Optimizing Member Experience in Digital Banking with Chad Ritchie

In the latest episode of the Digital Banking Podcast, host Josh DeTar welcomed Chad Ritchie, CIO at Ventura County Credit Union, for an insightful discussion. Ritchie emphasized the importance of aligning technology strategies with member needs and outcomes rather than adopting new tech for its own sake. He highlighted how data control and innovation cycles are critical for credit unions to remain competitive and relevant in a rapidly evolving financial landscape.

Ritchie elaborated on the challenges credit unions face with legacy systems and the need for an API-led approach to enable faster innovation. He shared experiences from his career, illustrating how adopting modern technologies can significantly reduce implementation times and improve member experiences. The conversation touched on the broader implications of these changes, including how they can enhance operational efficiency and member satisfaction.

The discussion also explored the future of credit unions, focusing on the necessity of seamless money movement and the responsible use of generative AI. Ritchie stressed that while technology is a powerful tool, it should always be leveraged to improve member experiences and trust. DeTar and Ritchie concluded by underscoring the importance of maintaining a consistent, high-quality service across all member touchpoints to ensure long-term relevance and success in the industry.

Transcript

Josh DeTar: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of the Digital Banking Podcast. My guest today is Chad Ritchie, the CIO at Ventura County Credit Union. As I think through my introduction to Chad as my guest today, I'm actually finding it hard to articulate just how much respect I have for this man. When I asked him to describe himself, he said, quote, I am a husband, father, executive, and veteran. No, no, no, wait, sorry. I'm a husband, father, veteran, and executive for a credit union. He said so much in so few words. And for me, it was the unspoken intent of the correction that tells me so much about who Chad is and where he places value. Chad has had considerable life experiences, both in his time in the military and in the corporate world, but also in his personal life, what has always anchored him from even a very early age though, was an unshakable belief and the [00:01:00] importance of wisdom, justice, integrity, and the pursuit of giving back in ways that push humanity to take steps forward. Chad's time in digital transformation and industries such as healthcare, government, higher education, and more provide a really well band rounded understanding of technology and how to identify the appropriate use cases for it. Now, obviously with a background and a heart of service, like we have already heard about, you can see how the credit union industry was Chad's perfect career home. But how do you bring those two backgrounds and passions together? Well, much like chess, it's important to see the end goal. Fun fact, playing chess is actually how Chad over 20 years ago met his best friend and soulmate. So I guess you could say he's pretty darn good at playing the smart game to get the results he's hoping for, i.e. landing the girl of his dreams. But again, as a leader,  Chad sees it as [00:02:00] vital to look at the use case and the outcome desired, and then strategically think through the best tools and solutions to get to that desired end goal. You can imagine with Chad, super cool background and mindset. We have some really exciting topics to discuss today. And in my opinion, the coolest thing about Chad is actually his ability to bring it back to useful, actionable insights based on use cases and with simple explanations of really complex topics. So with that being said, let's go, Chad, welcome to the podcast, man.

Chad Ritchie: Thank you, Josh. That was a wonderful introduction. Quite humbling. I appreciate the opportunity to be here on the Digital Banking Podcast.

Josh: Ok, if you're watching the video of this podcast, you will absolutely understand. But like when the man has this epic of a beard, there's some really cool personality behind this thing. And I think that's like just the tip of the iceberg. No, it's just, it's really cool to see.

I think you have [00:03:00] a really unique personality and just mindset. And it's one of the reasons I've been really looking forward to having you on as a guest is,  you  talked about this earlier and I'd like you to start by just talking a little bit about some of the other sectors that you've actually spent some time in.

And that's looking at healthcare and government and higher education. And how much like  quote unquote traditional banking here in the US. Those areas are actually really far behind in digital transformation. But especially in financial services, like you see it as a huge opportunity in that if we solve some of these problems that we're doing really meaningful work, 

Chad: Absolutely, Josh. I was fortunate in my career early on to, to get to be at the forefront of digital and organizational transformation years ago, back in the early 2000s, when we were just trying to figure out how this was all going to work, how this whole technology was going to work online.

Yeah. And I did get to work with a [00:04:00] number of fantastic organizations from all different types of industries. And in coming to the credit union space back in 2015, you get this shock that you're  going back in time from what's, what's possible to where the credit union industry is from not just a technology perspective, but how technology enables member experiences and credit unions.

We refer to our customers as members because actually, every member of a credit union has one share and they can use that share to vote for the democratically elected board of directors that we have. So it's a powerful force in the credit union industry, but yet we're so far behind,  banking is a chore much like a lot of other things that we do these days.

Shopping online is a chore. Looking at homes is a chore. Ordering food is a chore. Having someone grocery shop for you now these days on Instacart is a chore. Any of those things comparatively. Are so much easier to do. It's easy to go on Amazon and shop. It's easy [00:05:00] to get on Instacart to order some groceries.

If you want to take a look at homes, you jump on Zillow and you can look at homes, you want to order a car, you get an Uber or a Lyft. So we've come to this point in society where our expectations of what a good experience looks like is raised quite a bit across every industry. It's very easy to order a show on Netflix to watch.

So, how does that translate back to the credit units? We're so far behind in that. If I said today, think about closing down your credit union or your bank account and opening up another one somewhere else. It doesn't feel like something you're probably going to do in five minutes on a break.

It probably feels painful and probably feels like something you'd rather avoid. But why is that? It's a chore just like these other things that we've talked about. So why is it so hard? And getting to the root of that is, it is a big question for credit unions because it demands a question of, will we be relevant in the future if we can't solve it?

If we can't figure out how to be [00:06:00] easy for people to use, we're managing, we're holding their money for them. They trust us to hold their money for them. And if we can't be easy for them to move their money, the way they want to move it, how they want to move it, when they want to move it, then we become less relevant to them as they find other types of services that will let them move the money the way that they want to.

Josh: Yeah, I think, we already see examples of that,  Like look at the adoption of Venmo.  That was a very clear indicator that consumers were not being given the experience that they expected in the ability to transfer simple, small amounts of money between people who probably know each other from their financial institutions. They looked for that from a technology provider. right,

And somebody came in from a [00:07:00] niche perspective and solve for that. But I think I want to go back to you. You use such an important word in there and that's relevance.  and I'd love to hear what that means to you. And maybe if you could paint for me, like the rose colored glasses picture, and maybe like the doomsday scenario picture of. Like if, if credit unions not only,  maintain, but,  push further into the relevance for American consumers. What does that look like?

And if you don't, what does that look like?

