Tell Me Why I'm Wrong

Feat. Randy Karnes

Chip Filson deserves an answer from all of us as credit union professionals

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Is it possible that Chip Filson is the last NCUA critical thinker of his generation or just a one-trick pony?

Read this most recent posting from Chip Filson on CreditUnions.com. Within just a few seconds you will pause and think “Oh, Chip, are you ever going to give up on kicking this dog? Does anyone really think it matters if we critique the NCUA’s action anymore? Does it make a difference?” But then you will read on—I always do. Chip Filson is a friend of mine and I believe his opinions on the system and the NCUA are valuable on many levels.

First, they remind me that the NCUA is not just an insurance firm or a regulator – they were designed to be more. They were designed to foster and separate the concept of a consumer-owned financial system that saw the world through a community lens and with bigger goals than just banking.  Chip might be the last true commentator who had a pulpit focused on wanting the NCUA to be more than just a government agency.

Second, they remind me that you have to look further than today’s headlines to ADD it all up. And while the numbers are getting so large that we round to the nearest billion these days, Chip reminds us that the NCUA only rounds numbers up or down based on their own internal goals to look good. The NCUA is no longer balanced by anything other than its own sense of importance. And board members are no longer the voice of reason, they are simply the promoters of a bureaucrat’s reputation. Chip might be the last true historian with enough perseverance to audit, research, and painstakingly try to sum up the NCUA’s actions in totals to paint stories as lessons for the future, not just sound bites without conscience.  

Third, they remind me that counting on the central planners of Washington and all those that see our business, credit unions, as some fine-tuned social model for justice is becoming more and more fool’s folly. For those who make up the industry have lost much of their fire over injustice, lost much of their indignation of those who would tread on consumers that act to be owners of community businesses, and have lost faith in political structures that cannot see a reason to separate a cooperative system from the evaluations and constructs of for-profit designs for banking and community action. Chip might be the last CU leader that truly reminds me to maintain hope that the NCUA could be more, and that counting on our system to heal itself is still worth the effort.

Today, the article strikes out against the way 8,000 member-borrowers were discounted and forgotten. Yesterday, there were dozens of moments Chip reminded us that the NCUA was off track. But what I am the most dismayed about in thinking about all of these articles is that they never rallied my generation of CU leaders and CU organizations to any recognizable effort to change anything at the NCUA. We have yet to mount any effort that showed us that any administration’s intent for the credit union industry was greater than a quid quo pro nod to a third level constituent owed a favor. We never got anyone’s attention for the effort to build a better NCUA, a better insurance fund, or a better machine to improve our own solutions.

We are capable community, small business builders, but we might be little else if Chip will be the last commentator to try to rally our ire and hopes for bigger things. Tell Me Why I’m Wrong.

You do not see this every day, but now is the time to see it more

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A CU industry ICON reaches out to the Washington Post for more light on credit union regulatory agency’s disrespect for 100M American citizen-owners of credit unions

Many of us have long become accustomed to Chip Filson’s warnings related to NCUA excesses and lack of respect for process expectations or rules.  He constantly lets us know that the current administration at the NCUA and ineffective board cares little about due process, transparency, or even the hint of propriety in the use of their power to just wipe out credit union owners’ capital and the future it represents. So when he published his most recent article on the NCUA’s spending $1.5B of member funds, many of us might have just sighed “there he goes again”, and way too many of us might have given up trying to connect the dots with all of the numbers, acronyms, and references to the NCUA’s shenanigans. It is news, but it is just expected news these days.

What was surprising to me was when I read this email from Chip to the Washington Post, because his indictment of the NCUA in his email was much easier to consume, to engage with, and to “feel” as an industry supporter. I have always been able to feel Chip’s passion for the system, and even his hopes that the NCUA would play up. But when I put this article, our industry apathy to the details, and this reach out to the real world together I knew things were changing. Keep going Chip, and keep pushing for people to pay attention.

