by Robert McGarvey

Regular readers know I have long been gnashing my teeth over what has emerged as the annual question: Amex Plat, to renew or no?  

My most recent vote is yes, I will continue to shell out $550/year, even tho I have not been in a Centurion Club in a year and that had become my primary touch point with American Express. But in an era where I am not flying – and do not envision travel for perhaps another three months and maybe longer – I began looking for new perks from the Platinum card and Amex has responded.

Currently on the docket is a credit of up to $30/monthly on PayPal charges billed to the card. That replaces 2020 credits for streaming video and cell phones that expired at year-end. In my case, it is paying for my New York Times subscription and most of what I pay Netflix.

There’s also a continuing $15/monthly Uber credit (also applicable to Uber eats, which is how I have used it).

There also are miscellaneous and unexpected credits such as $100 annually ($50 max, every six months) against Saks charges.

There’s a similar $100 credit against HomeDepot charges (online only).  $100 at BestBuy (online only). And literally 90+ more that pop up on my screen.

But now Amex has rolled out a new perk for Plat that in effect offers cellphone protection to cardholders who bill their monthly wireless charges to Amex.  Similar protection costs $10 to $12 per month via Apple and various other carriers and retailers.

It takes effect April 1.

Here’s what it delivers: “Reimbursement for the actual cost to repair or replace a Stolen or damaged Eligible Cellular Wireless Telephone.”

There’s some fine print but surprisingly little. The coverage is reasonably generous:  “The maximum liability is $ 800, per claim, per Eligible Card Account. Each claim is subject to a $ 50 deductible. Coverage is limited to two (2) claims per Eligible Card Account per 12 month period.”

The only curious exclusion I noted is this: “Eligible Cellular Wireless Telephones that are lost or Mysterious Disappearance.”  That’s something of a bummer because I know many who have lost a phone in a taxi or an Uber.

But I have never lost a phone so I am personally unbothered by this exclusion.

Mind you, I have two phones that will fall under this protective umbrella on April 1: a presently uncovered Pixel 3 and an iPhone 8.  So I call this a good deal worth perhaps $20/monthly to me.

Add that to the PayPal credit and the annual $200 Uber credit and the card, as the cliche goes, pays for itself.  And it truly does.  

Do note that Amex Plat continues to offer a “purchase protection plan” that essentially gives you 90 days free from worry after buying something with the card.

There’s a $10,000 cap on the purchase amount.

Also still in effect is the American Express Extended Warranty Coverage which adds a year to the standard manufacturer’s warranty for most items purchased with the card. That’s useful because many warranties run just a year, so this doubles the coverage at no cost to the cardholder. Personally I have used it a couple times – with computers – and will say I was pleased with the service.

Yes, many cards offer similar extended warranty coverage – the only network without this perk is Discover, which had it but discontinued it – so the Amex plan isn’t unique. But I know from experience it does work.

Look, I understand: in many ways I too would prefer to be regularly stopping into the Centurion (and there now is one in my home airport, Phoenix, that I have yet to step into).

But I am glad to see Amex tossing new perks our way, to keep us in the ranks despite the absence of the travel perks that just about all of us signed up for Platinum to get.

Stay tuned. There will be more perks.  

And then, poof, they will vanish when most of us are back on the road again in perhaps six to 12 months.  Will we then kvetch about this absence?

I think I will when the cellphone protection times out.  What about you?

 by Robert McGarvey

On July 1, Sundie Seefried, longtime CEO of Partner Colorado Credit Union, makes a huge career change. On that day she resigns the credit union job to become the CEO of Safe Harbor Financial, LLC, a Partner Colorado subsidiary formed for the purpose of handling cannabis related banking.

When Safe Harbor was created in 2015, it was a groundbreaking institution for conducting compliance based banking that would satisfy regulators.  

Safe Harbor has become a big, consuming business and, said Seefried, it’s helped put credit unions into the conversation of cannabis banking – and, increasingly, that is a conversation that is being heard as more states legalize marijuana.  Included are multiple big states: California, Washington, Michigan, and Illinois. In only a handful of states is marijuana fully illegal.

