Credit union profitability is sliding downward. One consultant, Megan Cummins at Fiserv-owned Raddon Performance Analytics, insists that the fix is to nurture a sales culture within them.
You know that Fiserv is a sales culture. It lives to sell, simple as that, and it sells to live.
Would something similar work in a credit union?
As for the claim that credit union profitability is tumbling, Cummins points to Raddon data that say only 29.8% of the 300 credit unions it measures data for are profitable. That’s down from 33.9% two years ago.
Cummins told CU Today: “‘There are credit unions that definitely have a sales culture, but there are still many that don’t,’ Cummins said, recalling a recent meeting with a credit union during which the topic of sales was addressed. ‘They wouldn’t even let me say the word sales in the meeting because you can’t say sales at this credit union. They said they never use the word because they don’t want to sell to their members.’
‘In that meeting the credit union said they never want to feel that they’re selling. But at this point we have to sell to the members we have. We have no choice.’” (Emphasis added.)
Coca-Cola, Delta Air, Major League Baseball, Atlanta, the list of boycott targets keeps growing as sides are taken and lines are drawn in the debates over voting legislation in Georgia but not only because there is similar legislation in Arizona and more states.
In Texas, for instance, both American Airlines and Dell have spoken out against proposed legislation that many believe will suppress voting in that state. Both companies are likely to figure in boycott lists too and, yes, I am pleased that I recently bought a Dell computer, the first I have ever bought from that company.
Now travel in particular has become politicized.
Understand this: I am strongly opposed to attempts to limit voting and yet I am okay with consumer boycotts. I still remember going years without a leaf of iceberg lettuce entering my mouth, or a grape, in response to Cesar Chavez’ Salad Bowl boycott, which lasted from 1970 to roughly 1978.
Personally I am on record stating I would decline to stay in or even attend an event at a Trump managed property. That’s a kind of boycott and I am not alone. Most experts believe Trump’s hotels are in woeful shape financially
Our system is one where boycotts, often based on political differences, have a long history. Do they work? That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. The Freakonomics folks explored it in a long podcast (here’s the transcript). Some experts flatly proclaim boycotts don’t work, witness UCLA prof Ivo Welch in the Freakonomics podcast: “Boycotts almost surely will never work.”
A case in point is the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US and the refusal of France to support that effort. Across the US anti-French activities and boycotts flourished. French fries even were (briefly) renamed freedom fries and many swore to boycott French wine. Did the boycott work? According to Freakonomics, “According to three economists who later analyzed the data: ‘we show that there actually was no boycott effect.’ So why is there often no boycott effect? One reason may be that boycotts get a lot of attention — they’re a good, easy, spicy story for journalists to cover — which gives the impression that the outrage is larger than it really is.”
Another reason is that many proclaimed boycotters are all mouth no follow through. They insist – loudly – that they won’t swill French hooch but many never drank wine anyway and others who do like a tipple apparently continued to drink French wine, just on the QT and in the privacy of their homes. And maybe they even drove to the next town to stock up on Burgundy so they wouldn’t bump into a neighbor while navigating the aisles at Total Wine with a cart stuffed with French imports.
Even with the Salad Bowl strike it is hard to declare Chavez and the United Farm Workers the clearcut winner. That was a long, brutal labor action with much pain on all sides and, you know what, I grew not to miss iceberg lettuce, which I still rarely eat, and I never had much interest in table grapes anyway. I hope what I did benefitted the farm workers but I am not sure it did.
Even so, stiffen your backbones, you Delta bashers and MLB boycotters. Much as I think your crusade is doomed (and thankfully so), part of me wants you to stick with it because it will make my travel so much easier.
It certainly is the right of Trumpers to decline to fly Delta and I hope they stick with that resolve so I will know which carrier I will prefer. Note: it’s that ying and yang that unravels the impact of many boycotts. For each who swears never to fly Delta or drink a Coke, there I am swearing to fly Delta and at least thinking about buying a few liters of Diet Coke, which has long been my drink of choice in the sky. It’s more so now.