Chad: sure. That's a fascinating question, Josh. So there is a future state where credit unions could become irrelevant. If we continue down the path of letting these monolithic vendors, there are a few in the credit union space to  own and control all the data that we have. And we are forced to innovate in their cycle.

So unlike a lot of other industries where you get [00:08:00] to  start your technology stack and create it in the way you want to,  in the financial space, we have these core vendors and these lending vendors, these vendors that are key to our operations, a core vendors that they let us do transactions.

That's how every time you swipe your card or write a check that goes through a core technology. So in being able to do that, those vendors have been around since the 80s earlier, and they've not been forced to innovate because there isn't a lot of competitive threat in that market space or a handful of competitors, but still the innovation pace has been significantly slower inside.

The banking space because these vendors control so much of what we do. We don't have the ability to innovate much faster than they can innovate. But this is where this is where it gets. So the future in that case is we're led by these monolithic vendors who are slow to innovate. We're already 10 years behind.

If you look, go to London or go to Singapore and you do the same types of things you can do here, you're going to feel like you've just gone into the future by the way that they can do things in a much faster and much more efficient manner. So how [00:09:00] do we get that? How do we get that here? That's the question we have to ask ourselves. Because if we don't, what happens is, if people continue to go and open up their banking app or go into the branch or call the contact center, whatever way they choose to interact with folks, and they find that process to be painful and they're not looking forward to it,  even today, you can go and file your taxes online in a fairly simplified interface and have your taxes done in realistically a couple of hours if you have a pretty straight forward tax accounting.

You cannot do that yet. In banking, you cannot move your entire bank account or get everything that you own from a credit union or bank and easily transfer that somewhere else. That process is painful. If we can't figure that out, if we can't make it easy for members and consumers to move their money how they want, when they want, then they'll simply go to the places where they can.

And because the credit union industry is, all of us as an industry or beholden to some key vendors,  the whole industry could potentially be at risk if we can't figure out how to [00:10:00] simplify money boom the way everything else has been simplified. So, the doomsday scenario, as you say is we simply aren't around anymore and more and more right now credit unions have been in a consolidation mode for many years. We have more and more credit unions either simply fading away because the smaller credit unions can't keep up with regulation. You have all this regulation that is telling us what to do. And regulation is a good thing and make sure that we're being responsible with our members' money.

So there's nothing wrong with regulation. But when you have it at a hundred million dollar credit union, You don't have the resources to focus on that. So what we see is smaller and smaller credit unions are either getting emerged into larger credit unions or. The way we can get around that is by [00:11:00] one taking back control of the innovation pace. And I think this is incredibly important. And this isn't this isn't that technologically complex of an idea. It's our data that these vendors are using that they're then innovating with and selling us back services. It's our data that they need.

If we control our data as credit unions, if we control where it goes, how it goes, we can control the innovation cycle, which is something that we need to do. And there are ways to do this right now for the past two credit unions. I've been at one quarter in Washington state. And then here, Ventura County Credit Union, once you can control the data, you can start to innovate at your own pace and you can dramatically increase speed to market where much like you have an app on your phone. Today, you probably have a favorite app. Every once in a while, probably updates. You probably open it up and go, Oh, that's cool. New feature. You test it out.

You play with it. We don't do that in the banking space. The banking space, I'm going to update my online mobile app. I'm going to message you as a member six months out saying, Hey, big change coming, be prepared. We're going to take down the services for a [00:12:00] day. And then the next day you'll have this brand new experience.

And I have to warn you it's coming because it's going to be such a dramatic shift for you that is going to change your perception of how you're going to bank. And because it takes so much effort and time to do that. It's this big complex thing that ends up being something that you're almost getting scared of as a customer going.

Oh, my gosh, you're gonna be taking down my bank account if it were intuitive and easy like the other services we've talked about. You would just open up your app and one day your phone would have every couple weeks. Your phone would have a new feature that just did something new. Just  like every other app that you have that capability.

It's certainly within our reach. It's something we have in front of us right now. Today, what we don't have is a lot of vendors who are trying to teach us how to do that, because it really doesn't align with their business models. Their business model is to sell their service and to make a profit.

And that's fine. That's capitalism. That's the American way. But we collectively understood that, Hey, we can control all of this data and we can do it in a relatively simple way, we can speed up the innovation cycle. Then we get to a future where just [00:13:00] like every other thing you want to do. That's a chore.

You open up your phone, you look, and it's anything you want to do with your money, whenever you want to do it, however you want to do it, however you want to manage it, it's available to you in an intuitive, easy way.

Josh: Goodness gracious, sir. I really wish I'd blocked like six hours off on your calendar for this podcast. You just gave me so many things that I want to, I want to get more out of you. I want to start with actually, I think just the last thing that you finished with, I thought was  interesting.

And it is definitely something that comes up, especially when we're talking about like the Digital Banking Podcast,  So let's talk about digital banking.

I actually also find that really interesting,  You think about it. I'll use a, I'll actually use a real world example of a recent one for me.

And then maybe a more applicable one for folks. But  just the other day I logged into my Coinbase account. And they had a message that just said, Hey, we have a brand new UI. Everything looks totally different than it did last time you logged in. [00:14:00] I was like, okay, that was the end of it. And then I just navigated around.

I like some things better. I like some things not as much as the old ways. And then I moved on. And  the probably more relevant example for people is to think about how often Gmail updates the UI and things. It's all the time and you just log in and it's just different. And sometimes you whine and complain about it for a little bit.

And sometimes you love it right off the bat. How often does Apple release a new iOS? And there's always something on the internet about people who love it or hate it or what they did right or what they did wrong, et cetera, but at the end of the day, we all move on pretty quickly.

But what I find really fascinating. about changing the digital banking experience for credit unions. I'd love to get your perspective on this. But in my head, I think there's  two major factors that keep us from doing these rapid release [00:15:00] cycles or major changes to things like UIs if they're no big deal. And one is that we are dealing with people's money. And so there's perception either internally and or externally that like, oh my gosh, if we change things, people are going to lose their trust in us being their financial institution, that their money is safe.  I  counter that. Now, granted, again, I'm a little bit of an oddball in this regard.

Because I work in this industry, I do this  thing. But like, for example,  I went to my Coinbase account. There's enough money in there that if like there wasn't, I would be upset about this.  So it's like five bucks or something.  Huge change to UI, all of this. And I was like, yeah, fine.

My money's still there. It is what it is. Like I don't have this massive freak out moment of, they've changed UI. Can I trust that my money is still there? So I'm extrapolating that to say, if you change the UI massively on my credit unions, digital banking, personally, me as a consumer, I'm not going to think, Oh my gosh, my money's not safe with them anymore.

