How Credit Unions Can Think, And Act, Globally

Most credit unions are fiercely committed to their local communities, and we think that’s great. Sometimes, though, it’s important to take a few steps back and broaden our perspective. That’s where the World Council of Credit Unions (WOCCU) comes in.

Today, we’re going to step back with Mike Reuter, the Executive Director of WOCCU’s Worldwide Foundation for Credit Unions; Ari Farrell, Program Manager of the World Young Credit Union Professionals (WYCUP) program; and Lena Giakoumopoulos, GWLN (Global Women’s Leadership Network) Director. We talk about their audacious fundraising goal for International Credit Union Day, as well as why it’s important to think, and act, globally, what financial inclusion really means, and how WOCCU is tackling some of the biggest challenges of our time.

We also address this month’s BIG question:

What does financial inclusion look like on a global scale, and why is a global movement important? How can credit unions around the world join forces to build more strength and resilience?

 

Key takeaways

1. Awareness of the global credit union system in the United States seems to be limited. Mike recognizes the importance of focusing on local communities but also hopes more credit unions will recognize the power of working together to champion financial inclusion on a global scale. Access to financial services is as necessary as food, water, and shelter and can have catalytic effects that change lives across generations.
2. There is no “one size fits all’ when it comes to financial inclusion. Members of the LGBTQIA+ community, for instance, are more likely to work in cash-based economies. People of color in the U.S. are more likely to be denied loans, and in some countries, women still cannot open a bank account without their husband’s signature. Any efforts to meaningfully address financial inclusion need to take into account these communities’ unique circumstances and needs.
3. WOCCU’s three strategic pillars speak to some of the largest challenges and opportunities of our era. Digitization is about increasing access in an equitable way. Climate is about finding and replicating strategies to prepare for and respond to the increasing number of climate-related catastrophes that are affecting us all. And resilience is about building a credit union system that can withstand volatility and evolve with the changing times.

 

Read the full transcript

Cameron Madill:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Credit Union Podcast. We created our podcast to help credit union leaders think outside of the box about marketing, technology, and community impact. Each episode we bring on expert guests from inside and outside of the industry for conversations about innovation. Our goal is to challenge your preconceptions about business as usual, and provide you with actionable takeaways you can use to grow your membership, improve the financial health of your cooperative, and magnify the positive impact you have in your community. Today’s big question, what does financial inclusion look like on a global scale and why is a global movement important? How can credit unions around the world join forces to build more strength and resilience? I’m Cameron Madill, the CEO and a co-owner here at Pixel Spoke.

Kerala Taylor:
And I’m Kerala Taylor, also a co-owner at Pixel Spoke and the senior manager of marketing. I’m excited today to introduce three guests, that might be a first on our podcast, having three guests at once. They’re all from the World Council of Credit Unions, otherwise known as WOCCU. And first off, I’d like to introduce Mike Reuter, uses he, him pronouns, and is the Executive Director of WOCCU’s Worldwide Foundation for Credit Unions. Mike is a nonprofit professional who’s been in the industry since 2005 and he joined the World Council as the Executive Director of its Worldwide Foundation for Credit Unions in 2018. He’s tasked with scaling its fundraising capacity and deepening engagement between the US and international credit Union systems. Welcome Mike.

Mike Reuter:
Thanks for having me.

Kerala Taylor:
I’d also like to introduce Ari Farrell, who uses they them pronouns and serves as the program manager of the World Young Credit Union Professionals Program, also known as WYCUP, and it’s another initiative of the Worldwide Foundation for Credit Unions. Ari is part of the Credit Union De Novo Collective to support new credit unions that will serve the underserved, and they were actively involved in the formation of a De Novo Credit Union to primarily serve the LGBTQIA plus community, service workers and the formerly incarcerated. They have over 16 years experience in customer service and eight years in the credit union industry. Ari, welcome.

Ari Farrell:
Hi. Thanks so much. Glad to be here.

Kerala Taylor:
And last but certainly not least is Lena Giakoumopoulos, uses she, her pronouns and is the GWLN Director. Lots of acronyms here, bear with us. GWLN stands for Global Women’s Leadership Network and is another initiative of the Worldwide Foundation for Credit Unions. She has over 25 years of international experience working in 20 countries in Western, Central and Eastern Europe. Her background includes managing European Union cross-border cooperation programs, membership recruitment for a National Trade Association, content development for print and digital media, and directing career services and higher education. Lena, thanks so much for joining us.