Maybe I’ll fly to Atlanta to catch a baseball game. Last time I was in that town overnight it was to catch a Queen concert. But now I am thinking Atlanta seems a mighty fine destination.
Buckle up, the ride is just now entering turbulence.
The building still stands at 420 Notre Dame Avenue in Manchester NH. That’s where the nation’s first credit union – St. Mary’s Bank – opened its doors in 1908, to serve founding French American mill workers (and, yes, much of the original paperwork was written in French).
St. Mary’s Bank outgrew that space, moved into other facilities, but some years later it recognized that it wanted to preserve its original history and an attempt to buy it from its then owner was made.
It did not succeed.
As for how therefore the building now houses the America’s Credit Museum you want to listen to this podcast with Stephanie Smith, executive director of the museum.
The museum now is deep into an effort to capture and preserve the memories of a generation of credit union leaders who are entering retirement.
Words of advice: don’t throw away your archives without first contacting the museum. You may well have pieces that the museum will covet as it seeks to document the how of the rise of America’s credit union movement. You’ll hear more about this process in the podcast.
You will also hear how and why you want to visit the museum – which is about an hour north of Boston. Of course the pandemic has impacted the museum – it is presently open only by appointment. But that will change and, even better, the pandemic has prompted the museum to step up its efforts to digitize its collections which will put them within reach of us wherever we are.
Ultimately, said Smith, the mission of the museum is to capture the credit union difference – and that happens through the histories of the many in the movement who have shaped today’s credit unions.
Along the way, many mentions are made of Jim Blaine, the retired CEO of State Employees’ Credit Union of North Carolina. Hear the Blaine podcast here. Read more of Blaine’s thinking in this CUInsight blog.
Also mentioned is Bucky Sebastian. His podcast is 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
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.
The headline in Travel Weekly jumped out at me: “Several cruise lines require vaccines, but not everybody is on board.”
Back up a step. Let us review facts. At least 83 are known to have died a Covid-19 related death on a cruise ship. There were thousands of cases among passengers. Tens of thousands of passengers were grievously inconconvenienced, in some cases doing a Flying Dutchman journey in search of a safe harbor, sometimes for weeks.
No travel vendor had a blacker eye than cruise ships in the Covid era. No vendor of any kind – not grocers or restaurants, nothing – had a worse reputation.
That’s part of the reason the CDC continues to deny cruise lines the right to sail from US ports.
I have cruised perhaps 10 times – more? – and I like it, especially for certain destinations (the Greek isles are a favorite, as is Alaska). But I still have no interest in cruising and the Travel Weekly headline is why.
The cruise industry knows it has to restore passenger confidence. Many cruise lines already are doing the right, smart thing and requiring crew – who typically live in cramped quarters with scant personal space – to be vaccinated. What about crew who feel that’s a violation of their rights?
There are other jobs on this planet. They should look for them. They will. Crew aren’t the problem.
Some passengers apparently are.
A growing number of cruise lines now require vaccinations for passengers, usually 18 and over.
But that has triggered a potential passenger grumble. Reported Travel Weekly, “Although the majority of potential cruisers are on board with the idea of vaccine mandates, some travel advisors say many of their clients are not and are disappointed with cruise line vaccine requirements for sailing.
DeeAna Archer, owner of Texas-based Archer Luxury Travel, said that about 80% of her clients have told her they would refuse to get a vaccine this year.”
I have three words for those refusers: Go pound sand.
Of course it is their choice not to cruise and, given their refusal to get vaccinated, they also have decided they do not plan to cruise. Simple as that and I for one will hold the cruise lines to a vaccine mandate because only a village idiot would cruise this year without a mandatory vaccine policy in place.
Are the travelers who say they won’t get vaccinated village idiots? That’s a topic for them to discuss with cognitive experts.
I just won’t plan to cruise or in any way travel with them this year, or next, and, yes, I am dually vaccinated, meaning the full protection of the Pfizer vaccine has kicked in for me and still I have no interest in lowering my protections to accommodate people who doubtless also believe in hordes of Satan worshippers inside the Beltway.