What are they [00:16:00] doing? That's one. I think the other is. That was credit unions, especially in the credit union space,  Like I'll pick on credit unions and you all care so stinking much about every single one of your members, like chat. How many members do you guys have in the ballpark?

Chad: Oh, just over 70, 000.

Josh: Okay. You have 70, 000 of them, 

Like if I were to tell you, yeah, 1 percent of them are going to be mad at you. For most people in a digital space, like, great. 1 percent is a pretty great number, but I can tell you unequivocally. I know exactly what would happen if I made that comment to you, you and your team would go back at the credit union.

You need to look at it and you'd be like, Oh, that's 70 members. Oh my gosh. Those 70 people are going to be affected. I love those people. Those are my people. Those are my members. We can't do that to them.  Like you care so much about every single unique individual, which is one of the things that makes you special and awesome. But at the same time I have reason to believe that that also hampers us from doing some of these things because we're like, ah, we don't want to rock the boat [00:17:00] of the people that we care so much about. I don't know. What are your thoughts?

Chad: Oh, I certainly appreciate your perspective on that, Josh, and I can see it.  I can see how you would get to that. And it makes sense because we historically have done that we do care much, very much about our members and we have historically demonstrated that by being very thoughtful about how we roll things out.

But having the fortunate position that I'm in to see  the other side of that, I also see something else that's kept us from being able to do that more often. And that's, we do to get technical for a moment, traditionally in credit union space, because we've had these older technologies, we've had to do point to point integrations with everything.

And so,  point-to-point integration is if I have my core that's processing all the transactions, every time you swipe your card, or every time you write a check, or every time you move money around savings account, checking account, that's tracking that. Every other piece of software has to directly tie into that, make a connection, a unique connection, and that connection has to be maintained. Well, that's the most important piece of software. I have along with my LOS. My lending [00:18:00] origination system. So with those two, I have all these direct connections. Each one of those has to be maintained.

And if I change anything, Yeah. About any one of those, I now have to go make sure everything else is still working. So what I have is a very, very slow innovation cycle. I have this thing where if I want to roll out a new feature, it's going to take me maybe a big feature. Say I want to roll out a CRM, something like that big, big thing, nine months to a year, that's an average for a credit union, big lift like that. You start at the beginning of the year, you end at the end of the year. Congratulations. You've done a good job. Well, with a different model. And with this I'm going to say API-led model, which I know your organization knows a thing or two about.

With an API-led model,  you can do the same rollout, and I did at my last credit union, in 45 days. So why is it that I can do something in 45 days, which would be considered pretty good speed to market,   just over a little bit over a month and a half, and I'm rolling out a brand new big system, versus nine months to a year.

And that's because those direct integrations I was mentioning before become a spider web, and when one thing breaks, you shatter the entire thing. So [00:19:00] This is where credit unions can catch up. API-led technology isn't new. It's been around for quite a long time, but in the credit union space, it still is relatively new.

And how do we, how do we, it is, it is revolutionary for us. And,  when I did my first transformation back in 2016, and I was talking about API-led, people looked at me like I had three heads. They just didn't understand how I was going to pull anything like that off, but it's capable. So once you can get to that point where you can start to be an API-led organization now, as opposed to having a spider web of configurations.

That can break and break the entire thing. Everything plugs into my platform. Right, it's a singular connection. It's an API connection. So if I want to swap out something like And put in something like Typhoon,  I just take one API, connect it to my platform, and now I have a service that's integrated into one centralized spot.

And I can control all of these into one centralized spot in something like an enterprise service bus or,  sometimes you call it middleware, whatever you want to call it. You can get to the point where you have the ability to [00:20:00] control what you're giving your members in a much faster way. Speed to market,

Josh: That is a whole nother layer of adding that complexity. And even I think that almost compounds the two points that I was making in that. There's also the problem of this spider web of interconnectivity, and sometimes you do, you're like, Hey, look, I've got this stack that's running on all modern tech.

This stack, that's a few years old. It's not too bad. This stack that's ancient. And this stuff, I don't even know where this stuff came from.

And you've got that whole web of stuff. Like I have to imagine that's going to be really difficult sitting in your seat at the credit union to say. I'm just going to deploy something super fast because I actually don't even know.

Is this going to affect 1 percent of my membership or 10 percent or 50%? Like what are all these ancillary [00:21:00] things? So until you have your arms wrapped around all of that as a holistic strategy, like can't really play chess, 

Like you're like, I don't know how pawns work. So I can't really play the game until I learn how a pawn works.

And so you're like, well, I can't really do digital transformation at this credit union until I have a good grasp of how all these things work. And if I make a change here, like how quickly can I permeate that successfully to all these other spider webs? Is that fair?

Chad: Yeah. And I take it a step further. You want to break down all the spiderwebs altogether. You want to get rid of them. You want to completely disconnect the idea of the spiderweb in your organization. When I talked, when I first started talking to AWS back in 2016,  well, you couldn't talk to them back then.

You couldn't get a hold of anybody. Nobody in there even knew who the credit union space was.  but eventually I got to build a pretty decent relationship with them. And now I have a much deeper relationship with them. When I, I remember I got on a call with a young developer there. And,  when I explained what my [00:22:00] tech stack was, he couldn't comprehend it because he was probably, no, I'm dead-serious.

He's probably maybe, maybe 22 years old. And,  he, it wasn't all API driven. It wasn't all microservice based. It wasn't all the connections that he's growing up with Amazon as your tech stack. That's what he was used to. That's, they were huge back in the days of leading API development.

So when I had to explain to him what our stack looked like, he. It was trying to explain a chalkboard to somebody who's never seen one before, or,  back to those pencil sharpeners that used to have, they just couldn't, they couldn't understand what I was talking about. And, and that's the piece where we've got to, we've got to dismantle that.

And it's not that it's hard to do. It just takes a strategy on how you get there to where you can actually break down the entire thing. One of the things you start with is the idea of, okay, is everything in the cloud. Is everything that you, all your servers, all your on prem stuff, are you still maintaining that?

Because credit union technical folks, we're, we're more limited in supply than you'd find at a tech company. We can't [00:23:00] necessarily as credit unions afford to pay Amazon salaries to staff. So we have smaller budgets than you'd In the big tech companies. So when we do have folks on the technical team, they should be focusing on making solutions for our members or employees, making things better, not running around and patching cables and figuring out where to plug stuff in and making sure the servers,  at a certain height off the ground, leave that to the experts, like AWS, Azure, they had that stuff figured out. So the first thing you want is you want to get everything up and out. So your team isn't focusing on maintaining hardware anymore. That's a relatively legacy idea that credit unions still in very many places are still doing so you get everything up and out. Now you can focus on more innovation.