In this podcast Seefried talks about the process of validating the cash that flows through a marijuana business. She also talks about the early days of Safe Harbor – and the hostility and ridicule she faced.

Who’s laughing now?

By any measure, Sundie Seefried has emerged as the queen of cannabis banking.

What would her father, a Baptist, missionary think about this? We ask her.

Just as we ask about that uncommon first name, Sundie.  

We ask about being perceived as a maverick in a credit union industry that does not always revere its mavericks.

The one question she is asked that she doesn’t answer is the question, are there plans to take Safe Harbor public?

Her podcast with CUInsight is mentioned. Here’s a link.

Reference is made to how much it costs to open a Dairy Queen franchise – and surely you want to know how that came up.  Listen for it.

Earlier CU 2.0 cannabis related podcast guests include Paul Stull, also multiple guests on two long cannabis podcasts, episode 20 and an early unnumbered show.

Listen up. This is a fun episode.

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

First came the jab in my upper arm and ten days later came my startling wish that a meeting agenda I was looking at – a virtual meeting of course – was for an in person meeting.  I had not had such a thought in a year and in that year 500,000+ of us have died from Covid-19, I myself had the disease (mercifully, a milder form), and just about everything I do outside my home today is different.

But there I caught myself sniffing at the inadequacies of some virtual meeting formats and thinking that I was ready to resume in-person meetings. Thinking that was triggered by my having gotten the first Pfizer injection on Feb. 19.  

Of course I was deep into delusion.  In point of fact, just the first Pfizer shot delivers about 90% immunity after 21 days – but note I only have 10 days and also note that other studies put the immunity from one shot nearer 50%.  Note 3: I may have some additional immunity from having had the disease – but nobody knows how much or how long it lasts (and I had it about a year ago).  

I am scheduled for the second shot on March 12 and you can bet that morning is blocked off on my calendar.  

Even so, a question popped into my mind: will I start traveling come April 1 (fool’s day of course)?

The full vaccination immunity for me will kick in around then.

And are others planning likewise? Are we in fact on the cusp of a boom in travel, including business travel?

I know many in this venue are cheering on the idea of a business travel boom.  So far I have pooh-poohed the prospect but am I now changing my mind?

Not exactly.

The more I noodled the facts knowable by me, the more my initial skepticism seemed the likeliest outcome.

I started with vaccination data.  In Maricopa County, where I live, 15% of us now have gotten at least one shot.  

Only 5% of us have gotten both shots.

What’s more, there aren’t a lot of business travelers in the vaccinated population.  Those 75 and older are the most vaccinated group – 53% of them have gotten a shot.

About half of all those vaccinated in Maricopa County are 65 or older. Again, not a group known for lots of business travel.

Might these numbers fuel a boomlet in leisure travel?  Arnie Weissman, editor at Travel Weekly, thinks as much and I am coming over to that point of view. I definitely can see seniors buying cruises, flying to visit grandchildren, and probably getting busy ticking off bucket list travels. Probably in Q2 of this year.

But I don’t see younger demographics soon joining the traveling public.

They just won’t have been jabbed.

It will take until Q3 – possibly Q4 – to have vaccinated perhaps 75% of us, which probably is as high as we will go.  

It will take years – estimates go as high as seven years – to vaccinate the world.

As for the revival of business travel, certainly not before Q4. Vaccines just won’t have been jabbed into the arms.  The majority of US business travelers are 30 to 49 and, nope, that is not a demographic that is prioritized for vaccinations. They will be lucky to have been jabbed by September.

Yes, some companies have the money to put their employees at the front of the line – but right now the negative publicity that would surely trigger outweighs the benefits of vaccinated employees. Impfneid, vaccine envy, is real.  

Gartner research found that only 11% of companies have resumed business travel or plan to in the next six months. 61% of companies told Gartner they “just don’t know” when they will resume business travel.

Odds are high, too, that even when it returns, business travel will be shrunken version of its former self as organizations realize they can function, well and more profitably, without traveling much at all. That realization is not vanishing.  