Lena Giakoumopoulos:
Thank you for having me. Very, very glad to be here.

Kerala Taylor:
Wonderful. Well, Mike, I thought we’d start things off with you. I definitely wanted to mention your Members Helping Members campaign, which you’ve kicked off in advance of the 75th International Credit Union Day on October 19th, and you’re asking people to donate to give the gift of financial inclusion. On your website you point out that around the world, 1.4 billion people wake up every day without access to financial services. So let’s just kick things off with a very basic but important question, which is why does financial inclusion matter and what might people who have always had access to financial services take for granted?

Mike Reuter:
Yeah, I think it’s similar to water, food, shelter. I think in today’s day and age, when you uplift people either as individuals or as families, you uplift community, you strengthen community, you strengthen the economies of those communities when you provide individuals with basic access to loans, to the ability to save, to a whole platform of financial education and understanding. And when you do that at an exponential level, the way credit unions can do that on a global scale, the way that we’ve seen our member network of credit unions do it on a global scale, it has exponential generational changing impacts on people’s lives. And we’ve used the International Credit Union Day holiday for several years now as a rallying cry, as a catalyst to grow deeper awareness and understanding and education to all that there’s a global movement out there. Surprisingly still quite a few credit union colleagues of ours across the world, I mean rightfully so, are very focused on their local communities that they serve and even have awareness of the national movement that they are a part of.
But quite often there’s not an awareness of that there’s a global credit union system beyond that. And so for us, it starts with awareness and education and hopefully beyond that, people are willing to give a bit of their treasure to help someone that they may never meet many time zones away, gain access to basic credit union financial services. When we wake up every day clutching that mobile phone in our hands or access to that computer and we can access our accounts and capital at a moment’s notice. And so for us at the World Council, at the Worldwide Foundation, it’s all about the basics. A lot of our work is about the basics. It starts with the basics of providing that financial inclusion. And so that’s what Members Helping Members is about. It’s really a rallying cry to credit unions and member partners to say to their members, would you be willing to give a little to affect a greater change around the world?

Cameron Madill:
Ari and Lena from both of you on this, this is such a big question. So maybe Ari, starting with you, could you share a little about some of the specific financial barriers that other marginalized groups face? I know you have a lot of experience, LGBTQIA plus, formerly incarcerated, or really any other marginalized group, and what does that look like and maybe why might that be hard for someone who’s not a member of one of these groups to understand?

Ari Farrell:
Absolutely. It comes a lot from the experience you have in the branches and experiences that you have, just even feeling safe to go into the cities that you reside in and do business. Then politically, the political climate and people’s personal opinions play a lot into how services are provided. Biased or not, we do our best in the financial industry to mitigate that through regulation, but it still can happen and it still happens. I think the biggest example we have is not understanding some of the hardships that folks might be going through or some of the loopholes they might have to jump through just to get services. For instance, I mean one hot topic that’s coming up right now is the DACA, potential removal of DACA for folks in the Dream Act. That’s going to cause a financial burden on people who have to have lawyers who have to even just be able to live in the United States as legal residents.
So that just as a picture, it’s just like if they can’t get a loan because they’re no longer able to have an ID that allows them access to a service, how do we help uplift a community that is giving back to us all the time? LGBTQ plus community, a lot of it is cash-based business depending on what you’re doing. And we know that our regulators don’t like that so much, but we need to find safe environments. I did work a lot in the risk-based banking. We’re talking about industrial hemp programs and things like that. We have farmers out there that can’t get accounts because they do a portion of their business in industrial hemp, which is a legal product. It’s been legal for a very, very long time. It’s just about how we can uniquely serve these industries and under marginalized folks by getting creative with and working with our regulators to allow that access.
And I think credit unions are the best vehicle for that because we have a lot more ability to understand exactly what products we already have and that actually extends globally as well. We’re talking about, especially at the Foundation and the work that WOCCU is doing with digital services and offering support and advocacy to be able to get ACH services is a huge deal too, and that all plays a part in the bigger net of access for marginalized folks. If we can’t get what they need to them in their hands, then they’re not going to be able to get very far.

Cameron Madill:
Thanks for sharing that. And Lena, I was just really impressed with your extensive international experience and I’m wondering if you can paint a bit of a picture similarly about what might someone in the US not understand about financial inclusion on an international scale?