Now you got to start bringing in APIs. How do you do that? Well, When you talk to your vendors, you tell them, if you don't have an API that we can test and we can read the documentation on, you don't even get to qualify to bid on a piece of work here. So you've got to, as an organization, you've got to adopt this mentality of, if we're going to get there, we have to put in the requirements that keep only the things that are going to help us innovate coming into the organization.

[00:24:00] And in an API-led organization, which is where credit unions need to be, we have to be there. This is imperative. Most of our vendors have grown up in the credit union space, so they're developing technology for an older framework, for an older organization. They're expecting these spiderweb things. So they built their technology like that, where if you went outside the credit union space and you went anywhere else, it was a modern technical, technical shop.

They would be doing things in a completely modern way. But in the credit union space, again, you're going back in time. So you have these vendors who are supporting things in this old, outdated framework and they're saying we have to do this direct connection. That's all we know how to do. And you're going, no, that's, that's going to slow me down.

That's going to, that's going to stop my ability to innovate. I need you to be able to just plug in with an API. So you have those conversations and you have to draw a line in the sand as an organization and say, listen, if they can't meet what's going to make us innovate in the future. No matter how cool the technology looks, no matter what the solution is providing, if they haven't themselves thought through the strategy and said, we're providing an older strategy to our credit unions, we [00:25:00] have to think progressively about what they're going to need in the future.

If they're still providing this older strategy, then they just cannot come in. So once you get to a point where you've got everything  up and it's automated and you're in a cloud somewhere, and then you've got that secured, and then you can start vetting your vendors one by one as they come in.

And as old ones fall off, you don't renew them over the course of years. For credit unions, it's going to be two, three years before you can be at the end of something like this. You get an architecture that looks much more similar to what you'd expect to see at a modern organization. You're still going to have some things you need to have that are older and that's fine, but you're going to have the ability to start doing things much more, what I call a much more dramatically increased speed to market where you can.

And a couple of weeks make changes and things can start popping up and we start working in things like sprints where every two weeks we're delivering new things and new functionality to the organization or to the members. And once we can get to that point, then you start to close that relevancy gap where you're no longer slow [00:26:00] to innovate if you start planning something today.

Maybe in 2025, you have it up. If it's a big lift now, if you start planning something today and you can be up in a couple of weeks, think about that, think about how much more relevant you are to members when they want to do something with their money. Now that they don't have to request it. When Zelle or Venmo came out, they're requesting that for years before we actually got it to them.

We want Zelle, a great credit union, to start rolling it out a year, years later. Well, imagine they raise their hand and say, Hey, we want Zelle. And a month later it's available to them. That's it. How we stay relevant by shrinking the time it takes us to go from the members wanting something that's useful and meaningful to them and our ability to deliver that we have to get that window as small as possible.

Josh: I want to give you two examples that I think illustrate what you're talking about, these recent interactions I've had. So just in the last couple of months, I had these two very real interactions. One with the CIO of a good size credit union. And I will not name names for parts of [00:27:00] the country to let people narrow this down, but I had a conversation with him, Chad. He asked us if we could deploy on-prem. And I said, no, and he said, would you? And I said, no.  and we quickly had a devolving conversation. Where he proceeded to spend 20 minutes telling me why,  him hosting everything in-house on old technology. It was going to be safer and faster for him.

Then moving everything to cloud-based stuff. And he said he wouldn't touch anything that's API with a 10 foot pole.

Josh:  And then fast forward just a little while longer. I had a conversation similar to what you were talking about with the younger person at AWS, a conversation with somebody brand new to the credit union industry, works for an extremely large credit union,  and is in [00:28:00] their development team.

And he was at a conference and he was telling me, he was like, yeah, I'm walking around the vendor halls and he's like, I've talked to so many technology companies and I have yet to actually see a technology company. He goes, I see credit union technology because, but I don't see technology, you know? And so it's just, it's, it's interesting to see these are parts of the problems that whether we like it or not, whether we want to align to it or not, like this is a part of the overall chess game that we're playing or trying to move credit unions forward.

It's tech, legacy think, and some of this is unavoidable. Some of this is self-inflicted.  You use the example of an LOS. I'm not saying that this is true, but let's just say there is no such thing as an API driven LOS. Everything is on 30-year-old tech. Well then unfortunately that would hamper you because that is a core element of your business that you have to have, you have to rely on, and it cannot [00:29:00] innovate for some, whatever reason, that's going to hold you up,  So if it's like all those factors are swirling around that you have to navigate.

Chad: So the way that you, the way that I try and look at that is, yeah, there are going to be things that are bigger lists and other things. And when it comes to, when it comes to providing the member experience, that's what this really has to focus on. This all has to. It doesn't matter what technology you're using.

Technology is not a strategy, technology is a tool to accomplish a strategy. So when people go out and say, I want this new technology because it's going to solve a problem. What problem are you going to solve with it? And have you thought through the total impact of how that's going to work is a very important question talking about the member experience up front and talking about the employee experience up front before you ever decide on what the Software, maybe or whatever you're trying to do, whether it's even if it's building branches or or whatever the you think the solution is, have the [00:30:00] conversation around what is going to be the impact of the member?

What is going to be the impact of the employee in terms of their experience? And how does that benefit them? And. When you have that discussion, sometimes that technology might be the right answer. But to folks who want to think, and I don't, I understand the argument that it's safer if I control it. I get that.

I get that. It's if you built your internal stack and you know what its capability is, and you know what it can do, you may very well feel that it's. More protected in your case in your instance, and I wouldn't argue that what I'd say when I talk about the industry as a whole, not everybody's gonna have the capability to completely build their stack internally just the way they want to and have total control over it.

We're still gonna be reliant on vendors quite a bit. Those vendors are using a variety of technologies. So from an industry perspective,

API-led gets us to being faster with our members in terms of what they're looking for. That's the reason why you [00:31:00] want to use the technology. It's not because it's necessarily better or worse than any other technologies, because it enables innovation at a much faster pace. Because if I have an LOS that does multiple things, right, including underwriting and funding and all this other stuff, but there's a piece of that, that I dislike with that particular LOS system, I guarantee there's a FinTech, a financial technology company out there who's developing something in a very small slice of that LOS's capabilities that they want to tackle. For example, mortgage lending applications online, filling out a mortgage application is a huge endeavor. It takes, you got to, you got to set aside time for this. You've got to sit down and think, Oh my gosh, you got to go get papers from boxes and things.

And you've got to, this is going to be a monster. Well, imagine that it was really intuitive and It wasn't this generic form to look like somebody printed off a paper form and made inputs on the web form and you're filling out all this stuff that may or may not be relevant and the form actually dynamically updated as you entered stuff.