Employment lawyers indicate that many organizations are – rightly – worried about legal consequences of employee travels in a Covid era, and even if the legal issues vanish (there continue to be state and federal efforts to protect organizations from Covid triggered litigation).  But the lawyers also say that, litigation aside, many employees will simply refuse to take business trips now.  Fear of the disease is high.

My advice regarding business travel remains the same: unpack.  We ain’t going anywhere anytime soon on business. I know I’m not.

Jim Blaine on how credit unions can win…

by Robert McGarvey

In a wide ranging, 90 minute interview, retired State Employees’ Credit Union CEO Jim Blaine offered up a provocative look at possible tomorrows for the credit union movement.

The throughline is simply: Quō vādis? – Where are you going?

In 2000 there were over 10,000 credit unions. Now there’s a smidge over 5,000. That math is brutal. But it is fact. 

This is where Blaine’s insights come in. His views are ultimately optimistic because what he sees is how a credit union can win. He knows a lot about that.

Blaine, who served as CEO from 1979 to 2016  of what became the nation’s second biggest credit union, grew the institution’s assets from $300 million to $33 billion. He left a strong foundation; SECU now has over $47 billion in assets.

And nowadays, when Blaine looks around the credit union universe, what he sees is a highly talented, youthful pool of c-suite credit union executives. They have a lot of tech smarts. That is good news. The bad news is this: “I wonder if many are looking at a credit union more as a business than as a cooperative.”

A commercial bank, bluntly put, is in business to profit its shareholders. Period. A cooperative, by virtue of that status, commits to seven cooperative principles that date back to the 1844 Rochdale cooperative. Among the principles: democratic member control; cooperation among cooperatives; concern for community.

Every US credit union is a cooperative, those principles are its principles. And they are also non-profits. Credit unions exist to benefit their members and their communities.

Nothing could be more different from those principles than a commercial bank’s bedrock purpose and, says Blaine, those differences are the building blocks that pave the way to credit union success.

Continued at CUInsight.com

Hear the CU2.0 podcast with Blaine here.

 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

“It is nice to know that everybody’s kind of in their trackies, apart from those b*****s who went to Dubai.”

So Jake Quickenden moaned to the Manchester Evening News. He’s a Dancing on Ice winner and something of a UK celeb. The Dubai incident – where a bunch of British social media influencers and reality TV stars were treated to a junket and as they posted snaps of their holidays online, the British, indeed the global, public roared in angry resentment – has got to give anybody pause before jetting off to anyplace exotic.

Quickenden continued: “We’re all trying to get through this lockdown at the end of the day so that we can get on with our lives.

“People can rebuild their businesses, people can rebuild their relationships and their mates. We’re all trying to do that, apart from the ones who went to Dubai.”

Ouch.

This is flygskam – flight shaming – on steroids.

Know that Quickenden is just one of literally thousands of voices raised in condemnation of the skin flaunting influencers in Dubai and therefore you might think that the brands and locations that have tossed junkets to influencers might have pulled away from this marketing tactic, if not out of disgust at unnecessary travel in a pandemic but simply out of a survival instinct.

Which raises a key question: Are the brands that sponsor and host such events morally irresponsible?

The British influencers, by the way, traveled legally in that they claimed their Dubai hop was business travel and, for them, it was.

Sure, the British public, much of it, did not see the junket in the same light. But if you are earning money by showing some skin in the sun then, yes, such trips are business for you.

Legalities aside, however, the PR blowback was intense and negative. So it has seemed.

But appearances may deceive.

Indeed The Drum – an online pub that covers digital marketing – now reports that Dubai may not be forgotten but brands nonetheless are pushing forward with marketing plans built around influencers traveling abroad.

Is this nuts? Maybe not, says UK web design firm Rouge, which relates:

“we analysed the Instagram accounts of 50 popular social media stars who have been pictured abroad this Winter. And the results are somewhat surprising…

Likes per post for influencers abroad are up a staggering 144 percent compared to their average.” 

The Drum added: “The influencer marketing landscape is forecast to grow by 15% in 2021 to a whopping $5.86bn.”

