Posts By: Denise Wymore

The Veridian Group and Texas Dow Employees Credit Union are announcing a joint investment in Illuma Labs, a Plano, Texas-based provider of voice authentication for enhanced security against fraud in call centers.

“Identity theft is an ongoing threat that can have a costly impact on credit unions and their members,” said Nick Evens, The Veridian Group’s president. “We’re excited about the solutions Illuma Labs is bringing to market and grateful for the chance to be part of their growth.”

Illuma Labs is the maker of Illuma Shield, a real-time audio authentication platform to secure voice communications. Illuma Shield uses signal processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide faster, more accurate authentication than the use of PINs, passwords and personal questions. The platform runs passively in the background of each call, creating an easier authentication experience for the member.

“Our top priority is to keep members connected to their money in a way that is not only safe and secure, but also easily accessible,” said Stephanie Sherrodd, TDECU’s president and CEO.… Read more

PSCU, the nation’s premier payments credit union service organization, has updated its weekly transaction analysis from its Owner credit union members on a same-store basis to identify the impact of COVID-19 on consumer spending and shopping trends.

To provide relevant updates on market performance, experts from PSCU’s Advisors Plus and Data & Analytics teams today released year-over-year weekly performance data trends. In this week’s installment, PSCU compares the 21^st week of the year (the week ending May 24, 2020 compared to the week ending May 26, 2019).

• Overall credit card spend was down 12.5% compared to the same week last year, and overall debit card spend was up 11.7% year-over-year. For credit, it was the sixth consecutive week of strengthening results. For debit, it was the sixth consecutive week of year-over-year growth since turning negative on March 29.
• The average debit card purchase amount continues to be strong, up 17.2%

Des Moines fintech LenderClose today announced the company has welcomed Samantha Paxson to the company’s board of directors, effective April 22, 2020. Paxson’s appointment brings LenderClose’s total board membership to six.

“Samantha’s counsel and expertise will add an important layer of thought leadership to the board and reinforce our commitment to an exceptional borrower experience,” said Omar Jordan, CEO and founder of LenderClose. “Her knowledge of the challenges and opportunities faced by community financial institutions, coupled with her call for leaders to be bold in their pursuit of growth and evolution, dovetails nicely with our vision for the industry.”

Paxson is chief experience officer for CO-OP Financial Services, and architect of the company’s go-to-market brand and customer experience strategy. She is an accomplished speaker and founder of CO-OP THINK, an innovation content platform that just this year went virtual for an audience of 2,500+ credit union leaders.

A respected credit union industry advocate, Paxson shares the credit union difference with the greater consumer and business marketplace by contributing content to national media, such as the Huffington Post and Forbes.… Read more

Consumer Spending Remained Low During May 1 to May 15

As most of the country remained under stay-at-home guidelines, consumer spending remained low in the first half of May. Digital payments continued to surge; inside the CO-OP Credit portfolio, card not present transactions jumped 35 percent year-over-year, while card-present spending was down 33 percent. Looking at spending within CO-OP’s own Credit and Debit portfolio data, CO-OP Financial Services (www.co-opfs.org) is seeing the following trends inside these essential categories (data comparing May 1-15, 2020 with May 1-15, 2019):

Online Bookstores (Amazon)

Debit: Up 52 percent
Credit: Up 74 percent

CO-OP Analysis: Amazon bookstores purchases continued to see a significant increase across credit and debit in the first half of May. This indicates a strong opportunity for credit unions to begin promoting their card to the top of the Amazon wallet in order to not only capitalize on this spending trend, but also hold on to transactions at this popular merchant for the future.… Read more

In late 2017, core data processor CU*Answers released some sweeping changes to the Accounts Payable (A/P) system in CU*BASE^® making it easier to process invoice payments and adding the ability to pay vendors via ACH. Coming in July, credit unions will have the ability to automatically generate a payment advice email (with comments) to notify the A/P vendor that a payment was made.

Also coming in July will be a new Accounts Payable Dashboard that provides qualitative data about the workload of a credit union’s A/P department. Information regarding how many invoices get processed, number of vendors that are paid, and how payments are being made (check vs. ACH) will be available. This dashboard will provide great insight regarding the volume of work a credit union’s A/P department is juggling.

More improvements are in the works to not only the Accounts Payable system but for other accounting functions like subsidiary processing (fixed assets, etc.)… Read more