MONTEREY, Calif. - During a Social Impact Management Institute here, one expert had an apropos question for credit unions: "What is this thing?"

The following is excerpted with permission from a BankInfoSecurity.com's interview with Dr. Markus Jakobsson, a professor at Indiana University who is conducting research on phishing, and was originally conducted by Linda McGleeson.

DENVER - First Data Corp., which has agreed to be taken over by private equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., has completed the takeover of Wells Fargo's Instant Cash Network, a provider of ATM services for 500 financial institutions, a third of them credit unions.

PLYMOUTH, Mich. - This month's radio ad blitz by the Michigan Credit Union League is a supplemental buy to take advantage of $58-billion Comerica Bank sending 200 senior executives out of state for the greener plains of the Lone Star state.

* It took eight months to build the new facility. At its grand opening, it was missing just a few squares of carpet and the plumbing for the cafeteria serving area.

APRIL

DENVER - NCUA began notifying members last week of New Horizons Community CU, a financially ailing $300-million credit union it took over a year ago, of a potential data breach of their personal financial information.

TYLER, Texas - A veteran of two decades of working in credit unions, including several of the nation's largest, has opened a strategic consultancy. Ted Thames, most recently with California's Technology Credit Union, has launched his new practice, Q10 Resources, where he says he will focus on "building synergistic affiliations with well-known industry vendors and consultants," such as Connections Online from the Cardwell Group.

LATHRUP VILLAGE, Mich. - Michigan First Credit Union has introduced a line of business deposit and loan products. "As a progressive financial institution, we noticed an increasing number of requests from small businesses asking if we could serve them as business owners," said CEO Michael D. Poulos, CEO. "Our members also recognized the value of our low cost consumer products and started asking for the same thing for their business' financial accounts." The Michigan First business account product offers flexibility for businesses with a few employees to more than 50 employees, the credit union said. (c) 2007 The Credit Union Journal and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.cujournal.com http://www.sourcemedia.com

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."

MONETT, Mo. – John W. ‘Jack’ Henry, one of the pioneers among credit union outsourcers and a co-founder of well-known credit union vendor Jack Henry & Associates, died Friday, at 71, of natural causes. Henry and his partner Jerry Hall founded Jack Henry in 1976 after the company where he worked, Data Processing Manager, was acquired and his job was eliminated. They ran the fledgling company out of the back of a small engine repair shop, growing it to a conglomerate with 3,500 employees and now serving 8,700 credit unions and banks.

SAN ANTONIO – Clarke American Corp. said Friday it is preparing a private placement of $615 million of senior floating-rate and fixed-rate notes to help finance its $1.7 billion takeover of John H. Harland Co. The deal is part of a plan by corporate raider Ron Perelman to merge Clare American’s and Harland’s check printing operations, currently the second- and third-largest in the country. The combination, creating the world’s largest check-printer, was approved by antitrust regulators in the Bush Administration. Both Clarke American and Harland were acquired by M&F Worldwide, Perelman’s holding company. Clarke American was acquired by M&F in 2005 for $800 million.

HAGERSTOWN, Md. – Ongoing Operations, LLC, a CUSO that provides disaster recovery services for credit union, announced Friday it has agreed to acquire CU Recover, another disaster recovery CUSO, based in Baltimore. CU Recover provides business impact analysis, business continuity planning and a maintenance facility that distributes workload and responsibility so that all critical employees are involved. The deal is part of an expansion plan by Ongoing Operations, which includes opening of a second disaster recovery center in Portland later this year.

NORWALK, Ct.– Affinion Group, a provider of affinity marketer solutions, has acquired Malibu, Calif.-based CardCops, an ID theft protection, data monitoring and analysis technology solutions leader. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. CardCops monitors the Internet for fraudulent activity involving consumers’ personal information such as credit card account, debit card account. PIN numbers, Social Security numbers, mother’s maiden name and many other types of personal information. CardCops said it collects compromised personal information from foreign “underground” chat rooms where full sets of personal information can be bought and sold by identity thieves for $10 to $30. In 2006, Affinion Group and CardCops partnered to launch a new tool called ID Secure to fight identity theft.

RESTON, Va. – The corporate takeover frenzy is expected to continue this morning with two private equity funds poised to announce a deal to acquire student loan giant Sallie Mae. A group led by private equity funds J.C. Flowers & Co. and Friedman Fleischer & Lowe, along with JP Morgan Chase, one of the largest competitors of Sallie Mae, are expected to announce a deal to acquire the former government sponsored enterprise for $60 a share, or $25 billion. The deal will represent a major transformation for Sallie Mae, created by the federal government in 1972 to develop a secondary market for student loans originated by credit unions and banks, then privatized in 2005 to become the largest provider of student loan, itself. The deal would also come as Congress is ratcheting up its probe of practices in the student loan market and after Sallie Mae agreed with the New York Attorney General’s office to stop providing gifts and vacations to college loan offices with which it does business. Since its privatization, Sallie Mae has made more than a half dozen of its own corporate acquisitions and has built a student loan portfolio of more than $140 million, by far the biggest in the industry. The company, formally known as SLM Corp., has had a confusing recent history with JP Mortgage Chase, which severed its relationship with Sallie Mae two years ago after the two emerged as major competitors. Sallie Me shares surged 15$ Friday, after reports of the deal broke, to close at $46.76.

PORTLAND, Me. – Credit unions hit the air waves this morning with a new statewide advertising effort that will encompass print, radio and television spots. Four television spots will run until November, an estimated 9,300 times across the state. The spots, developed through focus group research, will key on lower rates and fees charged by credit unions, as well as the fact that credit union funds are federally insured, just like bank funds. The campaign was designed and developed by the Main CU League and will cost about $800,000.

BOSTON–If you're willing to wear a cape, especially in public, you just might get some super results. Kelly Parks, VP-marketing and business development with Call FCU in Richmond, Va., shared with the Credit Union Journal's Business Developmet & SEG Conference here how wearing capes--part of the credit unions Be the Office Hero campaign aimed at SEGs, has become the seed for the credit union's new branding efforts. Parks noted how she was attending a Chamber of Commerce event at which representatives of all the other financial institutions were wearing polo shirts and khakis wile Call FCU's reps were wearing their capes when she recognized that you all look alike to consumers. But one woman remarked to her, Finally, a bank with personality. That became the seed for a new brand built around the theme, To empower our members to be the heroes of their financial lives.