BankThink

When choosing a collateral recovery agency, lenders should know and understand the types of insurance coverages specific to this industry.

Editor's Note: The following is in response to comments by Paul Lucas at the CU Journal Business Development Conference that CUs should keep in mind their members are "consumers":

The parent company of a fast-food chain requires its senior executives to work in one of the restaurants for a week to learn the business first hand and get in touch with customers. For credit union management, often detached from the impact of its decisions, focus groups present a similar opportunity to reconnect with members and hear what they really think. After all, it's not the credit union that defines your brand identity; it's the perceptions of your members.

Before sharing the good news, I feel it only fair that a confession come first: I once played a pivotal role in organizing a conference that went so badly we expected at any moment that Mr. Murphy himself of Murphy's Law fame would arrive and present us with a plaque. We had fought to be among the very first to hold a conference at what was then the brand new Swan Hotel at Disney world in Orlando, only to discover what veterans of conference planning know all too well-you never want to be any hotel's first meeting.

If you're a Fiserv exec you can count on at least one of two comments being made to you by a credit union CEO: "Man, I wish I had gotten in on the ground floor with your stock," and "How long before you merge all those credit union business units."

Your members visit your credit union to carry out very private business. Many of them have the ability to log-on to their personal computers to make these transactions in the privacy of their home, yet they choose to make a face-to-face visit.

Tyndall FCU's program offering a limited number of 30-year, 3.99% APR mortgages for its members to buy a home (CUJ April 9) is an astonishingly bold move to serve moderate-income working class households.

Credit unions today cannot afford to expect busy tellers, loan officers, administrative or clerical staff to individually or collectively provide security for our credit union offices. They do not have the time or the expertise to take on that responsibility as they did in the past.

Here's the kind of e-mail we all love to get from the IT department or our ISP or a vendor with which we do online business: "Effective immediately, you will need to create a new password."

Until a few years ago, many credit union executives viewed Asset Liability Management (ALM) as an exercise in futile number crunching being thrust upon them as a necessary evil by the regulators. The general practice was to outsource this function to a third-party for a periodically generated "Asset Liability Management Committee (ALCO) Reports Package" to satisfy the regulators. These reports were then stuffed in a drawer to gather dust.