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…

For example, in the early days of online storage and backup pricing was almost always centered around usage and still is by some companies.  1GB for X dollars, 10 GB’s for Y dollars.  As the market matures, it drifts to the proverbial “all-you-can-eat” plans which provide unlimited backup so consumers don’t have to worry about quotas of any sort.  I remember when my cell phone plan had 60 minutes and my phone had a reminder beep 10 seconds before another minute ticked by.  Now the cell phone market is rapidly progressing to unlimited plans.

Two observations:

1. Nearly all utilities (water, gas, electricity, etc) are based on actual usage except broadband internet.  Why is that?  Internet is much cheaper do deliver than power.
2. Would there be a profitable model in offering an NSF package or Courtesy Pay package in which a member would pay a fixed fee for unlimited NSF’s or overdrafts?  Could this be an additional line of fee income for struggling CU’s that could make their members who use the service happy while at the same time boosting their bottom line?

What you say is ethnographic research?  Wikipedia defines ethnography as, “In the biological sciences, this type of study might be called a field study or a case report…”  Basically, it means watching your members, or customers, use your product and making determinations about ways to make it better.  I’ve read reports of a large LCD TV manufacturer follow customers home and watch them try to unpack their unwieldy and awkward widescreen LCD or plasma TV’s.  The result?  Rather than taking a TV out of the box, like you do with nearly every other product, you actually take the box off of the TV.  The TV remains sitting on the bottom part of the box and the end user simply pulls the upper part of the box off.  That proved to be much simpler than trying to lift an 80 pound TV out of a box at waist level.

Back to my face wipes.  They are some variety of alcohol-based wipe so there is a small amount of cleansing fluid in the packaging.  But over the course of time, all of the fluid settles to the bottom of the package and the wipes at the top of the package, the ones you actually use, lose some of their moisture.  The result is a product that doesn’t work as good as it should.  The solution is simple, I turn the package upside-down every few days to let the fluid seep back down and remoisten the wipes at the top.  Simple solution for the end user, but how many people actually do that vs how many switch to another brand?

What kind of gyrations do your members go through to get an envelope out of an ATM that only somebody sitting in a lawn chair can reach?  Have you ever watched any of your members try to log in with your MFA product or fill out a deposit slip?  And I don’t mean casually observe.  I mean time them.  Watch how long it takes someone to find that check box that I want to “deposit” funds or how long it takes them to read the statement, “I’m sorry, you are attempting to access your account from an un-authorized computer…”  Sometimes the best thing you can do for your brand and your members’ experience is to simply sit back and watch.  You might be amazed at what you’ll find out.

From Wikipedia:

…groups will reach a cliff overlooking the ocean. They will stop until the urge to press on causes them to jump off the cliff and start swimming, sometimes to exhaustion and death. Lemmings are also often pushed into the sea as more and more lemmings arrive at the shore.

We always talk about being innovative but save for a few exceptions, CU’s don’t like change and don’t want to innovate.

The products and discussions going on at Finovate is where the true innovation currently is in financial services and I feel like so many credit union folks are completely missing the boat.  The NACUSO conference was awesome and I’ll go back next year as long as it isn’t the same time as Finovate.  We’ve got to find a way to get the people and companies at Finovate to interact with CU people.  That may be at NACUSO or somewhere else, but I think the real opportunities for innovation are happening outside of the CU industry at the moment.  NACUSO, Filene, and many others are trying to change that, but right now it seems many of the future-building conversations are happening at BarCamps, Finovate, or elsewhere.

Thoughts?

1. Here’s a simple incentive plan to make the CU goals align with giving the most back to the members: Assuming you have a well run credit union getting 1% ROA, send 50 basis points to the members in an annual dividend, 25 to staff incentives and 25 to reserves.
2. Starting a credit union is hard.  Why?  With 8500 credit unions or so we have plenty of expertise to help out.  We need to create an online forum of CU experts to help assist people wanting to start a credit union.  If we could even get just 20 executives from CU’s across the nation from different capacities, we’d have a great resource to help others start CU’s and further the movement.
3. CU’s can’t get secondary capital to start up, but other CU’s can give them deposits to help them start up.  CU’s could contribute to a startup fund that simply deposits dollars into a new CU.

The ideas are rough, but just wanted to get them out there.  Looking forward to tomorrow but as it is almost 1 AM, I’d probably better call it a night!

UPDATE- How could I forget William and Gene?!?!?

It just launched on Friday, February 16th, but the content of the site is already taking off. The basic idea behind the site is for current, or potential, Dell customers to submit their ideas on what they want Dell to change/add/remove from their products. All of the content is user generated and visitors to the site can “Promote” ideas and leave comments. This should be a great tool for Dell to use to keep their fingers on the pulse of their customers.

It seems to me that CU’s could make excellent use of technology like this to develop products, fix problems, build branches, etc. Let your members tell you what they want. We work in financial institutions, so our minds are already skewed. We’re not normal customers/members. Give the power over to your member and let them say what they want!