By Randy Karnes, CEO, CU*Answers

Over the twenty years I’ve been in the credit union industry, I have reconciled myself to the fact that our industry is best defined as “fast followers” of the ideas that our competitors and general marketplace business designers bring forward.

This is not to say I believe our industry is short on innovators. But I would contend that our innovators tend to bend outside ideas to fit our non-profit, cooperative mold, with a great deal of constraint. In general, as credit union leaders we tend to run our businesses, choosing to modify our operations around consumer trends. If banks are offering checking rewards, we offer checking rewards. If banks offer mobile phone banking, we’re going to find a way to offer it, too.

What we don’t typically give ourselves permission to do is to radically reconfigure our business processes, organizational charts, or standalone operating templates. We will follow our competition down the consolidation path. We constantly talk about the fact that mergers and other tactics for gaining scale are the only way to go. But we have not been able to translate new organizational designs—such as holding companies, operational alliances, process franchising, and other network business formats—into new designs for credit union core operations.

Even CUSOs seem to work only between standalone credit unions, as aids to the classic model of one Board, one membership, one operation. Our industry has yet to challenge this design with any intensity or perseverance to deliver a solution that is truly a credit union translation of network architectures.

I believe we must remove these self-imposed constraints. We must be as diligent in responding to new business designs as we are in responding to new consumer trends. Ideas about mass collaboration, Web 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0, as introduced in Don Tapscott’s book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, need to be considered, and yes, translated into our industry’s narrative. We must blend these ideas into the very architecture of our credit union firms, our CUSOs, our trade organizations, and even our regulatory interactions. The promise of a network response deserves a credit union translation.

Consider the concept of peer production, where, according to Tapscott, “People…self-organize to design goods or services, create knowledge, or simply produce dynamic, shared experiences.”  What could be more in line with credit union tradition than this? We are an industry where the owners are peers and designers of our own solutions. Yet the networked world is more enthralled with the ideas of new business designs around this concept than we are.

We must translate this into new designs for peer network businesses. We can use this design to aggregate opportunity, aggregate memberships, and create aggregate operations—where we translate what our competition calls “consolidated scale” into opportunity alliances with far greater reach, less risk, and more robust careers for those who participate.

Translate is the key word in all of this. For our industry is different. Our competitive advantage is inherent in our beliefs and our charter. It comes from defining ownership through participation and setting goals outside of what our competitors use to drive their business. This competitive advantage means that we have to be ready to constantly translate the catalysts of our competition into equally powerful motivators for our own success.

This is why I am a supporter of the NACUSO Certification Program on Collaboration & Business Networks. This program boldly identifies credit union participants who consider themselves business designers, architects who are empowered to redefine credit union and CUSO businesses. NACUSO’s program is about starting these leaders on the path to translating what network business designs might mean to our industry. These leaders will consider how to modify what they have learned about leading quality standalone organizations, to include the concepts of competitive collaboration and network participation. NACUSO intends for this working group to be the future catalyst for new designs and credit union marketplace response.

These are big goals. Check out www.nacuso.org to better understand the Certification Program, the participants, curriculum, and projects.

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The year-long certification program is scheduled to include classroom sessions, distant learning sessions, and group projects. NACUSO will host two classes per year starting in October and April of each year according to the registration site at www.nacuso.org. Potential projects include opportunities to work with existing CUSOs, develop new leadership community contacts, and contribute to the development of new credit union business templates that NACUSO hopes will be the foundation of new solutions for the industry. Check out the projects under consideration today.

NACUSO CEO Tom Davis summed it up, “This program is more than a seminar or a feel good flyby on the old ideas about collaboration within our industry. This is a program designed to keep the participants engaged with the ideas, their peers, and working businesses that can inspire credit union and CUSO business leaders to find the action in all of this talk about the promise of collaborations and networked marketplaces. We intend to build and identify a new group of life-learners and innovators.”
Learn more at NACUSO.org.

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Develop an Active NACUSO Network Leadership Community

In a few years, the graduates of this Certification Program will number well over a hundred credit union leaders. What kind of community will they be? What is the potential for this group to be an influential part of the NACUSO community? How will these leaders interact, be seen by their peers, and come to the forefront as leaders presenting new business offerings and opportunities for credit union members? This project is to outline and start a new and active community of business leaders. The class of October 2009 will set the foundation and set the ball rolling. If this project goes well, each subsequent class will add to the momentum and reap the benefits of being identified as a network business leader.

1. Develop a plan to market this community and raise the credit union industry’s awareness of leaders who have completed this program.
2. Develop a plan to aid NACUSO in attracting more participants to this program and raise the industry’s awareness of NACUSO’s role in encouraging new credit union business models.
3. Develop a process to constantly be improving the Certification Program and add new resources to support the growing community of graduates.

When asked why he was excited to be part of this program Randy Karnes, CEO of CU*Answers responded, “Everyone talks about collaboration and finding new models to harness the power of today’s networked world, but this program seems to be one of the few that is about inspiring entrepreneurs within our industry to rethink how they build businesses and add new skills for the future. I wanted to be part of that, and make sure I am plugged into a new community of future designers of credit union operations and capabilities.”

Learn more at NACUSO.org

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NACUSO said the award was judged on a variety of criteria, including:

• Providing a description for how the organization brought value to the industry and credit union membership via its collaborative model.
• Thought leadership and critical thinking.
• Value created through use of collaboration.
• Innovation in organization design.
• Implementation and execution.
• Results, outcomes and performance.

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CU*Answers Web Services team is taking its CUSO client base to new heights with new Web Hosting Platform capabilities. This platform allows credit union staff to personally administer select modifications and updates to their sites and manage their CU*Answers hosted e-mail addresses. Additionally, it provides a display of critical statistics via a comprehensive graphical web hosting control panel.

Plans are in the works for additional enhancements that will enable clients to even further control their own site building and content management. With these features, clients will be able to perform various updates and changes on the fly, without any lag time involved. Without a doubt, this new web hosting platform allows clients to exert greater site control, schedule changes as desired, and budget future costs more effectively.

Not only does CU*Answers create and maintain credit union web sites; it also has branched out to other credit union associated entities. NACUSO Executive Assistant Shauna Luna says “I highly recommend the CU*Answers Web Services team. They are knowledgeable and quick to respond when I have questions. Many times we have projects that come up at the last minute and their turn-around is usually within 1-2 business days. Typically, it gets addressed even the same day.”

“The Web Services team is in high demand from CU*Answers clients. From new site design, performing site updates and custom requests, to exploring new territory with Content Management Tools and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) content feeds; you don’t want to miss what’s happening here. Best of all, we are just getting started! Our clients and their members are savvier each day for what the value of having a truly interactive and effective web site can mean to drive new member opportunities” says Web Services manager David Damstra.

Some other recent projects completed by the Web Services team include:

• Online Education Registration for CU*Answers University training classes.
• Retailer Direct; allowing any retailer to present an electronic, secured loan application directly to a loan underwriters workstation and eliminate all re-keying. Retailer Direct also includes risk based pricing, auto-decisioning and forms print features.
• A new partnership with Prime Alliance, providing a web-based Mortgage Application (and optional LOS system) solution delivered directly to a loan officer’s desktop.
• An Xtend Financial Services CUSO Shared Branching web site that provides members a web map tool for locating every shared branch location.

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