Lena Giakoumopoulos:
Thank you. When we were talking about what we wanted to share with the team here, I think that you hit it right on the mark. One of the things that we found through the work at Global Women’s is that many times we take things for granted in certain communities or certain countries versus other countries, and that’s one of the things that we keep seeing through Global Women’s. And my team members here know that I’m all about data and numbers and sharing that out to audiences. And because I reference a lot of the reports many times in our work, it’s important for people to think about things that they have perhaps in the United States that other communities do not. And we’re not even talking about where women are at the leadership level. We’re talking about some basic things where there is a large, large number, and I looked it up before we got on the call because I wanted to share it with the audience.
315 million fewer women than men own a smartphone. This is 2022 data. That’s a very, very large number. So Mike mentioned earlier about how we all get up in the morning and we have access to everything in our hands. That’s one one step. We can share the other part of the argument say there are actually countries in Africa that are very far advanced with the work that they do for financial services using their smartphone, so that contradicts that. But what the important things to know is that not everything is the same for all people everywhere. There’s a large percentage of women in some countries around the globe that cannot open an account in a financial service organization without the signature of their husband, spouse. And I say husband because we’re talking about some cultures where it is their male spouse.
That alone brings a whole other group of individuals who don’t have access to financial services. So it depends how you see it and in which country you are. It does differ from country to country. And we’re all here, I guess to put forth a collective effort to make that difference in the lives of women. On one scale, yes, to advance them to more leadership roles for GWLN specifically, but at the same time also to help them make that difference and that difference in their lives, their communities, their credit unions goes on multiple levels and it begins with financial services 101, if I may.

Kerala Taylor:
And Lena, I’d love to build on that a bit. I’m probably looking at these issues through a US-centric lens, but thinking about the symbol of Wall Street here in the United States, which is a charging bull, I don’t think you can get much more stereotypically masculine than that. And just even in our country where we feel like feminism has made some significant gains, financial services is still largely seen as a male realm. So I guess I’m just curious what challenges you’re coming up against when you think about financial inclusion for women and are there any specific opportunities, any examples from other countries that are making gains in this area that you’re particularly excited about?

Lena Giakoumopoulos:
I’m glad you mentioned the charging bull because I’m sure our audience knows the Ponytailed Young Fearless Girl, which was the statue that was created and placed literally in front of the charging bull in 2017 on Wall Street. And since the Me Too movement, all of this was moved and now it’s across the New York Stock Exchange. But how more of a symbol can we talk about than the actual girl sitting in the power stance across the charging bull? So thank you for bringing that up because the Fearless Girl is something that I love and I encounter a lot in our work.
But with respect to challenges, I’ve said this many times and my team members can definitely say they’ve heard this a lot from me. The challenges are in many countries similar. Women are faced with the usual challenges they are to be able to advance because we see more typically males in senior leadership roles.
And if we go down the path of looking at all the numbers and how things are advancing in the US system versus the system in Europe, like the World Council Statistical Report, the last one, we’re waiting for the new one to come out, showed that if you wanted to be a leader and you wanted to be female, the best place to be on the planet was actually Europe, according to reports from our national associations. That being said, that is a wake-up call for a lot of the people actually in the US who think that we’re doing much greater than we actually are because we are lucky enough to have a lot of tools and resources at our disposal and we’re really not. Because if you look at the leaders of the large, large, large credit unions in this country, yes you have females leading them, but you have a larger percentage of females leading the much smaller size credit unions, percentage wise.
So it depends which country you’re located. If you go to Southeast Asia, you’re going to find a very, very small percentage of females in leadership roles there. But a big caveat here, the leader of the Asian Confederation of Credit unions that has more than 20 countries under her belt is a female, and she’s the first one in 50 years. So you see that there’s variations across the globe. We saw it in Brazil too. We saw a large group of females coming into attendance and joining our events and activities, but at the leadership level, the senior leadership level and on the board level, we saw fewer, fewer females. And so they too are doing their respective client.

Cameron Madill:
Kind of like that notion that progress is not linear and it’s not accidental either. But I think we all kind of slip into thinking both those things are true sometimes.

Lena Giakoumopoulos:
We do.

Cameron Madill:
So I’d love to chat about WOCCU’s three strategic pillars. Digitization, climate, and resilience. And I was thinking about just starting with digitization, something that obviously is a technology web development agency for credit unions, we care a lot about, we see all the positive ways that digital access can impact inclusion. I know we referenced there’s so many amazing famous case studies of developing countries in Africa and Asia leapfrogging forward through being able to skip some of the infrastructure. But I guess, as you alluded to as well, it can also pose new barriers in all sorts of different ways. So I don’t know if Mike, I think you admitted that you sleep with your phone next to your bed, which you know you’re not supposed to do that. It’s bad for your mental health, but maybe I misunderstood. But I don’t know who wants to take a first crack at this, but I’d love to hear you guys talk about digitization and the upside and the challenges that come from it.