Count me as also wanting airlines to require vaccinations for passengers and crew – and there’s growing support for that idea at least as regards international travel.
Yes, I know that having the vaccine does not prove a person is Covid free. Latest test results show about a 90% effectiveness for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The J & J vaccine’s effectiveness is nearer 70%.
And yet I am dramatically more comfortable with the concept of cruising or flying with others who have proof of vaccination than I am of flying with an uncertified rabble.
There really is no way a person who wants travel to resume fastest could possibly be against vaccine requirements because there is nothing that will accelerate travel recovery with the alacrity and numbers that widespread vaccinations will bring.
About 25% of us – one in four – now say they will not get vaccinated. There are no good arguments against getting vaccinated and, yes, initially I expressed personal hesitancy, mainly due to an abiding distrust of anything touched by Trump and his acolytes. But now with 50 million of us fully vaccinated, and 90 million more partially vaccinated, and comparatively few side effects of significance, there is no good arguments against it.
Opposing vaccinations and vaccination requirements is another way of supporting a sputtering failing economy and a dead travel business.
Before logging into this call, I studied up on who John Herrera is. He was born in Costa Rica, then came to the US to go to college at the University of Delaware and one thing led to another and instead of going back to Costa Rica to build a better society he stayed in the US and has worked on building a better society for all of us but with a special focus on Hispanic immigrants such as himself.
My first question to him, off mike, is how did he get from there to here. The podcast starts off with him telling that saga.
Today Herrera is a senior vice president at Self-Help in North Carolina, where his focus is on Hispanic relations and he has been busy building banking relationships with immigrant communities in North Carolina but also Illinois, Florida and California.
Also on is resume is that he is a co-founder of the very successful Latino Community Credit Union in North Carolina. That credit union got its start some 20 years ago when there was a wave of robberies and murders of immigrant workers who got paid in cash and often carried large sums.
He is the founder of El Pueblo in North Carolina which focuses on civil rights for immigrants.
In this podcast he offers rich and deep insights into how to serve immigrants – especially Hispanics – and he muses on how the United States is soon to become a minority majority nation (by 2045 according to many demographers). This is smart, sensitive commentary. Take notes. It’s a primer in how to serve a crucial US demographic.
Along the way, many mentions are made of Jim Blaine, the retired CEO of State Employees’ Credit Union of North Carolina. Hear the Blaine podcast here. Read more of Blaine’s thinking in this CUInsight blog.
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
Word of warning: be sure to check and keep checking your many airline miles, at every carrier, because they just may be in the hands of cyber crooks.
Another big travel related data beach is why.
The victim is a company called SITA and if you haven’t heard of it, join the club. But SITA is a big data processor for many carriers and in a March 4th release it said: “SITA confirms that it was the victim of a cyber-attack, leading to a data security incident involving certain passenger data that was stored on SITA Passenger Service System (US) Inc. servers. Passenger Service System (US) Inc. (‘SITA PSS’) operates passenger processing systems for airlines.”
My favorite sentence in this otherwise uninformative statement is this: “This was a highly sophisticated attack.”
Trust me: you will never see a breach announcement that says, “The attack was the kind dreamed up by especially dumb 8th graders.” Nope. The attackers always are arch criminals and card carrying Mensa members.
Right.
But this SITA attack, the little we know about it even a month later, is ugly business especially for those of us who covet and collect airline miles.
On which carriers? Damn near all. Some 90% of the planet’s air carriers are said to use SITA. The company handles many reservations and ticketing.
Other than saying there was a serious “data security incident” on February 24 the company tells us bupkis. Company spokesperson Edna Ayme-Yahil told TechCrunch zip, for instance.
Travel Weekly got a little bit more info: “In a statement, SITA spokeswoman Edna Ayme-Yahil declined to say how many airlines have been impacted by the breach. The company also didn’t provide many details on the type of data compromised, but it did note that the data includes some personal data of airline customers, including frequent flyer account data.”
Ayme-Yahil also told Travel Weekly: “Each affected airline has been provided with the details of the exact type of data that has been compromised, including details of the number of data records within each of the relevant data categories.”