Like I enter, I'm a veteran and all of a sudden I get VA loan access that wouldn't have been there for somebody else,  So it [00:32:00] intuitively guides me through that. Well, a company may be very, very good at that, but they may not be a full blown loan origination system. They may not do the other stuff, but if they have an API, 

Now I can simply plug that API into my environment. I can show the members the new cool interface that they want to see and still have the LLS do all the hard stuff in the background that it's designed to do. No, I can still do that, but as more and more, and this is where there's an explosion of vendors in the space, they want to offer that one slice of the financial services that they can do much better than anybody. And they're going to focus their entire company on that one thing. They're going to be really, really good at doing that one thing, like mortgage applications online, for example. Well, imagine now you get dozens of different organizations providing these very good services.

And you can decide, I want to use these different services for my member experience, my employee experience. So I picked the best, the best possible experiences [00:33:00] and I can control what it looks like. In terms of giving it one unique feel and my members are going, wow, this is great. It works so much like I would expect a more modern application to work.

Getting to that point is what's critically important for us as an industry and knowing how to get there isn't so much about what technologies you're going to use AWS versus Azure. It's more about focusing on the outcomes that you're creating for the members and understanding that what you're trying to do isn't a technology.

What you're trying to do is it. Speed up how fast you can give members what they want. So the technology is secondary. The primary focus is what is going to enable us to more rapidly deliver to our members and maintain relevancy the things that they want to do with their money when they want to do it, as opposed to saying, God, I wish I could do that.

But my credit union doesn't support that.

Josh: Yeah. Yeah. No,  that's, I think that's a lot like, I think we saw a lot of this in tons of industries as we started to go through the digital transformation age,  And they said exactly what you were just saying. [00:34:00] Like we used to have this piece of paper that people are filled out and going to digitize it.

We're going to put it on an iPad. It's the same exact thing. It's not a dynamic field. It doesn't auto populate based on inputs.

We just took it from paper and we put it on an iPad. Digital transformation,  And the answer is no. Like, why was somebody filling out that piece of paper in the first place?

What were they trying to accomplish?

Ok  great. Now, how can we use technology to simplify the actual action of why that was being done in the first place? And is it even a form? That's a part of the question that is more strategic thinking than just saying, well, technology is going to solve my problem because I'm going to technologize the thing. You know what I mean? 

Chad: Josh, either they want to buy a home, they want to buy a new car, they want to get a credit card, they want to save for their kid's college, they want to save for their retirement. They're coming to us because we enable them to be able to do [00:35:00] something, and being able to do something should happen as quickly as they need it to be done.

So if I want to buy a home, which is a big, big process, what if I can take that from a standard of,  45, 50 days to go through that process, to under two weeks?  That is meaningful to the member who wants to buy the home. Hey, I can have my new home in two. I saw it online. I want to go. I'm going to apply for it and I can have that home in two weeks or, or, or your child's first car or saving for college or whatever it may be that you're using that credit union for getting that thing that they want is why they're coming to us. We are in a very real sense enabling them to do what they want to do with their lives. And we're the ones that are taking care of their finances in a responsible way to do that. So the faster we can focus on getting that done, the happier they're and do it well, consistently doing it.

Well, that's where that trust issue you brought up earlier on is people trust Apple with their new rollouts and are incredibly loyal to the brand because the brand provides consistent [00:36:00] quality, consistent,  what, even though you're going to get something new,  it's going to be good. You're not going to open up.

It's not going to work. Rarely.  For the most part, it's the, it's the consistency. It's the consistency of delivery that meets expectations. And it's the emotion that comes at the end of it. So if you go through that process of buying a car and the entire time, it's difficult to work with The credit union of the bank and at the end of it, you get the keys and you're relieved like, Oh God, I'm so glad that's over.

That's a bad job that we did on behalf of that member. If they engage in that same process and because, and this is not just technology, it's the entire experience. If the way that the customer service team interacts with technology and the way the customer service team treats them is, they feel like they're taken care of.

They feel trusted when they call back again and they don't have to repeat themselves and everything's right there and everything is succinctly packaged up. So when that person calls back to ask, how is it going? The person who is a completely different person who answers the phone knows. Absolutely everything, including the very last thing this person said, you establish that trust and you start to develop an emotion that is [00:37:00] equivalent to something that is a positive experience.

And when they get done, if you can maintain from the minute they touch you, this is a really important thing, whether it's a marketing ad or they're coming to your website, the minute they touch you, they have a, they have something they want to do, that they want to get done. And if you can maintain that trust, The fact throughout each step of that process, whether it's buying a house, buying a car, getting a credit card, opening an account, that every step of the process is validated with more positive emotion and things are happening in a way that you think is reasonable and should happen.

And at the end of it, you're getting what you want. Now you have relevancy. You have sustained scalable relevancy for the future. If you can't take that same process and have that same emotional outcome tied to success. Now people are going to look for alternatives to traditional banking. And that's where we are right now.

We're not consistently delivering. Good experiences with positive emotions. We want to, especially in credit unions, this is what we're, as you said, we're designed, we care about our members, but yet the technology and the tradition of providing a lot of in service attention has left us a little bit behind in terms of the [00:38:00] digital expectations of how we can provide those same services meaningfully through digital channels or a combination of in person and digital channels.

Josh: Can I put some words in your mouth? And I'm curious how this aligns to what you're thinking about.  I personally am one of those people. The objective end state is so much more important to me than just the KPIs along the way. And as you were talking, it got me thinking about when my wife and I bought this house that I'm in right now, we actually sent a letter. To the builder,  that was the total sob story.  It was just out of reach for us, but we knew this was going to be like the home where we wanted to raise our family and have kids in and like fast forward. Now I got two of them running around in here with us and, and the, where I'm going with all [00:39:00] of this is, you're almost saying to me that like as a credit union, what your KPI is, I want more letters from people that are like, Chad, I just want you to know that because of Ventura County. We were able to get in because we were able to make an offer faster. We were able to get funding through faster than other buyers. We were able to get our dream home that we're going to start out and that we're going to raise our family. And then saying we digitized 36. 2 percent more mortgage applications than we did last year.

Chad: Sure. Sure. Quantifiable data is a wonderful thing because it does objectively give us an idea of how those experiences may be going because not at the end of the day, not everyone's going to, as much as I would love to get that letter every single person at the end day, we're not always going to get that letter.