Mike Reuter:
Yeah, well, when I arrived at World Council in 2018, and I think Lena’s service with the organization predates me by two or three years. When we both came to the World Council, the World Council had embarked on an initiative called Challenge 2025, which was to truly try to realize a level of equity in terms of digitization evolution amongst all of its association members, which means all of the global credit union systems that are a part of that World Council network. And I would say that we still have a lot of work to do, but there’s been a lot of, like you have articulated, in places like Africa and Asia and Latin America, there’ve been significant strides to elevate the digital readiness of individual credit unions and even the associations. I think in certain parts of the movement, there are large credit unions that are well beyond the digital readiness or the digital evolution of even their confederation or their association that they’re a member of.
So I think one of the silver linings or one of the hidden gems of the global movement that we’ve seen effort really spring up is cross peer engagement and collaboration on this digitization issue. Case in point, we have our Caribbean member, the Caribbean Confederation of Credit Unions on a three-year engagement journey with the credit union movement from South Korea, and they’re talking specifically on digitization. So the IT team from the South Korean movement is collaborating with the digitization team of the Caribbean movement, and they’re looking at building a unified infrastructure that addresses some of these basic digitization pain points. And I think Ari touched on a few of them. Building out basic ACH capabilities across the entire Caribbean region. I think again, outside looking in, people look at in a scenario like that and say, well, it should be just really simple to be able to just from a uniform perspective, create this similar digitization readiness across all these credit unions.
But there’s so much political, cultural and ecosystem inequity and barriers and competing priorities that it’s not a simple flipping of a switch. It truly takes getting people at the table putting their own organizational priorities or movement priorities aside and coming together toward the common good of the entire movement from a regional, and in the case of the Caribbean, a regional perspective because you have all these independent countries within that region that are on varying levels of digital evolution. And so what Korea is trying to do is try to bring in a sense of centralization and uniformity because that’s where their movement was created from. They’re a centralized create unit system where everything runs. They have now almost 900 credit unions across Korea. They’re all centralized into one core. So imagine trying to get 20 plus Caribbean nations in a region scattered across geography, across different levels of infrastructure and politics and central banking and all of that onto one unified system potentially. That’s going to take a long time.
So these are the types of global challenges from a digitization perspective, that’s one of the reasons why the World Council membership always gives us feedback to say digitization is still our number one priority, and until every single credit union system around the world has an equal level of digital readiness, I think it’s always going to be our number one challenge.

Cameron Madill:
I’m curious as a follow on, Ari, just speaking of, you spoke about how many of the barriers come of just walking into a branch when someone doesn’t fit the dominant paradigm, whatever that is locally. And I’m curious if you have thoughts or insights on there. There can be a lot of scary things about automating inequality and algorithmic bias, but there are also some really nice things about letting people access financial services digitally. And so I’m just curious if you have any perspectives on that you’d like to share.

Ari Farrell:
I think that the interesting thing, if there’s infrastructure in place to do online account opening and online applications, I think that the access and equity can be high because there’s a little bit less upfront bias going on. But I think it really comes down to how the credit union or the financial cooperative uses the technology on the backend. Because I think what we think about is how, oh, if we implement all this technology, then things will be streamlined. Yes, that does happen. We’ve had Q Cash here in the United States go make really quick low dollar loans and help reduce the tendency to go into get a payday loan. That’s digital services at its peak to really do quick access to low dollar lending. But what we have is a human side of everything. So yeah, we’ll have some infrastructure in place that does reduce bias and increase equity.
But then we also have the higher dollar lending, which is more of what I was talking about, more of those car loans are going up, mortgage lending is going way, way up. I’m not going to get into specifics, I’m not a lender. So just to preface that. But I know that those specifics are going up. It’s obvious to me as a consumer how that affects what I decide to do in my life. So what happens is after you get those applications and there’s still only humans, it’s human error and bias that comes into play. Somebody’s last name, someone decides to fill in the demographic information because that data, we need to collect it, it should feel safe to be collected, but someone might look at that and make an opinion and then say, instead of being able to offer the highest amount possible because they have an A Plus credit score, we’re going to go with just the regular tier credit.
Those are decisions that humans make. And I think that comes down to just educating folks and having honest conversations with them about how to use the digital services that are coming up and then how to best review those going on the backend. Bank Rate picked up a story about a study that was done about racial bias within the credit union system, mostly in the United States. Now there’s a high technology rates here in the United States, so really there should be less bias, in theory. Even with using all of that data, they still found that folks who appeared more white presenting had higher success rates in getting loans. I can actually look that up really quickly. I think it was somewhere around 35% more access to loans than compared to Hispanic folks or African-American folks or Asian folks or just other ethnicities. So we have to be really, really careful when we talk about digitization. It helps with speed and access, but are we really being equitable on the backend? I am not sure if that fully answers your question, but that’s just where my head goes when we talk about access and equity.