For now is the time to push harder. With the recent announcement of Rodney Hood for another round at the NCUA as a board member, the recent push to fill the other empty seat, and the pending need to replace McWatters, there could be no bigger reason to try to get the attention of all of the people who might care about those 100 million citizens. Now is the time to push for a different type of leader on the board. Rodney Hood shows no signal, from his past or current activities, that he will change a thing for the better as a future board member. I predict that he will be recycling the agency’s disrespect for all of us with his passive, quiet demeanor of a bureaucrat without the skills to lead.

Now is the time to push the President to actually have a “project” for the NCUA Board. Something that calls for leaders. Now is the time for the administration to do more than dole out appointments as an afterthought. Now is the time for the administration to give the NCUA Board a job! Change the path of the CU industry by actually caring about the owners of credit unions as much as they care about the owners of for profit financial service models. Now is time to push for a new day.

I hate to see icons of the credit union industry (e.g. Chip) pushed to calling on the Washington Post, but now is the time to reach out and demand somebody shines a light on the need for a better NCUA Board with a real agenda. Tell Me Why I’m Wrong.

The tides of change don’t affect the legacies we leave behind

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Thoughts on the merger of Progressive Credit Union

I recently read an article from Chip Filson about the merger of Progressive Credit Union, a 16-year CU*Answers client, and PenFed, and it got me thinking. To some the merger may have come as a surprise, but for those aware of what made Progressive so successful for many years, the taxi medallion industry, it did not come as a shock. Rather, Progressive was caught up in the tides of an industry being swept away by Uber and other rideshare services. But instead of serving as a cautionary tale, I think Progressive’s legacy will be one to inspire others looking for that next big thing.

There’s no doubt that Progressive was a long-term leader in leveraging a marketplace for its members and the members of many other credit unions—they positively worked by proxy for us all. Robert Familant and his team creatively encouraged community lending (participation lending) and its evolution to aggregate capabilities to reach more people than they could otherwise have done alone.

And Progressive did leverage the medallion economy to great success, seeing their assets rise with the bubbling medallion prices, which climbed from an average of roughly $200K in 2002 to $1M in 2014, and have since crashed back down to 2002 levels. As new entries into the market disrupted the medallion industry, Progressive, among many others, was part of the wave requiring everyone to adjust to new norms.

No insurance company puts any credence to the idea of working things out, whether it be living through a portfolio of loans, or working through lawsuits, or trying to defend taking on hard roads ahead. They put so much weight on removing the topic from the to do list, that they weight their models for only their goals. While I think that the credit union might have been able to work it out over the long term, the NCUA would never have allowed them to continue riding the roller coaster of adjustment. They doomed the credit union for convenience and a sense of calm—get Progressive and medallions out of the news.

The taxi medallion business was a great business and the lifetime earnings of those who were good at it cannot be denied as anything but positive. It had its phases of wins and losses, but on the balance did very well for Progressive and its members. Its time has run out and so has Progressive’s. Not being flippant here, far from it, I respect Robert, Progressive, and all of the CUs that helped their members through the years based on the economies created by medallions and credit union hard work.

Every generation must learn this evolution of economies and the wins and losses that come with it. To 1) see the constant need to search for opportunities; 2) constantly consider how those situations might be disrupted; 3) avoid the impatience of disconnected regulatory oversight; and 4) see the long-lasting triumph of those who lead into the future without regret instead of clinging to the injustice of what was. There are lessons to be learned, adjustments to be made in the next cycle, and joy over the fact that it worked for Progressive for as long as it did.

Tell Me Why I’m Wrong

Scale is not everything

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Be careful not to dismiss ownership as some inconsequential detail on the path to success

I received a comment from Gregg Stockdale on my last piece, “The risks of vendor consolidation on the credit union industry“. In it he wrote:

“What disrupter of the credit union industry followed this model?  -“Only ownership can prioritize disruption of the status quo, competitors and the core of innovation. Cooperative ownership of our solutions is the key”  Also, “Protecting the decisions and mechanisms for maintaining our differential is the mandate for the future”  –  What differential?  Other than ownership, how is a cu different from a bank?  Cu’s are very bank-like and banks have become cu-like in their service offerings.  The big disrupters have come from outside the entire industry and many are privately owned.”

