 a head) but not until February 2023 – so if air traffic in fact picks up and stays up, as some pundits predict, the Centurion will remain as inviting as a 6 train at 4pm on a Friday night in July at Lex and Grand Central, at least until the guest head count falls in 2023.

The final shoe dropping is the big fee increase – from $550 to $695 as of July 1, 2021. Remember, too, the card cost $450 in early 2017. That’s a 54% bump in just four years.

And does the card still fit my evolving lifestyle, the post pandemic me?

Yes, Amex does conveniently calculate that I saved $250 using the card this year on purchases at BestBuy, HomeDepot, Goldbelly, and there’s another $200 in Uber credits plus miscellaneous givebacks on PayPal purchases for another, say, $100. Add in the free cellphone protection, free Global Entry, etc.

There’s also a new $240 annual digital entertainment credit which will cover my NY Times subscription. And a $100 Saks credit.

Very probably there is $695 in perks.

But do I want these perks? Really?

What I keep choking on however is what seems a good deal – a new, monthly $25 credit at Equinox, the fitness club, and that money can be used at an in person club or an online service. The latter costs$40/monthly so net $15 to a Plat cardholder. Here’s the deal however: I am more like to get my hair dyed green and my nose pierced than I am to use Equinox, not that I have a problem with the club, just that it has little to do with who I am and what I do (and my personal exercise is to tie on a pair of $100 walking shoes and walk, which I did for 10 miles this a.m.)

A lot of the Plat perks seem, well, like stuff we laugh at the characters in Babbitt when they crave similar shiny objects in their day.

It was all so much simpler when Plat gave me airport club access and I flew enough where that mattered.

Now the Amex club access is tarnished, Priority Pass benefits seem to have shriveled for cardholders. Restaurant lounges are excluded.

To renew or no? I can renew at the old rate when my term comes up next month.

But going forward is this new lifestyle card – because that is what Plat now is – right for me and my lifestyle?

And do I really want to spend time tracking and logging the perks and benefits which do change? I want a credit card that works for me. Not vice versa.

I just am not sure about renewing. But I will be by next year. Ask me then.

Awards travel update: I used Amex miles, converted into Delta miles, to buy two round trip comfort class tix from PHX to MAD in September. Cost was around 190,000 miles, which worked out to about a penny a point. But, hell, a lot of those miles were earned buying groceries at Whole Foods, paying dentist bills, vet bills, and other routine, mundane charges. A free trip to Spain in return is an ok deal in my mind. Even if I fell far short of my 2 cents a mile target.

by Robert McGarvey

 You know Renee Sattiewhite. She’s CEO of the African American Credit Union Coalition (AACUC), has been a past guest on this podcast (episode 101), she is a co-star in DCUC’s Tony Hernandez’s recent podcast (155) and she is the person to see if you want to know how African Americans are faring in credit union c-suites, in boardrooms, and as they stand in teller lines.

But, lately. in the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) universe, her interests are broadening and she is pondering how many minorities (Latinos and women for instance) are succeeding in credit unions.

DEI, she says, is not a minute, it’s a movement.  Indeed.  Started amid the despair of last summer – George Floyd RIP – a year into it and the question has to be, what’s been accomplished.  Sattiewhite tells her opinion in this podcast.

Know that progress is getting made. But this is hard, continuing work.

A recent project is CCEP – cross-cultural exchange program – where credit union people are pared with another, typically of a different race, possibly a different gender – for a 90 day dialog.   

A talk with Sattiewhite is lively. She laughs.  She mentions people you should know (Pete Crear, Victor Corro — both past CU 2.0 podcast guests by the way).  

She also expresses fundamental optimism because, she says, talk with young people (Millennials and Gen X) and “they are not playing around.”  These young people want change and are unprepared to accept less.  For them real racial and gender equality is non negotiable.

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

Or is it just that the cash price for the flight is inflated in the first instance?