The New Statesman elaborated: “Kaz Crossley, one of the Love Island stars currently in Dubai, gets 50k-60k likes per post on holiday versus nearly half that (roughly 30k likes) on posts she shares of herself in the UK. Another example is Molly Mae Hague – a Love Island 2019 runner-up… – who posts regularly to YouTube…. While her video stats vary, ranging anywhere between half a million and a million views, her travel vlogs in the pandemic have been some of her most successful ever. Her vlog from Crete this summer has 1.4 million views and a trip to Ibiza has a whopping 1.9 million; a trip to the Maldives in December has 1.3 million and – you guessed it – a vlog of her trip to Dubai that same month has 1.2 million.”

We – you and I – are drawn to this content and therefore the influencers and their sponsors are simply serving up what we apparently crave. As we are in lockdown – by government fiat in the UK, or simply by personal choice for many US travelers – we have our eyes on those who have broken out.

But a money question for the hosts and sponsors of these junkets: Yes, visits to influencer posts and content went up but did any visitor actually make any purchases? My guess is no, especially not among the core UK travelers who remain in lockdown.

Never confuse site visits with end results. I should have thought that part of the Marketing 101 class. But, evidently, it isn’t.

Just because we surf to a site doesn’t mean we are transacting.

Site visitor counts be damned, the Dubai campaign failed. Period.

If we ain’t buying tickets to fly there, or booking hotel rooms to stay, it’s one big fail.

What’s the Credit Union Response?

by Robert McGarvey

New research out of Juniper smacks most credit union leaders in the face. That’s because 50% of us now say we would consider switching to a digital-only bank. Indeed, many households already are actively contemplating a move to a digital-only bank.

Face this reality: Very soon it will be one whole year in which many of us have not set foot in a branch. And you know what? We have satisfactorily done our banking despite that abstinence.

Many, the Juniper survey says, now believe there are no compelling reasons to want to go back to in-branch banking when the pandemic threat passes—which, by the way, won’t be until year-end 2021 (and maybe, if the variants prove hardy, longer than that). Some have deluded themselves in thinking that a day is coming, and soon, when, click, a switch is thrown and suddenly, as in a Twilight Zone-style slice of life, we are thrust back into our 2019 lifestyle… which for many credit union executives means in-branch. It ain’t happening that way.

by Robert McGarvey

 You may think you have it tough managing a credit union in the pandemic.  You need to talk with David Tuyo, CEO of University Credit Union, with assets edging up towards $1 billion and a growth rate in loans that’s running around 30% per year.

2020 too saw sustained growth – in assets, loans, and even members.  That’s despite the reality that University serves a membership of what the name suggests: colleges and universities, mainly in California, some faith based (St. Mary’s College in northern California and Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles), others large publics (UCLA and University of California Irvine).  The kicker is that California colleges were closed for much of 2020 due to the pandemic and yet University grew.

And every University branch was closed. Still it thrived.

How? Tuyo tells in this podcast.

The credit union had had a multi-year plan to go full into digital.  What had been envisioned as a three year transformation took three months.

He also notes that University’s compensation is entirely team based – that is, raises are a result of the organization’s performance.  Not the individual’s.

Another Tuyo word of advice: now is the time to let your nerd out.  He means dig into and revel in the data. Really know your members and prospective members, what they need and want.

At around $875 million in assets, can University survive? Tuyo says his benchmark is that he wants the credit union to perform at the rate of a $2 billion institution.  That, he thinks, is the velocity that is needed to stay competitive in a world where a handful of big banks control half the banking in the U.S.

Along the way mention is made of a CUBroadcast show he did.  It’s linked 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

by Robert McGarvey

You like food. You want to make money. Right there, for many, the fantasy collapses. Who can actually make a living by focusing on food? For many — millions probably — food blogging is a hobby. Then there are the growing numbers who actually write about food and earn substantial income from a mix of brand sponsorships and advertising dollars.

This has become a golden age for food bloggers especially as the pandemic and associated lockdowns have fueled surging interest in food as well as a lot more home cooking. From baking bread to seeking inventive ways to prepare chicken wings (an unexpected pandemic favorite), a hungry public has turned to the Web and social media to learn what to cook, now, and how to cook it better.

Smart food bloggers are profiting from this.

Keep reading at StartUp Savant