I agree whether a CUSO, CU, or any other company is a disrupter can be difficult to identify without close examination. But I contend there are many in the CUSO space as vendors, and in the credit union space, when they are judged locally by their consumer-owners (members) who meet or surpass the bar for disruption. Where I think Gregg was off track is his MACRO EXPECTATIONS from these ideas. He dismisses CU ownership as the DIFFERENTIAL that counts. It does count, and it should. Credit unions represent consumer owners, citizen ownership, and ultimately the best of community ownership model in society. Our economy and government should be more aware of that and be more demanding of that differential. If they were, it would be more than just an internal goal of cooperatives to focus on disrupting, it would be a national goal and mandate that they do. For that reason I judge the NCUA not to be a cooperative regulator, but just a bank regulator hiding under a cooperative banner.

Owners, no matter what their type, can internally mandate that their approach to the marketplace be disruptive to their competitors, for their consumers, and for the status quo. We both can be disappointed when their efforts are not STUNNING and APPARENT to the outside world, but their efforts can be real. They can be real one consumer at a time. So when he mentions the “big disrupters” he is scaling disruption with a MACRO EXPECTATION again. Why?

That is the point of my blog – vendor mergers like Fiserv and First Data are based on the MACRO EXPECTATIONS that scale is all that matters. And that when scale wipes out the nuance of niche approaches by simple rolling over the needs of those niche players we lose something, and in our case (CU supporters and believers) we might lose everything when we buy from these vendors.

I do believe that CU*Answers is a disruptive force, but not one that will move the world or even vendor analysts. I believe the force mandated by our ownership will move our industry to respect itself via our intent. I believe the force mandated by our ownership will move our industry to see that the cooperative inherent win-win model with consumers is powerful because consumers are the owner. And I believe that that is a disruptive idea for the ages when highlighted, amplified, and sincere in its efforts. So I focus on the micro-disruption of the owner’s intent, the owner’s heart to move things given a chance. Every community’s heart given a chance. I believe that our industry should be concerned when the vendor marketplace consolidations take that chance away.

Thanks to Gregg for commenting and pushing the conversation further.

The risks of vendor consolidation on the credit union industry

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By now you’ve probably read about the announced Fiserv-First Data merger. In an opinion piece, one person suggested that “small banks and credit unions fear big fintech.”

“Fear” is the wrong word here though. It should have been “CU Thinkers See the Long-Term Challenges in Vendor Consolidation.”

It is not just competitors merging here that should concern credit union planners and leaders. It is the consolidation of focus, project resources, and price to ROI expectations that should worry a niche-based industry like the credit union industry. When the vendor marketplace or the industries that support a marketplace design, like financial services, become so out of proportion with segments of customer niches, then those niches are mandated to more and more.

Those niches, in this case credit unions, struggle with each renewing contract and acceptance of norms other than the ones that they count on to propel their unique success. What appears to be simply buying tactics at one level of the credit union becomes accepting new conditions that change the very culture and business approaches that once were the defining differentiators for credit union success.

  1. Focus – As these super-firms–these glaciers–set their marketplace priorities and execute their plans, they will continue to marginalize credit unions and their drive to be unique in a commoditized, externally defined marketplace. How will CUs set their own unique priorities?
  2. Project Resources – With vendor consolidation combined with resource scarcity we see in the labor markets, these recombining firms have less project management focused on niche marketplaces and the concerns of those marketplaces to project manage CU adjustments and change priorities.
  3. Price – Does a vendor design its prices for its success or to the needs of its clients after absorbing the prices cast upon them? CUs are increasingly becoming price takers and massagers through CU distributors like PSCU, COOP, etc., but less so price innovators through ownership or via their own manufacturing of solutions.