Cameron Madill:
And I think it speaks to technology being an accelerator, but if you have bias processes, you’re just going to accelerate them versus if you have equitable processes, that’s where the opportunity lies. So I think I highlighting the people and the processes behind the technology is spot on from my perspective. I’m also not a lender, so for whatever that’s worth.

Kerala Taylor:
Let’s shift gears and talk a bit about the second strategic pillar, climate. We actually did a podcast a while back about climate finance and that really helped me connect the dots when it comes to how credit unions can contribute to the climate movement. Those are two personal passions of mine. And I’d say with some exceptions, I don’t see a ton of credit unions in the United States talking that openly about climate change. And I was just wondering if any of you had examples of ways that credit unions are supporting sustainability and other parts of the world or maybe some untapped opportunities that more credit unions here could be taking advantage of?

Lena Giakoumopoulos:
This was one of the questions that I was actually struggling with, and the reason was because this is the sixth year that the United in Sustainability Summit is taking place, and that happens each year from the United Nations Federal Credit Union in collaboration with OAS. And this year they’re hosting it in Washington, and I happen to be on one of their sessions a few years back, specifically speaking about activities for women as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals overall, not specific to actions taken with respect to climate. However, I think we can all see that this is a very large… The planet is being brutal to us because we’ve been brutal and this is going to be continuing, it’s going to be part of our lives ongoing across the board. We see it from our audiences in different parts of the world of what’s happening, whether it’s a fire, a hurricane, a tornado or whatever you want to call it.
And I think the capabilities that the respective credit unions have to support it in different regions around the world obviously varies. Can definitely give you specific examples because we have Project Storm Break, which is our program at the foundation that supports these type of catastrophes. But I think what we all need to remind ourselves of, and I’m talking specifically GWLN, women are tremendously impacted by climate in their respective parts of the world because they are in some countries the primary caretakers, and all of a sudden if the roads are out and they can’t walk that very long distance to get physically to that very, very small financial co-op, that credit union to conduct business, then they can’t support their family. Like a very simple example. So I wasn’t sure if that’s what you were seeking, and I’ll pause here because I’m pretty sure Mike can chime in.

Kerala Taylor:
I appreciate your perspective and love to hear more from Mike.

Mike Reuter:
Yeah. One of the things that World Council just unveiled or launched or invited the global community to come forth and contribute toward at the World Credit Union Conference in Vancouver this last July was the Climate Influencers Network, which is a new initiative within the Trade Association of the World Council to bring candidly best in class solutions that individual credit union systems or individual credit unions are putting forth themselves to a global table, to a global conversation and to really talk through who is doing what and then taking best in class and replicating ideally across the entire global system. It’s early days, I think for us here at World Council in terms of we’re in the discovery phase of understanding who’s doing what. As Lena mentioned, we’ve been present at the United in Sustainability Summit for quite a few years now. We’ve pinpointed a few US credit unions that are putting climate finance and climate sustainability and green lending things at the forefront of their agenda. I think a lot of credit unions are doing the right thing in terms of getting to net-zero or carbon-neutral.
On the reverse side, however, I see a lot of credit unions who were created because they are connected to the fossil fuel industry. There’s going to be a conflict with quite a few credit unions that have that competing agenda. And I think there’s going to be a bit of a reckoning for them in the months and the years to come in terms of how do they grapple with their original identity versus where the world is headed. So I guess case in point, and we can give of course a couple of web links to your listeners. The Climate Influencers Network has a landing page and there’s one case study profile in Columbia. There’s a group of credit unions that have come together and have invested in an initiative called Cooperacion Verde, and it’s basically these credit unions are coming together and revitalizing an area of Columbia that has been hard hit because it’s been connected to the drug trade and deforestation and a lot of environmental abuse. And so they’re reinvesting time and effort and resources to revitalize that community and the environment around it.
There are case studies that pop up, and so the Climate Influencers Network was initially created to be a hub, to be a catchall, to educate people best in class of what’s happening in the credit union space around climate.

