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This podcast explores contemporary, critical thinking and issues impacting the nation's credit unions. What do they need to be doing to not just survive but prosper?
499 Episodes
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Send us Fan Mail Do you want to talk about bad debts and collections and…what’s that, you’d rather discuss athlete’s foot and gyms? Listen up: on the show today is Gwyneth Borden, founder and CEO of Remynt, a debt collection CUSO - funded by One Washington Financial, the investment arm of Washington State Employees Credit Union and a recent guest on the show along with Starlight, an innovative fintech that also won funding from One Washington Financial. So, yes, Remynt is doing coll...
Send us Fan Mail It’s time to talk about something really, truly exciting in credit union land. How about online/mobile calculators? Calculators! Yes, I hear those derive laughs but listen up: on this show you will hear from Tim Pranger at Appli, who has developed calculators that users genuinely like and use. Katie Ullman, vice president of marketing and community at First Source Credit Union in Utica NY, is also on. That’s an institution with around $1 billion in assets. A...
Send us Fan Mail What do you know about Gen Z? That just may be the critical question confronting credit unions today and that’s because, age 13 to 29, Gen Z is increasingly the focus of fintechs, neo banks and non banks who all want to grab these consumers. How can credit unions win in this battle? On the show is Lee Wetherington, senior director of corporate strategy at Jack Henry, and lately he has been thinking in depth about Gen Z because this generation has entered a prime spendin...
Send us Fan Mail The CUInsight headline caught my eye: “Why credit unions must step up as financial stabilizers to rebuild consumer confidence.” The piece was authored by Dave Buerger, CEO of Union Credit and, before that, he was CEO of CuneXus, where he was a co-founder. At Union Credit the mission is delivering 1-click, perpetual loans to credit union members. 70+ credit unions are Union Credit customers and a key to Union Credit’s business is that it memberizes non members...
Send us Fan Mail Agentic AI. Google’s Gemini explains what this means: “Agentic AI represents a shift from AI that simply 'talks' to AI that 'does.' While previous iterations of AI were primarily reactive—answering questions or generating text when prompted—Agentic AI systems are proactive. They can reason, plan, and execute multi-step tasks autonomously to achieve a specific goal." Agentic AI is the hot topic in AI today and credit unions can have it. Now. On the show are Abhishek Tiwari...
Send us Fan Mail And First Entertainment Credit Union Begat CineFi. Say what? First Entertainment is the big show business credit union. Based in Hollywood, it has assets of around $2.1 billion and serves around 90,000 members, many of them who work in Hollywood, doing everything from acting to the skilled crafts (such as set building) that create Hollywood’s magic. On the show is Stephen Owen, CEO of First Entertainment and he is here to tell what CineFi is, why First Entertainme...
Send us Fan Mail In mid February, Curql, the collective of 160+ credit unions, announced its first blockchain investment into Stablecore, a company that provides digital asset infrastructure for credit unions. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars now are flowing into stablecoin, a digital currency backed by fiat currency and accordingly it has little volatility. Big banks are pouncing on stablecoins but the credit union problem is a lack of tools for managing digital currencies. Ente...
Send us Fan Mail Are you still relying on product based rewards for members? Meet the new tool on the block: relationship building. A trigger is that interchange rates are under attack and, for many financial institutions, it’s been interchange that funded the rewards programs. So what’s the new approach? On the show is Beth McCoy, CEO of CORA Loyalty, who provides a roadmap for building member relationships that benefit both the member and the institution. CORA Loyalty explain...
Send us Fan Mail Just when I thought credit card rewards initiatives were on the chopping block, here comes David Metz and Priizeout with an innovative twist on credit card rewards and it’s one that already is winning credit union applause. Proof is that also on the show is Sarah Vasey, Chief Operating Officer at Michigan-based United Financial Credit Union, an institution with around $350 million in assets. Sarah herself is a credit card rewards beneficiary and she tells what s...
Send us Fan Mail Do credit unions have a future? And if so what? Meet Lamont Black, a Filene Fellow - Credit Union of the Future. Spoiler alert: Black is optimistic about the future of credit unions. A finance professor at DePaul University, Black also is a busy writer, speaker, consultant who focuses on innovative technologies including AI and Bitcoin and, nowadays, especially Stablecoin. In the show Black is articulate in explaining why AI matters to credit unions and he also ...