While some segments of the CU industry believe they can grow and keep pace with the scale that can keep them in the game with these firms, other segments will feel these pressures growing. Credit unions are not just struggling with the need to compete with other financial service segments for consumer connections, they are or will struggle to find a vendor focus that does not simply press them into being weaker versions of their competitors via commoditizing of their business models – not just their tools that support their products. And like cancer, one day you wake up and find you’ve been eaten from the inside out, and the body does not respond to the mind’s desire to execute its own plan.

CUs must continue to prioritize their own uniqueness, and that is the ownership model. Cooperative ownership is the key to being the manufacturer of price and culture even in spaces that seem dominated by commodity tones. Pushing to design prices that allow a client to earn out on the investment, pushing to focus resource and project management based on the timing of the client, and pushing to ensure that models for shared and cooperative execution come to the forefront.

We are an industry of cooperatives, and that required sense of connection is important to our futures. Only ownership can prioritize disruption of the status quo, competitors, and the core of innovation. Cooperative ownership of our solutions is the key to:

  • Price Disruption – to ensure our cooperative models can earn the ROI on the prices they pay.
  • Access Disruption – to ensure that the things CUs need are not walled off from them or relegate them to the back of the line.
  • Execution Disruption – to ensure that when service engagement options need cooperative alternatives, they are there.

Protecting the decisions and mechanisms for maintaining our differential is the mandate for the future. Whether it be in our dismay about a regulator who seems as resolved as ever to a one-way model for financial service firms or about the fact that we increasingly rely on vendors where we are only an afterthought in their strategies, we all, the customer-owners and members of credit union cooperatives, should not fear the future. We should simply mandate the future to the greatest extent we can by mobilizing active ownership in every level of our value stack or vertical capabilities.

Tell Me Why I’m Wrong.

Why be right when you can have the last word?

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NCUA Board approves amendments to 2015 risk-based capital final rule, delay until 2020

The NCUA recently adjourned from their October board meeting and with respect to the impending RBC rule has approved action to raise the minimum impacted asset size from $100M to $500M. More importantly, however, they have delayed implementation from January 2019 to January 2020. Vic Pantea provided his thoughts on this decision:

“This action, in my humble opinion, will kill the entire RBC rule for the immediate future. I see a purely political compromise here that allows both McWatters and Metsger to gain satisfaction. McWatters who argued strongly, back in 2015, that the board did not have the authority to implement RBC, cannot reverse implementation as long as Metsger, who voted along with Matz, is the other vote on a 2-person board. But by getting the delay to 2020, we can assume that Rodney Hood will supply a 2nd vote sometime during 2019 to eliminate the final rule, regardless of Metsger’s disposition as an expired board member or if his eventual replacement has been appointed. Metsger, as a consolation, can continue to say that for as long as he held office, he was a supporter of RBC and excessive agency overreach in the name of “protecting the NCUSIF.”

Got to love politics… The pendulum between rules and tools swings back and forth based more on who has the last word than what is right. Always being last to the party on these kinds of things is a good bet. Picture all the effort and money that has been wasted in debating RBC, CECL, and other regulatory divides in the last 5 years.

How many real issues might have moved forward if we had not stalled so many people in debating the “what if’s” of fluff, risk management overreach, and style points for politicians? Imagine all the CU leaders that were discouraged by the doomsday preached when the predictions of these changes doomed all small CUs. And most of the debate was over late to the party, overreactions to disasters already survived, and the idea that data and measurements can predict the unpredictable, low probability events called life.

My advice: live by the creed of “do valuable things and good things will happen” as CU leaders. Let’s find a way to never be herded into a corner again by those who garner our attention over shuffling paper, debate the inconsequential, and doom us with protection from “it could have been worse” insurance policies.

Would you enjoy warm pork rinds with your car loan?

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Have you read the last two postings of Tell Me Why I’m Wrong? Vic Pantea and Patrick Sickels commented on an NCUA Interagency Statement Clarifying the Role of Supervisory Guidance and while they may not be riveting, they are informative. Do not get me wrong, their postings are good work. Logging the document and ideas for a rainy day after a bad exit interview with your examiner is probably prudent. You know those meetings… the ones where the board wants to know what the heck happened in that last exam and why the examiner is throwing their weight around when you promised you are in compliance with the rules.