Cameron Madill:
Thanks for all those perspectives on a huge topic. I guess they’re your three pillars, so they should all be huge topics. I’m going to go to your third pillar of resilience, which by the way, fun fact is my mother’s favorite word. It is just such an important theme in a world that every year becomes even more interconnected. And I think we kind of see that those interdependencies and the volatility that comes from a globalized world. We obviously have the bank failures in the United States for one of many headlines that highlight some of the underlying unstability. Curious, what are the three most important things that Credit Union should be doing to build more resilience in this age of uncertainty? You can each do one.

Mike Reuter:
Yeah. Well, I mean, one that I’ve seen is continued succession planning and leadership transition, building that pipeline of leadership. And I would suspect Ari’s going to want to chime in on this particular topic because WYCUP is so central to that. But I was at a few credit union convention meetings last week around the country, and I was just talking candidly to folks, and there’s just still a lack of leadership transition. Leader that’s retiring out or choosing to retire, there’s no succession plan and so the credit union is faced with potential merger into another local credit union. There is not as much of a priority in my view of thinking through the leadership transition and the succession planning. And I think that needs to be a key imperative to build resiliency.

Cameron Madill:
Thank you. Anyone else?

Ari Farrell:
Yeah, I can definitely hook in. I mean, WYCUP, the huge piece of what I do with WYCUP is kind of figure out what those gaps are for leadership opportunities for young leaders and emerging leaders alike. And succession planning is a huge one. So one that I was just at a conference and it was a hot topic for actually just talking about generational differences and getting to understand what values they have and where they fit within, not just membership, but then within leadership within the organization. Coupled with that and resilience is how and intentional we are about bringing voices up through the credit union or making sure how intentional we are about having spaces for young professionals or people who don’t have access to the higher level meetings. How do we talk about them? Who’s talking about them? Who’s being the advocates for them within the credit union?
The other piece that we have to talk about with resilience is seeking high level talent to take on these roles in rural areas. So a big thing that’s coming up through some of the work I do with the De Novo Collective honestly, is learning about what is the reason that these credit unions are not staying afloat? Why are they merging? Because if we don’t know the why, we can’t affect any sort of change. And so the resilience part of that is talking about salaries, talking about fair compensation, and then thinking about that process. And well, if you’re saying loud and clear that you don’t feel like young professionals have enough experience, what are you doing to give them the experience? What opportunities can we provide to them? One unique idea that is floating out there right now is this sort of framework that I think Cornerstone League is already doing, which is a program that allows folks to shadow or take on credit unions for a short period of time as younger professionals, and then they get experience and they get fitted in, it’s like a temporary placement while they’re finding a CEO.
So they get to learn everything there is about the credit union. They have to learn how to be a CEO, they have to do all of the work of the CEO, but then they come out of it with that greater experience at different levels. So resilience comes from multitudes of places as far as keeping credit unions alive. How can we support them to stay alive if we don’t give people the opportunity to jump in with two feet and give them the support they need? Now, there is a cooperative, I’m dragging out here just a little bit, but there is one last point to this. There’s the idea of bigger credit unions supporting the initiative of these small credit unions for finding CEOs and finding ways to match salaries so that there’s more ability for folks to maybe relocate and still have the ability to live a life that’s not paycheck to paycheck, which sometimes does happen in small areas. Sometimes they’re just part-time CEOs, and that’s the reality of some of these credit unions.

Mike Reuter:
Cameron, I think one of the other things, as Ari was talking, it made me think of the other two pillars that we just discussed. Those other two pillars tie into resiliency. How does a credit union remain resilient? Well, they need to prioritize digitization, and they need to be looking ahead and prioritizing how they’re going to play a role in helping to overcome this or fight this climate crisis. And to Lena’s point, one of the other initiatives of the Worldwide Foundation project, Storm Break helps to respond to credit union systems that are in crisis, whether it be a climate crisis or in the case of Ukraine, unfortunately a political cultural war really. And we’re talking to Ukrainian credit unions through the associations on how are they remaining resilient? Unfortunately, some of them aren’t. A lot of them are.
And again, how can we as a global movement step forward and help them build their resiliency even in the midst of wartime, because we know that the war will end at some point. And so when peacetime comes to Ukraine, how can we be there at the ready to help them rebuild themselves and build a stronger sense of resiliency within themselves for the future?

