Months without letting new lenders join or bidding on loans?  How will they “endeavor to fulfill through alternative sources?”  This seems like a major roadblock that could dramatically slow their growth.  I wonder why this wasn’t an issue during start-up?  Needless to say, it will be interesting to see how long this process actually takes and if the months of downtime will be worth it for Prosper.

I would really like to see a credit union step up and take advantage of this offer.  Exactly how, I don’t know, but there is an opportunity in there somewhere.  We just need to figure it out.

In no case shall XYZ Vendor be liable for Loss or for non-permonance or delays of Service, liability or expense caused by or resultsing from: (1) war, hostile or warlike action in time of peace or war, yada, yada, yada, any chemical, biological, bio-chemical, or electromagnetic weapon; (iii) ionizing radiations from or contamication by radioactivity from any nuclear fuel or from any nuclear waste.

You get the idea.  Is this just an example of putting a bunch of attorneys in one room to think of nearly every possibility?  Is it even feasable to have a one page Scope of Coverage agreement like Red Hat has?  I’m not sure I see one page contracts in the future for credit unions.  Which is a little unfortune.  Don’t they just really want to know that the vendor will be there for them?

Lending Tree

While we love Wesabe and Mint, data breaches can happen to anyone.  The services Mint provides are really cool and pretty, but what happens if they were to get breached for whatever reason.  A Mint employee has a weak password that gets cracked, Yodlee screws up and loses info; it could be anything.  Wesabe is in a little better shape just because they provide alternative methods of importing your data, but if you import your data automatically, your are still storing your info with them.  Both companies do go out of their way to inform their users about the data security they have in place, but just as Lending Tree had many of the same technologies and processes, they won’t be immune forever.

I personally use both Mint and Wesabe and I have faith that they are doing everything possible to prevent bad things from happening.  Buy go ask the old CTO of TJ Max and I’m sure he thought they were doing a good job protecting their data.

After seeing the movie, I got to thinking about what really makes this movie likable by both a 5 year old and a 40 year old.  The five year old likes the action (everyone wanted to be able to fly as a kid) and the grown ups enjoy the action, humor, and plot.  Is it even possible to appeal to multiple generations of members with financial products?  Why couldn’t a checking account meet the needs of everybody?  Some would say it seems easy for movie to do with the success of movies like Transformers, Ice Age, and Shrek.  Each of those movies has a little something in it for each generation that the other generations seem to not pick up on.

Is it even feasible for credit unions to be able to create such a versatile product that can appeal to many generations at one time or are we stuck creating products for each new generation?