That mum’s the word posture is the norm in breaches but it is maddeningly unhelpful to possible victims who have no idea what was stolen, if the theft in fact impacts their data and what, if anything, they should do about it.
But various SITA customers – among them: United and American airlines – have been sounding alarms with a particular focus on loyalty programs.
United specifically said some customer Star Alliance data was affected, but it stressed that MileagePlus data were not touched.
American said it did not use SITA but some frequent flier data passed through the system so that loyalty points accrued on other carriers could be accounted.
Lufthansa, meantime, said 1.35 million Miles and More members were impacted.
Singapore Air has said the breach may have affected as many as 580,000 people in its loyalty programs.
Even FinnAir says 200,000 of its loyalty members were impacted.
Skift summed up the carnage: “More than two million travelers enrolled in the frequent flier programs of at least ten airlines had some of their data hacked, according to messages they received recently from the carriers.”
That’s a punch in the face.
Even worse is that we don’t really know what data was lifted.
The still worse news is that it is on you to protect yourself and we simply must proceed as though the hackers got away with our account numbers and log in info – precisely what they would need to steal the miles and sell them on the dark web or convert them into easily sold goods (iPhones are extraordinarily popular).
The worst news is that, sigh, there is nothing different now: our loyalty programs are and have been easy pickings for criminals. I wrote about an American breach in 2015, ditto a United breach. I could have written the same story many more times but why bother when there is nothing new to say?
I wrote about the Sita breach- after waiting almost a month in the vain hope for more info – simply because of its breadth (just about every carrier you and I use is involved) which is inversely proportional to how much we know about it, which is a teaspoonful of worrisome uncertainties.
Protect yourself, don’t trust the carriers. That is the bottomline.
CUNA is still at its “Open Your Eyes” to a credit union campaign and Teresa Freeborn is still heading the effort. Regular listeners will remember Freeborn from her podcast two years ago, episode 29, and when she asked for a return we gladly said yes.
You probably heard that CUNA paused the campaign last year for what was called a re-set. Freeborn tells what happened.
Along the way, CUNA spun the campaign off as a separate company January 1, 2020. The campaign now is led by CU Awareness, LLC
Freeborn also tells what is happening now where about half the nation’s states are on board with supporting the campaign and more are on tap to go online this year.
Freeborn stresses in the podcast that this is a critical chance for credit unions to join together in lifting what has been a long stagnant market share. The big banks keep getting bigger. Credit unions need to fight the trend.
Freeborn’s belief is that the cooperative structure and nature of credit unions is a huge advantage – but it is not always cleverly deployed. The “Open Your Eyes” campaign is a step in that direction.
(On that note, do read the CUInsight blog “Credit unions, Quo Vadis,” which draws on a conversation with retired credit union CEO Jim Blaine to develop the theme that the cooperative foundation is the key to success in credit unions.)
In this podcast Freeborn clearly discusses her disappointments in leading this campaign and at the top of the list, there is meager participation among credit unions with over $1 billion in assets. By her count just 98 of the biggest 320 credit unions are supporting “Open Your Eyes” – and their maximum annual contribution is capped at $500,000. Freeborn does not know why the biggest are holding back and she is plain in her unhappiness about this.
“We are trying to build the credit union brand,” said Freeborn and her point is that a rising tide lifts all ships. The campaign will benefit all credit unions.
Why don’t more people join and make real use of credit unions? They don’t believe they can join one and if they can, they don’t believe it could have the national reach of the biggest banks. The facts are different – but many in the consuming public just don’t know. Thus the need for a continuing campaign to put credit unions on the minds of many of us.
By the way, “Open Your Eyes” is an entirely digital campaign and you may think, I have never seen an ad. Freeborn says she too has never seen an ad but she is happy about that because the campaign is targeted – specifically at Millennials – and she is not in that group.
So if you are not seeing ads just maybe that means the campaign is functioning as designed.
Just coincidentally, on the day we talked for this podcast, Xceed, where Freeborn had been CEO, voted to merge with Kinecta. 83% of voting Xceed members approved the merger, which has created a $6 billion credit union, the nations 35th largest. Freeborn is staying on as president and has promised a return visit to discus in detail the merger and what it may mean for credit unions.
