Do you know why most credit union CEO’s don’t blog and aren’t on Twitter? Because nothing important happens in the credit union blogosphere. Yeah, we all get to network, see what each other are doing, and maybe catch a pearl of wisdom here and there. But the bottom line is the important stuff, the game changing stuff, is never really talked about online. Changes to the member business lending cap. That’s a game changer. A partnership developed between FSCC, CUSC, PSCU, Fidelity, etc that enables all credit unions to become shared branches automatically. That’s a game changer.

I’ll bet we could fill an airplane with all the people in the credit union social media space. Literally. What would happen if that plane went down? Nothing. That’s right, nothing.  Now imagine filling that plane with the CEO’s of the credit union leagues, trade associations, CUSO’s, and credit unions. We would have a catastrophe. Innovation would be ground to a halt. The real partnerships and collaborations that were happening, albeit on a small scale, would cease.

Tim McAlpine recent wrote on the CUES blog about using social media to advanced your career. And he is 100% right. Social media can help to get your name out there. But we in the social media blogosphere need a greater goal than getting 500 twitter followers or blog subscribers. Trey Reeme and I recently had a conversation about this issue of social media being disconnected from the important things in the industry. Daily life at a credit union isn’t glamorous and fun. It is trying to find a way to help a teller do a process 1 minute faster. It is about finding a better checking product to match up with the maturity of your credit card portfolio. It is about patterning with neighborhood credit unions to form a multi-owned business CUSO to get around an individual credit union’s business lending cap because a.) business loans are profitable and b.) members need them.

If a flood was coming to the credit union industry, would you be invited onto Noah’s Ark to weather the storm? Right now, I wouldn’t be. And I’m not going to stop fighting for the credit union industry until I am.

In light of the poor economic and budgetary shape the city of New York is in, they are facing tax cuts to schools and the removal of programs. To help combat this shortfall of funds, and most likely for some good publicity, some strippers from Long Island are asking for a “pole” tax. Boiling down to a cover charge or door fee, stripping establishments would collect the fee with the specific purpose of sending that “tax” back to a local school. While entirely voluntary, the group of stripping advocates are lobbying to make this tax required by the state.

Sin taxes have existed for years on cigarettes, beer, liquor, tobacco, and the like while very few states have a stripping tax currently on the books. Some may call CRA a sin tax as well, forcing banks to reinvest, or pay a special tax depending on one’s point of view, into their local community. Seeing as credit union taxation is such a hot topic, what would happen if a CU stepped up and asked to be voluntarily taxed? A credit union could come out and say, “Because we care about our community so much, we’re going to pay a voluntary tax of 1% of our net income into the general school fund.” Would some CU’ers freak about calling it a tax rather than “community involvement”?

• All CUSC shared branches are now included in the database (~4000)
• All COOP ATM’s. Over 28,000 of them.
• In partnership with REAL Solutions, we’ve added a list of all credit unions with branches in schools.

What does this mean to you? Well, the shared branching data and the ATM data both have latitude and longitude included. You can make nearly any variety of map mash-up that you can think of. iPhone branch locator app? Check. Andriod app? Check. A branded ATM locator app for your CU? A walk in the park.

We’re working on even more data and hope to have every credit union branch location in the US sometime this quarter. In the mean time, we’re also creating some new “views” in the database because nobody knows that fs220.acct_010 is the field that contains the asset size of the credit union. Once we get a few of the views built, it will be much easier for people not intimately familiar with the data to do useful things with it.

As always, keep playing around with Numbers and let us know if you have any ideas or concerns!

As is usual with NACUSO, the caliber of people that this conference attracts is amazing. These are hands down, the most innovative and entrepreneurial people in the entire credit union industry. The things that people at the conference have been able to accomplish is amazing. Ongoing Operations of Hagerstown, Maryland, for example, won the 2010 CUSO of the Year award for their outstanding disaster recovery services. They have over 125 credit union clients and 20(ish) credit union owners in the actual CUSO demonstrating what real collaboration can accomplish.

The theme NACUSO has been driving home is collaboration and innovation throughout the whole week. The speakers have really brought home many of the concepts and done a great job talking about the good, and the bad, of collaboration and innovation.

Check out CU Times for for some more coverage from Michelle Samaad and don’t forget to check out the Twitter feed. Make sure to try and make it a point to attend next year. Who knows, maybe we’ll get a crash together for it…

Welcome to Numbers, CU Innovators call report data solution.

While the NCUA has been providing call report data for many years, it has always been structured in such a way that makes it problematic to use unless you were a database administrator. There are a few others solutions available to the enterprising user, but none give the flexibility required for a custom reporting solution or web application. Wading through the details every quarter to update Excel spreadsheets is monotonous and takes up valuable time. With Numbers, all that is a thing of the past.

Built on a high-availability database architecture, Numbers is readily available online to be integrated into almost any tool you can dream up.

Internal credit union reporting
Peer comparisons
Merger analysis
CUSO market research
Credit union industry trends
Custom web applications

Numbers has been integrated into websites to demonstrate the effectiveness of a product to potential credit union clients. It has been used for peer comparisons and analysis to determine high performing credit unions. It is currently being built upon to create an impact analysis for potential clients of a CUSO. The list goes on and on.

What, do you say, could I use this for? The NCUA call report contains a large amount of data, including the asset size of every federally insured credit union. It has the url of their website, which online banking provider they use, how many employees they have, who the CEO is, and how much fee income they produced in a given quarter. There is so much information, in fact, that we’ve created a searchable data dictionary (PDF) to help you wade through it all.

Numbers has a large variety of uses and is only limited by your imagination. If you have any idea of how you’d like to use Numbers, drop us a line. We’d love to help you out! For more info, visit the Numbers product page.

Click here to download the PDF version of this presentation.

Dan Mica announced his retirement plans in late 2009, but has been tight lipped about his destination until now. As a former Congressmen, Mica has very unique insight into how the political process works and how best to accomplish the goals of an industry. Keith Leggett, a senior economist with American Bankers Association, has been critical of credit unions and the NCUA in the past, especially in regards to business lending, corporate credit union issues, NCUA governance, and field of membership restrictions. In reference to the recent creation of a new low-income designated credit union, Leggett had this to say, “…I guess being a rogue agency is part of NCUA’s culture.”

While some may be initially shocked that such an avid credit union supporter would be joining forces with what many describe as an enemy of the credit union industry, the combination of their unique skill sets could be advantageous for credit unions and banks.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the industry. With Mica partnering with Leggett, could it be viewed as him jumping ship and getting in bed with the ABA? On the other hand, Leggett may be viewed has suddenly having a soft heart for credit unions. Either way, the pair will have a tough boat to row, potentially polarizing any potential clients. The industry will watch with anticipation once the company is launched in January 2011.

Here’s the full press release.