It is a good document to pull out during a board member orientation where you discuss the concept of being a regulated firm heavily leveraged not only by the rules, but by the feelings of your insurance agent (the NCUA) as well. Remind the new board member to consider Vic’s optimism and support. “I hope that more CU CEOs and Boards will fearlessly and forcefully argue for those strategies and solutions that they have created for the benefit of the members they serve that are within the powers granted them but in conflict with “supervisory guidance.”

The problem with the two postings is WHO CARES? Who thinks an interagency statement that was designed as a “get out of jail card” for the NCUA board and home office bureaucrats to explain that they do try to “temper” their field agents is going to change anything? 

I struggled when Patrick brought the statement to my attention. Patrick’s lawyer side was showing a “precedent for arguments not yet made” kind of thing. Too many times I have seen field examiners blow off the home office’s cautions at the NCUA, and the oversight of the NCUA by other government officials has seldom seemed to weigh in on the side of a CU under pressure. And Vic, reminded me that this might help CUs play up, but is there momentum to be gained when you only hear about when CUs gave in and almost never about the wins made through pushing back? For a second, I wondered if it would be better to post an opinion piece of the value of serving warm pork rinds at loan closings, but I gave in. I took the bait that NCUA was sincere.

But now I worry that even if the NCUA were sincere, the game is set and we all will respond year after year in the same groove: capitulation to our fate. We need supervisory guidance no matter the consequences. Tell Me Why I’m Wrong.

P.s. Are we pushing for a new norm?

Approval seeking is not a positive leadership trait

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Why social media and the hunt for Likes and approval is likely to derail future leaders

If you were to ask past leaders in our industry—or any industry for that matter—most are likely to agree that hunting for approvals in an echo chamber is a trap. So how do you coach a new generation of leaders that are growing up in a world where social media reigns?

Future leaders do not need to be “liked” or garner approval as their strongest talents—they need to hone their skills as learners, influencers, and debaters of value. I am not sure that social media does any of that for most of its participants. Can you really learn anything from tracking manipulated, advertised opinions and Likes via social media today? How do we push our leaders to ensure that they are building the talents and drive to build learning organizations and voices that can inspire all of us to benefit?

Being a lifetime student does not come from being agreed with, it comes from the challenges of opposing viewpoints and then creatively learning to reconcile that dissent. When you are fearful of rejection, you will insulate yourself and your beliefs and ideas to the point that learning stops and talents wither. But this is not a new problem; we see it in organizations that do not share their business plans with members, who no longer believe the market cares about their hopes for cooperative ownership, and who have shifted to the idea that consumer acceptance and Likes about the nuances of today’s financial service tactics are more important than what separates us from look-alike-competitors who sell the same nuances.

While the term “echo chamber” may be approaching overuse, it is one that the credit union industry should recognize as not a new problem. As the agents of our credit union member-owners, we have created our professional and third-party commentator echo chambers since the first day we pushed our volunteers out of the operations. The CUNA system, the regulatory system, and other vendor organizations have isolated our conversations and taught us to accept the status quo limits of our influence and debate. We hunted for acceptance and the positive feedback of like-thinkers-like-relationships for decades until we accepted the doctrine of our credit union industry to be worth its weight on our entrepreneurial hopes or innovative thrust towards member-owner potential.

So, we do need to guard ourselves from accepting and pushing our future leaders into an even bigger acceptance of the social media echo chambers that are too consumer-focused and manipulated by network managers way beyond our control or influence. We need to encourage future leaders to think critically, hunt out dissent, and look for the teachings that come from debate and alternate ideas. We need them to hone their skills at negotiating with ideas counter to their own and influence the future from what they learn.

We need to highlight where we fell victim to wanting the Likes of the NCUA, the molds of our trades, and the limited scope of our agreements with each other, and challenge them to debate and learn from the energy of disagreement on the way to new ideas implemented. Tell Me Why I’m Wrong.

What is showing its age more, your board members or your board approach?