Cameron Madill:
Well, and I feel like maybe underscoring what you’ve said is for all of you, is that kind of a big piece underlying resiliency of credit unions as a robust global system. Pretty good lead into all three of you being here. So I have one bonus question, but first I want to say thanks, Ari, for bringing up the De Novo Collective. It’s such cool work you all do. So I wanted to make sure we got talk about that a little. And I think this is probably for you, Mike. I know you guys have this fundraiser you’re doing for International Credit Union Day, but what’s the headline? I think it’s a lot of money. How do people give? What does it accomplish? I think just make sure people in the audience understand, because it’s a pretty audacious and cool initiative you’re doing, and I think people would love to hear about it and a little more detail.

Mike Reuter:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, I think our ICU Day fundraising initiative will never go away. Again, I see ICU Day as a way to galvanize and gain the attention of credit union colleagues, not just in the United States, but around the world, towards our movement’s global challenges. And we touched on a lot of them today. In the spirit of 75 years of ICU Day, we are hoping to raise $750,000. And while that may seem like a large amount, if you truly spread it across, even the US, just the US Credit Union system and all the individuals that are employees of credit unions, on the boards of credit unions, sit in the C-suite and the members of credit unions. But if you extrapolate that to the global system, it really is a drop in the bucket. And so our whole approach with Members Helping Members is members or employees of credit unions or affiliated with QSOs, vendors, being on the board, formerly being a part of the credit union movement, you’re a retired employee or an executive.
If you give a little bit and we bring all those modest contributions together to sum up to a larger amount, we’re going to be able to continue to spearhead these various diverse credit union development programs that the World Council is continuing to shepherd. We’re able to continue to spearhead our project Storm Break Initiative, Networks like Global Women’s and WYCUP. And so these dollars are going to continue to help credit union systems around the world build resiliency, going to assist emerging leaders get WYCUP scholarships and Global Women’s Empowerment grants. So these resources help not just the Worldwide Foundation spearhead it’s internal initiatives that we offer value to around the world, but it’s also helping the World Council continue to grow and strengthen credit union systems around the world as well.

Cameron Madill:
Well, thank you for sharing a little more about that. It’s such an important mission and work you all are doing. I’d love to pivot to some rapid fire questions. So just for our audience, they’ve seen these questions, but they don’t know who’s going to get which questions. So Lena, you get to go up first. This is a pretty cool one. If you had a wand, it was a magical wand, you could change anything in the world, what would you change?

Lena Giakoumopoulos:
Well, if you know Global Women’s, first of all, and you know what we stand for, you know that it would be a pink wand because we [inaudible 00:34:36] pink. Okay. That first.
But I think what I would change is literally the chance or the opportunity for everyone to be able to learn, get educated about how they can make themselves better, because education is such a big, big important piece of our lives. And many of us take it for granted. And I’ll give you one example why I am saying this. We had a woman who heads up a credit union in the Philippines last year, share a story with one of our audiences. And she heard about a group of an underserved population that was living in the northern part of the city where she was, that they would walk for endless hours to come sell their products. They didn’t know, and they saved their money in tin cans in the ground. So she took her team members and they went up to that area of the world. They did not know how, what anything with respect to financial services. And they said, “We don’t know how to write, so how are we going to open and fill up the forms to open our accounts?” So they worked with them and they worked with their children who were going to school and getting educated.
So my magic wand would be education for everyone, girls, men, boys, across the board. That would be my request.

Cameron Madill:
All right, I love that. So from the heart to the stomach, Mike, what is your favorite meal?

Mike Reuter:
Pizza, without a doubt. It doesn’t matter what kind of pizza. It can be deep dish, Chicago style. It can be thin crust, it could be Neapolitan. Pizza. I could eat pizza all day. I could eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It wouldn’t matter.

Lena Giakoumopoulos:
And I’m doing Mike eating pizza, just so you know. And it’s true.

Cameron Madill:
Mike is my three-year-old son’s long-lost twin. So all right. Ari, what is a place you’d like to visit that you’ve never visited?

Ari Farrell:
Oh wow. My number one place is definitely the Netherlands. I think that the work that they do as a community there is just amazing. Honestly, we’re talking about climate, talking about a very climate friendly city that is a place I’d like to explore some more.

Cameron Madill:
And Lena, what is your favorite word?

Lena Giakoumopoulos:
My favorite word is a Greek word, it’s actually Dunamis, which means power. And I see it a lot. I use it a lot. And it helps me to sort of keep focused on the work that we do.