But to your point, I think your point is, is incredibly valid, which is, you had, you, you got, you were able to go through a process and get something that you really, really wanted and it worked [00:40:00] out and you were so excited about it that you wanted to write a letter. Like, that experience needs to, every industry that's really, really good at something can provide an experience consistently that may not always be the letter writing, but it's, it's closer to that than it's not.

So and that's where credit unions as cultures, we have this nailed as, as this is, there is no culture better than that. That I've ever seen in any industry that rivals the credit union culture. Like we care about our members. We care about our employees. We care about our communities in a way that is genuine and authentic.

And you can see it in the numbers because we're not for profit financial cooperatives with democratically elected board of directors. So we're not driven by quarterly profit returns. Our board of directors are volunteers. They volunteer their time and their sole focus. is on the membership to make sure the membership is taken care of.

So our ability as credit unions to look at the long term is fantastic. A lot of organizations don't have the ability to look four or five, six years out and say, this is where I want to be then because we don't have to focus as much.  we have to be profitable. We have to keep the lights on, but we take that profit and [00:41:00] reinvest it in the company or in the members or in the community.

So. We can take the long term approach to get things in a way that is more meaningful to those kinds of outcomes. So traditionally, we've been the industry that can create those letter writing experiences consistently, but now trying to overcome the gap of that technology deficit that we're facing. Because right now, what we're not doing is when people interact with us if they have the singular interaction with the contact person or with the context on the phone or in the branch with the person, they're going to know they were great.

They know my name. They know what I like every time. But can we consistently repeat that in any touch point that they have? And that's, that's where we're struggling as an industry right now, and that's where the relevancy comes in is there is a way to do that. I've done it at two different credit unions now where we can get to the point where we're getting to that level of interaction with our members, but it takes a, it takes a different focus on technology is, is not the strategy.

Technology enables the outcome. [00:42:00] Focus on the outcome, not so much on the technology.

Josh: Yeah. No, I, yeah, that's, it's such a well stated point because that's, that's it,  Like if we're just saying, Hey, we need to digitize our mortgage application process,  And that is the KPI. Then yes, you may be successful and you may see a few more mortgage applications come through. But if the thought wasn't like, Hey, how do we create, because we get the ability to create it from the ground up, going into the digital space, how do we create an engagement with our membership? So they want to write a letter to us later about how awesome this was, that we made the process so smooth, they were able to get into their dream house. Again, you're not to get all the letters, but if that's the thought

Like if that's the starting point of what you're trying to solve for, I think you solve it very differently than just, My team was tasked with digitizing [00:43:00] our mortgage application. We took it, we scanned it, we put it into a PDF and made them forms that you could fill out. We have digitized mortgage applications. It's just, it's very different. And, and to your point, like that is the DNA of a credit union,  Is, is the member experience side of things. So that's gotta be the guiding light. And then the technology just has to be a tool of solving for the objective.

Chad: Right, and you have to understand every point in that member's journey through whatever they're trying to do, whether that's open an account or buy a car or get a credit card or fund us fund their business or or save for retirement, whatever they're trying to do. The piece of technology you're buying may improve one slice of that.

But if we look at it as a journey of, a journey of value to the member, if any other point along that path causes pain or is inconsistent or is wrong, it doesn't matter what you. [00:44:00] How great this one piece is. It's a holistic experience and you have to look at it from the first time it touches you, your organization, whether that's digitally or physically, however they do it to when they have the thing done that they're trying to do one, how long did it take them to do it?

And two, was the entire experience consistently good? And that takes a different view on things because when you go to start a project, Traditionally, in a credit union, you'll get the team. Like I'm on the mortgage team. I work for the CLO. I'm going to go get this new mortgage application. That's going to solve my mortgage problem where it's not as easy for my members.

But have you talked to the people in marketing about how that's going to change your experience? Have you talked to the people down the line who are going to be doing that? Providing the keys to the hands with the underwriting and maybe going to the external partners that you partner with to make those kinds of transactions possible.

Have you thought through the entire experience to see what that's going to change and how it's going to change the outcome? And it probably will improve your piece to some extent. So there's not that there's no value in that. Of course, there's value in trying to improve the solutions with which we provide our members.

But if you're not taking into account the entire journey and the entire [00:45:00] experience, then you don't know. Where else the pain is being caused in that process and you don't know just by changing that one piece if you're going to get that letter, so to speak, at the end, because you're not sure what else they experienced along the path.

So it behooves the entire organization, everybody to understand how their work impacts the other part of that member experience. If everybody understood their piece in that and how it impacts this, this larger experience, then they would all understand the value in what they're doing and how it's relating to what the member needs to get done.

And that's, that's an area where I think credit unions are getting better, but historically we've been very siloed in, everybody does their own piece and they  focus on what they do.

Josh: Well, and that brings back to one of the things you started with that I wanted to come back to Chad was when you were talking about relevance,  Is relevance was actually a lot easier. It's a lot easier when the touch points of engagement are simpler.  Because it's much easier for you to convey your value [00:46:00] proposition to someone when the only interaction point they have with you is when they come into the branch to talk to you at the teller line.  But now we have so many different touch points and to your point, like they could have 10 different touch points across 10 different silos of the organization for one actual desired outcome.  And if any one of those breaks a link in the chain, then it becomes much more difficult to demonstrate where you fit in the value chain for that person as a part of that whole project.  And I wanted to come back to. You  made the comment when you were talking about relevance. The thought that, and I, I'm going to word vomit this out and you wordsmith it. 

Chad: I'll do my best,

Josh: You were almost talking about the fact that like,  there's maybe an unspoken fear of [00:47:00] if we make processes too easy,  and it makes it so easy for somebody to change their institution that they would just change will-nilly. And we'd potentially lose customers. But I think what you're  identifying is, is again, going back to that example that you just gave. No, if you're providing a really clean experience throughout that entire process, you're demonstrating your relevancy and your value. And you're thinking about the objective more so as like, how can we delight the members and make an impact for the positive in their life in this, as opposed to just,  did we, did we digitize something, for example.

That is gonna create an ecosystem where even though it'll be very easy for members to flow in and flow out, they will gravitate toward, gravitate towards staying with you.

Chad: Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Think about when Amazon first launched Prime back in the day, [00:48:00] big concern with Amazon was always like, how am I going to return it? I can't go to a, I can't go to a store and like, give me, give me my money back. Like, I've got to, I've got to ship it. I've got to wait for a return.

Like, how's that process going, it was unknown to us back in the day. And it was a little worrisome. Like, what if I don't like this thing and I get it and it's the wrong size or the wrong fit, or it doesn't work. But thinking about how they've established, it's very easy for me to return something on Amazon.