I am planning a trip to the Iberian Peninsula in early fall.  It had started as mainly Portugal but Portugal has been imposing lockdowns, etc. as it wrestles with an outbreak of the delta variant of Covid-19 – probably all to the good in the long term – and now my focus has shifted to a trip to Madrid and points north in Spain (Leon, Santiago de Compostela, etc.).

So I look on Expedia and, shut my mouth, a Delta flight from Phoenix connecting through ATL is priced at $2296 for premium economy for two fliers, and that is as good a fare as I see except for Condor which flies a milk run with multiple stops (including one in Frankfurt). The Condor flight may be cheap but no…I am not prepared for that long a flight.

But I have a stash of Amex miles.

So I go to the Amex rewards page, plug in details, and a rewards flight is 229,690 points.

Ouch. That is a penny a point.

But I do not see much better deals for any flights to Madrid.

Here’s the other mystery: Is it better to lock in that fare now and part with the miles (I’ll probably plunk down the points, rather than pay cash, because I got ‘em and there’s no value in holding the things since they generally just lose value)?

You may be thinking, there are better deals to other places in Europe? You are right.  But they do not have the Prado, nor do they have the jamon and the short beers that always seem like a 3-star lunch wherever I have eaten and drunk in Madrid.

No, Spain it is, Madrid it must be, and points will be my currency.

One more thing I ponder – is it worth my time to transfer points from Amex to Delta and buy the flight from the airline? I have done that before, for instance when Amex and Delta had a bonus deal going (my memory is that I got a 50% bonus, so 100,000 miles became 150,000).  But I don’t see a similar deal at Amex now  that involves European carriage.

When booking at Delta, miles for two is 240,000 plus $115.50 in cash. A bit dearer than via Amex.

Choices, choices, choices.

Why fly Delta anyway? The flights and prices are comparable to American Airlines from Phoenix and, in this town, those look to be the best to Spain, at least for now. More flights, on more airlines, will be scheduled in the coming month (assuming Covid remains tamped down in Europe and the US) and I do not plan to make a commitment for at least two weeks. So the options may change but, right now, it’s American versus Delta and Delta has a narrow lead because the club in Phoenix is good as is the one in Atlanta.

But I remain gobsmacked at the mileage costs for such flights and in the early fall.  Not prime summer (although who knows that summer will be peak this year for European travel, probably not).

Am I just stuck in a past era?

Or have flight costs been bumped up right now simply because jet fuel is pricey and airplane capacity remains limited, as carriers scramble to get planes and crew and supporting infrastructure in sync?

And who am I to complain? Essentially free flights to Spain. In autumn.  

It’s a good, if dear, life.

by Robert McGarvey

Now don’t you wish you had a magic decoder ring?

There’s an alphabet soup in the podcast title. Let me decipher.

DCUC – Defense Credit Union Council, the trade group for some 181 military themed credit unions (and many are behemoths – Navy Fed, Pen Fed, you get the picture).

Tony Hernandez is the DCUC CEO, after logging 25 years in the Air Force where he finished as a colonel.

AACUC is the African American Credit Union Coalition.  You know AACUC because last year the CEO Renee Sattiewhite was a guest on the show.  Remember that name because you will hear it frequently in this podcast.

As for CCEP that’s a new AACUC initiative that has paired people of different backgrounds and often different races for a 90 day interaction.

Hernandez is on the steering committee, and he has authored CUInsight blogs explaining the why of CCEP.  

The first CCEP round comes to a close in July, but the hunt already is on for participants in a new round.  

Experts debate when the US will become minority majority, meaning whites will no longer be in the majority, but one fact is certain: that day is coming and now is the time to focus on efforts to produce more harmonious race relations,  And a big part of that just is talking with people not like us.  (Whatever we are.)

Along the way in this Hernandez podcast you will hear a great deal about why defense credit unions matter, why they have an ideal membership mix, and how a 25 year Air Force veteran transitioned into the credit union world.

Hernandez’ personal story is something you didn’t expect, from how his wife was instrumental in his getting the DCUC job (never sneer at being a plus one!) to musings about the difficulties in ascending the military ranks ladder.

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