Cameron Madill:
You’re acing the rapid fire questions. These are great answers. All right. Mike, what is in the trunk of your car? And don’t say a dead body. No one has said that yet, but I’m always curious.

Mike Reuter:
Super boring answer. I’m remodeling my bathroom here at the house. There’s a stack of tile that’s leftover from Home Depot. This is such a boring answer. I’m sorry, Cameron.

Cameron Madill:
We’re just getting all this insight into your personal life. All right. Ari, just curious, what’s your favorite season of the year?

Ari Farrell:
Spring, definitely. There’s a smell in the air. It’s just too good.

Lena Giakoumopoulos:
I like that.

Kerala Taylor:
Right. Well, let’s do our final take. If you remember we said it was the big question. It was actually two big questions, but they were, what does financial inclusion look like on a global scale and why is a global movement important? And then secondly, how can credit unions around the world join forces to build more strength and resilience? I’d love to hear from each of you. I’m going to challenge you to keep your answers to just a couple sentences in the interest of time. And let’s see, Mike, should we start with you?

Mike Reuter:
Financial inclusion look like on a global scale, everyone has equitable access to the same assets and resources to be prosperous and to have financial freedom. And why is the global movement important? It’s important because we can all come together and play a role in that, large or small.

Kerala Taylor:
I love it. How about you, Lena?

Lena Giakoumopoulos:
Well, I think Mike covered some of this. We’re credit unions coming together, building more strength together, bringing more knowledge, more ideas together and sharing of know-how. I don’t know how else to say it. Joining forces makes us stronger, strength in numbers. So if we’re stronger together, we’re more resilient together. And I think longer term, that’s what we have to keep focused on, not just short-term solutions.

Kerala Taylor:
And Ari, do you have any last thing to add?

Ari Farrell:
Yeah, I’d definitely say a global connection and an experience, getting credit unions to talk to each other across the world and people. Lena mentioned this earlier on, just a quick anecdote I promise. That we all have different approaches to the same solutions and we can learn so much from each other.

Kerala Taylor:
And I have one more question, which is just if anyone wants to donate to your Members Helping Members campaign, where do they go?

Mike Reuter:
They go to our website at the Worldwide Foundation, doglobalgood.org. That should take them directly to our campaign page and donations of as little as $7 will provide a cost-free debit card to a Venezuelan migrant who are the beneficiaries of our Peru and Ecuador program that’s going on right now. Literally as little as $7 can make a difference in an individual member’s life.

Kerala Taylor:
Wonderful. Well, thank you all so much for joining us. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Lena Giakoumopoulos:
Thank you for having us.

Mike Reuter:
It was a pleasure.

Ari Farrell:
Yeah, thank you so much.

Kerala Taylor:
Thanks to our listeners for joining us for another episode of The Remarkable Credit Union. We covered a lot of ground in that conversation, so I’m going to do my best to distill everything down to three main takeaways. First, I would say that awareness of the Global Credit Union system in the United States seems to be somewhat limited. Mike talked about how he recognizes the importance of focusing on local communities, but also hopes credit unions will recognize the power of working together to champion financial inclusion on a global scale. Access to financial services is so important. It can be as necessary as food, water, and shelter, and can really have catalytic effects that change lives across generations.
Number two, there’s really no one size fits all when it comes to financial inclusion. For instance, members of the LGBTQIA plus community are more likely to work in cash-based economies, whereas people of color in the US are more likely to be denied bank loans or credit union loans as the case may be. And in some countries, women still cannot open a bank account without their husband’s signature. So any efforts to meaningfully address financial inclusion need to take into account these communities unique circumstances and needs.
And then number three, the three strategic pillars that we talked about speak to some of the largest challenges and opportunities of our era. We have digitization, which is about increasing access in an equitable way. We have the climate, which is about finding and replicating strategies to prepare for and respond to the ever-increasing number of climate related catastrophes that are affecting us all. And lastly, we have resilience, which is about building a credit union system that can withstand volatility and evolve with the changing times.
Well, folks, that’s a wrap. The Remarkable Credit Union is brought to you by Pixel Spoke, a digital marketing agency that works with credit unions to create user-friendly, high converting award-winning websites. As a B Corp and worker-owned cooperative, we believe that businesses can and should be a force for good. You can learn more and check out our work at pixelspoke.co-op, that’s Pixel Spoke, all one word, .coop. And until next time, I wish you the best of luck in making your credit union remarkable.