This podcast is only about “Open Your Eyes.” That’s a huge topic on its own. 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
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.
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
Maybe it is because I now have gotten my second jab but suddenly I am again thinking about travel related issues and in my face is a new Travelers United lawsuit against MGM that flatly claims: MGM is lying about the costs of an overnight stay in their hotels.
Ouch.
The suit claims that MGM practices deceptive pricing because it “hides” the resort fee it slaps on its room nights. This adds up to big bucks – “hundreds of millions of dollars” in the past decade, per Travelers United, a traveler advocacy group based in Washington DC.
Reported Travel Weekly: “The organization claims that MGM Resorts currently charges a resort fee at all of its U.S. properties, which include the Maryland-based MGM National Harbor, located just outside of Washington, as well as the MGM Grand, Bellagio, Aria, Mandalay Bay, New York-New York and Luxor properties in Las Vegas, among others.”
Resort fees add up. Travelers United pointed to a room night at the Luxor that cost $29 in July 2020. The resort fee was $35 per night.
Travelers United further claims that in the pandemic resort fees have not been reduced, although some of the services and amenities the fees supposedly cover have been reduced or outright eliminated.
Of course there is nothing new about this story. As far back as 2013 I wrote about “resort fee scams” for TheStreet. It’s a topic I have returned to many times – 2014, 2016, 2019 and many more.
The only things that have changed is that more hotels and resorts charge them and the amounts have steadily increased. The $19 fee of 2013 now is twice as much and, bar the door, as many hoteliers drift nearer insolvency in the Covid era expect that there will be still more and higher hidden resort fees, urban amenity fees, and who knows what else they will be called.
The other reason hoteliers do this – and I have asked many – is their assertion that the competition does it. That is, the competitor down the road deceptively advertises a room price (by failing to disclose the resort fee) and therefore the competitor says he is obliged to do likewise or risk losing the business because consumers will take the lower price.
There is not an abundance of evidence that says this is true, especially not at higher price points. Many guests might opt for a $99 per night room over one priced at $104 – but it just is not proven that guests would opt for a $370 hotel room over a $400 room on the basis of price alone. So a core defense of hidden resort fees is unproven.
Also true is that hotels could clearly disclose that there is an additional fee for a bundle of services for those who opt in. Just as there are extra fees for those who use the resort or hotel WiFi in many cases (although in some cases that is bundled into a resort fee, even when the guest has no intention of using the pool, the gym, etc).
Clearly the system is based on deception and is just wrong.
But still the fees persist.
How do they get away with this? We don’t complain and, at least for the past four years, there was no appetite in Washington, DC for taking away hotelier revenue streams. The latter may change with a new administration but what probably won’t change is our passive acceptance of deceptive advertising.
This shoe is on our feet. It’s up to us to demand changes.
We can also try to duck the fees. The Points Guy notes that many Las Vegas stays that are paid for with points are exempt from resort fees. That includes IHG, Hyatt and Hilton.
Another way – used by me on multiple occasions – is to book into an organization’s block of rooms for a meeting and, often, the meeting planner has negotiated a zero resort fee for attendees. That will continue if only because meetings are likely to return to Las Vegas in slow motion and resorts will be fighting for them.
But you are on your own when it comes to ducking resort fees in locations that are primarily leisure focused (as more will be in 2021 and well into 2022). There won’t be a large corporate meeting planner that has your back.
Your other option: badger your Senators and members of the House to take action. In 2016, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill introduced a bill that would have blocked hidden resort fees. It went nowhere and McCaskill lost her seat in 2018 – her stand on resort fees had no impact on that outcome.
But it could come up for a vote in the next two years, very possibly with different results in both the Senate and the House.
Remember, nobody is saying hoteliers can’t charge resort fees. Just that they have to disclose the charge before it lands on our bill. It is just about impossible not to support that. So write your legislators They just may act.
What about the Travelers United suit? I applaud the effort – and maybe it will prevail. But why wait when we can take our own action?
