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Our very own Matt Dean was included in a recent CU Times article highlighting five sassy young entrepreneurs. The article is titled Gen Y Entrepreneurs Shake Up CU Industry, Helping to Reveal Authenticity.

Here are two snippets from the article, which is chock-full of some great points and insights from the interviewees.

Matt had some great thoughts on CUs engaging young people without necessarily having to wear a backwards hat and drop hip-hop references.

“The best business decision a credit union can make is rekindling the focus on the membership and reigniting their evangelistic feel to encourage passion and empower younger staff, ... These are our future leaders; they need to be engaged. People are more willing to stick around if they feel that the value of what they are a part of is bigger than themselves.”

(Who knew he was so smart? Me.)

Creative Brand Communications CEO Jeff Stephens made some bang-on comments on the practice of a CU hanging it’s hat on better service over different service.

“It is a cliché. So you define this great customer service as knowing everyone by name, friendly, pleasant staff, being responsive to member’s needs, and those attributes are all good and positive, but those alone won’t differentiate that credit union. ... Being nicer is not different, and the more credit unions succeed at being nicer the more they all seem the same. You build a position only you can occupy.”

Amen, right?

I don’t want to spoil any more of the article than I have. Get over there and read it.

We’re a company based in Indianapolis, so we are very influenced by Peyton Manning. We don’t often win Super Bowls, but we do often call audibles.

Matt and I were preparing for our presentation tomorrow (March 18, 2008 at 9:45 a.m. PDT) and decided to change our presentation. We know the handouts are printed and nicely bound, but we felt it more important to make changes now and deliver a great presentation.

With my apologies to Diane and the rest of the staff at the California and Nevada Credit Union League, here are our slides for the presentation:

Download the notes in PDF here

Download the slides in PDF here

View the slides here

Enjoy!

We launched a micro-site for the National Credit Union Foundation’s REAL Solutions last week. The site is a media dashboard where we’re covering CUNA’s Governmental Affairs Conference through video and audio interviews with industry thought leaders, photos, and microblogging.

Visit the REAL Solutions GAC site here.

We used YouTube for video, Odeo for podcasting, A Flickr Group for photos (if you’re here, feel free to join and add photos), and Twitter for micro-blogging.

The site is a simple one-pager that automatically adds content based on updates from each RSS feed.

Here’s REAL’s Lois Kitsch kicking off the conference (hat tip to Chaz for the cool intro idea), followed by Scotland’s Capital CU CEO Marlene Shiels discussing Britain’s fight against predatory lending:

In Q2, we’ll be launching a knowledge and resource center for REAL Solutions to distribute research and innovation products directed as serving low-income households.

Learn more about the work REAL Solutions is doing here.