If I want to, I click a button, I print a form, I drop by my UPS store, wherever I drop in the mailbox, I think about it, my money shows up. I never have to talk to anybody. It's a super simple process. Now I could just as easily go to any other, I can walk into a retail store. I can go to, I can shop in different ways, a different organization, but I've come to trust the fact that when something isn't right from Amazon, They're going to take care of it.

And it's going to be very little hassle. It's going to be very easy for me. So while I think you could get to a point in the future where perhaps it is really easy to move your money around.  that's what, that's what they're doing in Europe right now.  they have, they have regulation that says you have to be able, you can walk into a bank today and say, give me all my [00:49:00] data.

They're going to give it to you. And I can walk across the street and I can open up another account. We're going to go there anyway. Regulation will come that will say in the protection of our members and our customers, they deserve the  To have access to their data when they want it, how they want it, not just their money, but their data to everything they should have that's theirs.

We're stewarding that for them in a responsible way. And that's why they come to us. But ultimately, if the experience itself, which is this is where I think credit unions have a huge advantage in the market, because we are so hyper focused on our member experiences, and we are so hyper focused on taking care of our communities, that if we can get this other piece, right,  If we can get this piece where it's so easy to make a return. This digital piece, where people feel like, Oh, this, yeah, it's consistently always good. Yeah, they can move their money, but why are you going to? You've, you've developed trust with a brand that you believe stands for something as most credit unions do, and how they're giving back to their communities.

And you feel like [00:50:00] Working with them is doing not only a transaction for you, but a social good. So in that, yeah, I may still lose the occasional person because they see a lower interest rate on a loan somewhere else and they want to take advantage of it. It's good for them, but they may just go to that one little product.

Do that one loan. Just come right back because I'm giving them consistently good service across all Everything that they do. And I think that is something we are so wonderfully positioned to do that any other,  We're going to beat the banks on that one all day long. They just do it all day long but we're really bad at marketing ourselves as an industry and we need to get that wonderful experience consistently, every time they interact with us. 

Josh: Um. S I'm going to phrase this as a super simple question, but you could probably go two hours on the answer with it, Chad. But,  when you talk about relevance and credit unions dying off, do you think that it's more likely that if this isn't solved for credit unions, just completely disappear altogether and are done for, [00:51:00] or that you become relegated to simply just essentially a ledger service.

Chad:  That's a really good question, Josh. I think we asked earlier about the doomsday scenario. That's what I was trying to paint is like, here's like,  the worst case scenario as we go away. But I think that the way that our consumers in the United States have developed an understanding and increase their expectations of how it should be to interact with an organization.

We do have to find a way to meet that. We can't always be, Oh, well, they're a bank or they're a credit union. They're just,  they're just not there yet. That works for a while. I think we probably could even say we have 10 more years of trying to be a little bit behind or a lot behind everybody else.

But at some point the generations are growing up completely digital, which they are now much older than I'd like to imagine.  they've grown up in a completely digital environment. They're not going to understand it back in the day. This used to be okay. 

Josh: Yeah. 

Chad: Why is this [00:52:00] so painful? I'm going to find an option that's not painful anymore.

And I'm just going to do that. And I think in there, that's where we are, that's where we lose relevance. It's not going to be that suddenly the doors are shut on credit unions around the country. I don't think we'll ever, as an, as an, as an industry go away, it's, it's too meaningful of a mission. But I think we are seeing the numbers get smaller and that could continue.

And especially if we can't get to the point where we can provide that  experience, that is easy and intuitive. So I don't know that they ever fully go away. I would, I would,  I would say no, that's probably never, not all credit unions are ever going to go, but I can say that if we want to be prominent in the forefront of the consumer's minds in terms of a viable, a good option for stewards of their money, we need to step it up quite a bit and we need to do it fairly quickly because the gap isn't necessarily getting smaller right now, unless we take aggressive steps as organizations on how we're going to get there, we have to have a plan on what that looks like in the future.

And you have to have a [00:53:00] team of people in the organization that will get behind and rally behind that and move towards that. And I think That is something that we're still learning how to do as an industry.

Josh: Yeah. You've  touched on this a couple of times, so I wanted to just get your take on it, but you've made the comment a few times about money movement being a big key. Like, would you say that that's probably one of the biggest,  I guess, feature expectations of American consumers today is just their ability to move money where, how, and when they want it?

Chad:  It's incredibly important. What are the, what are some really important things in your life as a person, my health and my money, those things enable me to do the things in life that I might want to do or that I need to do. So if you, if you, if you take somebody's money and you hold it for them and you make it difficult for them to use it the way they want to use it.

So that can be movement. That can be, it can be, we're stewarding their money for them and holding it responsibly in a way that we're saying, Hey, your money's safe with us. We're going to take care of it. But when they go to get that, [00:54:00] if that's a painful process to do what they want to do, and it doesn't work the way they want it to work, or it takes longer than they think it should take, then that's going to be impactful for them.

So again, I go back to that idea of we've got to get to that point where the way that whether it's movement, whether it's. The activity that they want, getting the keys to the house or getting a car or maybe opening a business or whatever it is, it's their dream or just their necessity that they need to take care of.

They need to be able to do that when they want to do it, how they want to do it. If they want to split the check five ways at dinner and they want to be able to just shoot money off to other people.  that needs to happen. That shouldn't take four years of development to get to that point. And if a financial technology firm outside of our space can do that today,  We've either got to find a way to take all those cool ideas that everyone's building outside of the technology space and rapidly adopt them so that we can use them,  Team up with these people, or we've got to find a way where we can Provide that level of service that they're expecting that [00:55:00] those other providers are offering and and that is our challenge

Josh:  I think if people have been paying attention to what you've been talking about, they'll probably have a good indication of how you're about to answer this, but,  when you're talking about tools and having the right tool for the right job, but actually understanding what the job is in the first place, like, how does this major buzzword of AI and generative AI into that for you?

Chad: Well, so ai is a wonderful tool . It's fantastic. And I think we should leverage it as responsibly as we can We're already the financial industry is already using, you know Machine learning for a lot of things that we do for underwriting loans for member retention for how we test our balance sheets So, you know the idea of using  machine learning is not new for our industry, that's been around for a while. So I think we are going to continue to find ways to use that responsibly. Generative AI is a fantastic, [00:56:00] fantastic toy. And I, I've spoken on this a few times and,  I say when Steve Jobs stood up on the stage in 2007 and held up the iPhone and said, this is going to change everything.

We all  went. Okay. We didn't know what, we didn't know what it meant. We didn't, we couldn't, we couldn't understand what he was saying at times because we'd never seen one before. And then, you fast forward 10 years and everybody had one and you fast forward today and every, every, everyone's got a phone in their pocket.