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Be careful what you ask for—younger board members might not like what you’re selling

You want younger board members, you can’t handle younger board members! Or replace the word “younger” with some other characteristic you’re looking for: more business savvy, more technical, more mission-based, more member-focused, etc. The bottom line is… have you changed your approach to teaming with board members as a resource to be more?

How young is your approach? Is it a carryover from when your current board members were 33 years old? You might have changed from paper reports to digital ones on a tablet, but are they the same reports? You might have changed the order of the board sections, but have you really changed the board content? You might have moved from a Tuesday evening to a Thursday, but have you added or reduced the number of meetings you have per year? You get the point.

It’s tough, scary, and an uphill battle with traditionalists to upset the apple cart, but when you do bring in new board members, even one by one, the traditions are what you teach, not what they demand. Are you the reason that your credit union makes old souls out of every board member you attract?

Often when I meet 80-year-old-plus board members I find that they have stuck around not because of what is happening now, but because they remember what happened when it was “fun, rewarding, and real” for them as volunteers. They remember when they were part of building the credit union, not just rubber stamping someone else running the joint.

And right there is the key to how you need to make young board members feel today. They need a job, a purpose, and a role from their perspective not yours, not the NCUA’s, and not from the perspective that the place is on auto-pilot.

As a CEO, whether with 50 or 5000 employees, it can seem that you too are watching a business operation that is on auto-pilot when you think about the Monday to Friday operation. You can feel that you are supervising the operation and a board is a redundant asset helping you oversee something that cannot afford anymore supervision. So, you already feel marginalized, and you might be doing that to your board without even realizing it.

Just like you, they need to build something, to sense that they own something, and that their skills are important to something. Renew those feelings in your board and it won’t matter how old they are! They will engage what is being built, they will take interest in what they own, and they will get the pride of being important to it all.

Shift from blaming generational issues on your board and tackle the generational stagnation of your organization’s approach to the value of owners and their volunteering. Build something, if not just enthusiasm, and you will see a change. Tell Me Why I’m Wrong!

Why do we count on CEOs for success?

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Work hard to listen to the crowd, but CEOs are still the key ingredient

For over a decade, I’ve invited credit union CEOs from across the country to come to Grand Rapids and attend a CEOs-only event involving learning and discussion—and they’ve been greatly successful. A day and a half of teaching, and a full day of round table discussion (during which I did my best not to dominate the conversation!). We’ve had great conversations on the hot topics of the day, from compliance to service income, learning from peers, building businesses, and putting data into action. We talked a lot about the things we wanted to do or should be doing. Outspoken CEOs and I implored credit unions to listen, and to act. Some have, but many haven’t.

A couple years ago I introduced a different kind of event—boot camps for solution builders and data-minded individuals. These have also been eye opening for me, and we found CU designers across the network who were eager to come in and not just talk about what we should be doing as a CUSO, network, or industry, but to have their hands in the bread making. We’ve built tools and features together that our credit unions are now using today or will be using in the future. In many cases, however, the individuals in attendance, although eager to help build and implement solutions, didn’t always have the power at their own credit unions to make change happen.

So when it came time to start thinking about our annual CEO event, I recognized that credit union CEOs have the responsibility of being the intersecting point between what the CUSO should do and what CUs will do with it. Unless CEOs do their job for both sides of this question, we’ll never effectively match solutions with the efforts of CUs in our network. If credit union owners are the heroes credit unions need to survive long term, CEOs represent the owners of our credit union industry, and we need them to take ownership of its success. Not all CEOs need to be active. And the same CEOs don’t need to be active every time. But we need a healthy community so that there is a material group of CEOs active at the right times.

With that in mind, we made the decision to change what was a popular teaching and roundtable event into a more intensive boot camp experience where CEOs won’t just talk about what they want, but will take part in the strategic development of that future. In our case that means helping design new products and services for the future of our credit unions, but the same should apply across the entire credit union industry. Credit union CEOs need to be the heroes we count on to attain the future we want for our industry. Tell me why I’m wrong.