Send us Fan Mail Only about one third of your members feel understood by you - that’s the harsh fact that emerges from a member experience survey conducted by the Harris Poll and sponsored by White Clay, a fintech that says it helps banks and credit unions enhance customer relationships and profitability. On the show today is Mac Thompson, CEO and founder of White Clay, to tell why members feel misunderstood and also to explain why he says credit unions should get busy implementing human-ce...
Send us Fan Mail Today Andrea Argueta is director of financial institution advisory at Glia, a company that focuses on providing credit unions and banks digital customer service tools and nowadays that means AI. So this show’s focus is on the practical suite of tools Glia has working in some 400 credit unions, making Glia very probably the largest provider of AI tools to credit unions. Importantly, too, Argueta knows credit unions. That’s because before coming to Glia she served as CO...
Send us Fan Mail Fraud is up, a lot, at credit unions, according to the Alloy 2026 State of Fraud Report, says Sara Seguin, a principal adviser at Alloy. Sara is a past CU 2.0 Podcast guest - link to that show is in the show notes. She’s on the show now to report that credit unions say they have experienced a 72% increase in fraud events, more than any other segment. Worse, a lot of fraud now involves synthetic identities - i.e., manufactured people - and a long con that may ...
Send us Fan Mail What a ride Steve O’Donnell has had at One Nevada Credit Union, a $1.5 billion institution where he started as a teller some 22 years ago and in August 2025 he was promoted to CEO. This podcast is about his journey getting into the top job - and also what he sees as some of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for him and One Nevada. A name you will hear often in this show is “Paul,” that’s Paul Parrish, the prior CEO at One Nevada and a current member of the i...
Send us Fan Mail Safe Harbor, the Golden CO based cannabis banking pioneer, is alive and growing and that’s the message of today’s guest Terry Mendez, the recently installed CEO. Mendez took over the seat that had been occupied by Sundie Seefried, onetime ceo of Partner Colorado Credit Union who left that post to helm Safe Harbor. Sundie, by the way, was the guest in CU 2.0 Podcast #139 which posted 4+ years ago, link in the show notes. A lot had happened in those intervening ...
Send us Fan Mail The Credit Union Generation Barrier. On the show today is Melissa Krut, VP of Success at Sogolytics, a Herndon Virginia based firm that focuses on data driven analytics that answer questions such as how satisfied are a credit union’s employees, how satisfied are members, and more. Krut is here to discuss Sogolytics data driven approach and also to elaborate on a recent Sogolytics report that documents the disconnect between younger Millennials and Gen Z and credit unions....
Send us Fan Mail Rik Reitmaier is CIO at Tennessee based Ascend Federal Credit Union, with $4.4 billion in assets and 245,000. That puts Ascend in the nation’s top 100 credit unions. And Reitmaier is on the show to talk about the wide range of issues, worries and concerns that are on his mind. AI of course is high on that list and Reitmaier explains both Ascend’s position on AI today and why he thinks it’s the right course. Hint: many Ascend employees are already using Copilot. ...
Send us Fan Mail I fancy myself something of a minor expert on Medicare and often have advised friends who are approaching 65 about their best options. Until a man I know approached me and asked for my advice. He added he was dually qualified for Medicare and Medicaid and he thought he probably qualified for food benefits, too. Huh? I had no idea what he was talking about and had to admit to him I was useless in this case. Today I advised him to find a credit union he co...
Send us Fan Mail Mark Ritter, CEO of Member Business Financial Services, a Pennsylvania based CUSO, estimates that about 800 US credit unions do member business lending, meaning that perhaps 3700 don’t. Many, many more could. That is spelled out in HR 1151, the law that lets credit unions serve more than one employer group. Passage of that law is detailed in CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 51 with Marc Schaefer, then the CEO of Truliant CU. If credit unions can make small business loan...
Send us Fan Mail It’s typically the first in depth contact a non member has with a credit union and that non member, increasingly, is seeking to open a new account online. Good luck with that. The brutal fact is that digital account opening tools at most credit unions are inadequate - and an upshot is a stampede of would-be members who simply abandon the process. That’s why today’s show features Philip Paul, CEO of Cotribute, a developer of digital member onboarding tools, and Kathy Ric...
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