If you’re a financial services professional trying to choose a conference to go to, you can flip a coin to make your choice.
Heads, you go to some large industry-wide boondoggle in Las Vegas with a thousand other attendees and see Sully (oops, I mean CAPTAIN Sullenberger) in the 43rd minute of his 15 minutes of fame. Tails, you go to a smaller functionally-focused conference with 150 other attendees and see your colleagues talk about what their firms are doing (if you can stay awake through their entire presentation, that is).
If you’re lucky, however, the coin will land on its edge. And then you can decide between Finovate and the CU Water Cooler Symposium.
I wasn’t able to attend Finovate last week, but I did get to go to the CU Water Cooler conference. Even better, I got to present there.
When Tim McAlpine told me a few months ago that he was selecting me to speak, I asked him what he wanted me talk about. He said “I don’t know. I like the way you bring humor to your blog, and want you to bring that to the Symposium.” I told Tim that I don’t do stand-up comedy, so he said “Do what you want.”
I chose to speak on Quantipulation, and tried to debunk a few marketing myths. CU Times wrote that I have a “simple message for credit unions, ‘Don’t believe any numbers without question.’”
Not to make a mountain out of a molehill here, but that’s not quite accurate. Instead, I told the conference attendees not to believe any number they heard over the course of the conference without questioning the number’s assumptions. But I’m quibbling here.
With no intended disrepect to the speakers I’m not mentioning below (I didn’t actually get to hear all of the presentations), here are the three highlights for me, in no particular order:
1. Demystifying Creativity. Someday Charlie Trotter (the one living in Foat Wuth Texas, not the restaurant owner) is going to be well known, and I’m going to get to say “yeah, I know Charlie.” It’s OK if he doesn’t admit to knowing me. Charlie talked about what creativity really is. Charlie helped me (and I hope everyone else) to better see how creativity is not synonymous with imagination. Imagination is the ability to imagine. Creativity is about DOING something. According to Charlie, you aren’t creative until you’ve actually created something. The third concept Charlie hit upon was talent. Talent + Imagination + Creativity = Success. Charlie didn’t actually say that, I’m just quantipulating.
2. Boomification of Credit Unions. Damn, that Denise Wymore is a good speaker. I truly wish that I had her ability to connect with an audience. On the other hand, I’m glad that I’m not wrong about stuff like she is. Denise’s presentation truly was excellent — engaging and compelling. Problem is, her ideas are just simply wrong. Ideas like getting rid of FICO, and judging loan applicants based on their “character.” They have a name for that, Denise: Discrimination. And it’s illegal. Or the idea that profit-driven is somehow the antithesis of people-driven. A false dichotomy, Denise. Denise’s cumbaya makes for a great presentation, but cumbaya won’t sustain a credit union, nor the credit union industry.
3. Future of Payments. As I listened to Jeff Russell, CEO of The Members Group, a little voice inside my head was screaming “ARE YOU LISTENING TO THIS, PEOPLE?!” My perhaps skewed perspective on the things I hear from credit union professionals lead me to believe that too much of the conversation is about lending. Jeff’s message, if I’m interpreting it correctly, is that payments is where the focus should be. If I’m getting him right, I couldn’t agree more. There’s no better way to help a credit union member best manage his/her financial life than to help them make smart everyday spending decisions. You simply can’t do that if their primary spending account is a checking account or credit card held at some other financial institution. On top of that, the future of cross-sell marketing for banks and credit unions will come from payments-related and payments-triggered transactions. If your credit union is a payments laggard, good luck. You’re not going to make it up on car loans.
I do wish, though, that Jeff hadn’t said two things that he did. The first being that mobile payments will be the dominant form of payments in five years. I’m willing to bet a LOT OF MONEY that that won’t be the case. In the past 15 years, I’ve NEVER been wrong underestimating the rate of technology adoption.
Second, I’d argue with Jeff regarding his view that free checking is dead. Free checking isn’t — or shouldn’t be — dead, and for two reasons. First of all, unlike Jeff said, debit interchange doesn’t fund free checking accounts. Free checking accounts have been around for a lot longer than the increase in debit card activity.
The advent of free checking was born out of the the belief that getting someone’s checking account was the steppingstone to getting more of their financial accounts. If that belief is true — and it’s certainly a discussion for argument, since so few financial institutions have done a good job of successfully cross-selling — then a cut in debit interchange shouldn’t portend the complete death of free checking.
The other reason why is free checking isn’t dead is because it never really was alive. When we say “free checking” what we’re really saying is “no monthly fee” checking. Tell the people who don’t pay a monthly fee, but pay out hundreds of dollars in overdraft, foreign ATM, and safety deposit box fees that their checking account is “free.” I hope you don’t get punched in the face.
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Beyond the presentations themselves, the other thing that makes this conference top-notch is the attendees.
I wonder how it felt for first-time attendees who aren’t tied in to the credit union twittersphere. I wonder if they felt like this was some party they were crashing. I certainly hope not. But the conference really is a gathering for a lot of credit union professionals who actively engage with each other on a daily basis. And of course, some of the attendees have known each other for a long time. Denise Wymore and Janine McBee told me they’ve known each other for….
Oh, hey, did I tell you that I finally met Jimmy Marks in person? I’ve never hugged a man the first time I met him. But I gave Jimmy Marks a hug when I “met” him. (It’s OK, it was one of those male “shoulder bump” hugs). Although I had never met him in person before this week, I’ve been tweeting with him for at least two years. And I “know” him better than I know a lot of my colleagues at work.
It was also a treat to see Rob Rutkowski and Jeff Hardin at the conference. For two reasons: The first, because I had met the both of them at the Forum Symposium in 2007, and hadn’t seen either of them since; and second, because the two of them make me feel like I’m not the only “old” guy at the conference (even though both of them are younger than I am).
Bottom line: Love this conference. Thanks to the CU Water Cooler editors — Carla, Matt, Kelley, William, Gene, Doug, Brent, Christopher — for their time, effort, and brainpower on doing what they do. And huge thanks from me to Tim McAlpine for giving me the opportunity to present and attend the conference.
Ron Shevlin's Marketing Whims 