It's changed the way we interact with people. It's changed the way we interact with each other, with ourselves. It's changed everything. When generative AI launched a couple of years ago, when open AI launched at GPT to the public a couple of years ago, it's been three months. It had more adoption than the phone iPhone did after the equivalent of years.

So think about that. That is enormously an order of magnitude more adoption. It's fundamentally changing the way everybody interacts with technology right now. This tool is available for us to use. So I think in terms of [00:57:00] shifting and impacting humanity. It's going to be an order of magnitude higher than what we saw from Steve Jobs back in 2007.

How do we use that responsibly? How do we use that in the credit union space? This is a very interesting area of conversation right now because everyone's coming to us saying, Hey, buy our thing. Look at this gen AI, but, but,  generative AI can hallucinate. It can, it can be trained on data sets that are specific for your institution or more generalized.

And when it makes a mistake, what does that look like? And there was a really interesting use case that happened with an airline in Canada. I won't name the airline where,  I think his name was,  Mr. Moffitt was, had a, somebody passed in his family and he had to take a bereavement flight from Vancouver, Canada to Toronto, Canada, and he went online and they had generative AI and he interacted with the chat and said, Hey, can I get a refund if I book a flight, but I don't have the documentation yet.

I need to prove that this is a bereavement [00:58:00] flight. Can I get it? And the generative AI said, yeah, you got up to, I think it was 60 or 90 days,  to go ahead and give us that documentation and we'll, we'll credit you. Well, the generator AI was making up that policy. That policy didn't exist. If you want to look at their terms and conditions, their terms and conditions said, no, you can't do that.

Josh: Hmm.

Chad: So this person sued and said, Hey, listen, wait a second. I took screenshots of the chat. The chat said, it was okay that I do these things. It said, I get my money back. And the airline said, well, if you looked at our terms and conditions, you would've seen that wasn't allowed. So then who do you trust?

Do you trust the chat that's telling you what's, or do you always go and look at the terms and conditions to marry that together? So I think in order to use it responsibly, the credit union space is trying to understand, we got a pretty big working group we put together with the help of Sue Mitchell and AWS,  to,  to understand the impact of generative AI.

And we actually did a white paper specifically on this topic. That's about 50 pages where we got the best thought leaders in the credit union space, not just technologists, but business leaders, CEOs. People from AWS, like all over. We had people come together and put together this white paper to [00:59:00] focus on.

How do we responsibly roll this out? What are the questions that you should ask? So if you're an executive or you're in a credit union and years, your team's coming to say, Hey, can we get this AI? Because it's going to generate all the content on the marketing page like that. And we don't have a website.

We can generate all the content. We don't have to go pay a hundred thousand dollars a year for content anymore. What are the types of questions you should be asking? What's the risk rating for vendors when you use generative AI? What's the risk rating for generative AI? If generative AI is member facing, should that be a higher risk than generative AI who's just translating policies and procedures for internal staff?

Like those are two different functions that maybe one can be, one can make mistakes. Maybe we can make mistakes with this, but we can never make mistakes with this. So it's this approach of, we have a new technology, it's going to enhance and amplify employee performance like we've never seen before. For all of us, we're all going to be able to do things.

We've never been able to do it in a faster way because of this technology, but how do we do it in a controlled way? That's going to give us sustainable growth and not negatively impact either the members of the employees with [01:00:00] information that sometimes can be wrong. So there's a lot there to think about, but I think ultimately this is a good, this is a wonderful thing for the organization.

I'm a positive person. I choose to believe,  I've seen Terminator. I get it. I get where this thing could go. But I choose to believe that we're going to, we're going to get to that point where it's, it's, it's, it's a benefit. This is going to be a wonderful tool for us when we figure out how to use it the right way.

Josh: That's a really, really great way to cap that is just we have to figure out how to use it the right way. It's not, it's not the silver bullet answer to everything.  But,

 Chad, I'm dead serious. I, I thoroughly regret not blocking like 24 hours off and feeding you and sending refreshments your way to keep you going.

Chad:  You've piqued my interest. The 24 things would be a little tough, but  free food.

Josh: Now I know your motivator. Got it. Okay.  no, seriously, this has been an absolute blast, but before I let you go, [01:01:00] I, I got two final questions for you. So first it's just, where do you go to get information about what's happening in the industry? And I'd actually like, just since you called it out, would you mind referencing where folks could get that AI case study that you did as well?

Chad: Yeah, yeah. So,  for where I go for news in the industry, I am fortunate that I embrace my LinkedIn contacts quite a bit and I gained quite a lot from them. But there's one individual I'll call it. I've never met this person in real life. His name is Matt Wood at AWS. I think he's a VP of AI. I followed him for quite some time,  back even in the early days when generative AI was just rolling out because he gives consistently insightful advice.

So that's one person I call out to say, and,  I think, I think he's actually Dr. Matt Wood, but I don't know what his degree is in. So say he's been a wonderful,  single resource for me in that environment in terms of learning about generative AI and the capabilities there. So I think he oversees that or some large part of AWS.

The other thing was The White Paper. That's a, it's a group called, [01:02:00] we do a group called the Underground and you can look it up in the credit union space. The Underground is actually a group that typically,  will meet and we have discussions. It's open for all credit union folks to attend. It's run by Sue Mitchell and she puts on several shows a year where people come and they get informed on what she calls,  the, the, the, the raw story of the credit union movement.

And she has very transparent conversations in ways you're not used to seeing in normal conferences. So,  it's a, it's a,  you, you go to one of these events, you look up Sue Mitchell, look up her group, and you'll have access to The White Paper. It's a wonderful resource, and  I think it's available right there on their website.

Josh: Awesome. Thank you, sir.  and then if people want to connect with you and have more conversations with you more about the credit union,

Chad: Obviously I'm very proud of Ventura County Credit Union. This is just such a wonderful group and we're doing such good work in our community. And I'd say,  our website is vcconline.net. Please check us out. It's a group I'm incredibly proud to be associated with.

And for me,  like I said, [01:03:00] I'm on LinkedIn all the time. That's where I learned quite a bit of my information from folks. So,  I'm happy to connect with folks there.

Josh: Awesome. Chad, thank you so much for sharing so much of your insight.  This was action packed.  I hope people were taking furious notes on this one, but,  thank you so much for coming to be a guest on the Digital Banking podcast.

Chad:  Josh, you're too kind, Josh. I appreciate it. I appreciate the opportunity. And, I wish you the best of luck in this podcast. It seems like a wonderful, wonderful way to get some great news into, into your, into your audience.

Josh: Well, when I can get people like you on for sure. So. Thank you