Trusted News for Credit Union Leaders
Credit Union Times
NOVEMBER 22, 2017 | VOL. 28 | NO. 41 | CUTIMES.COM
The Next
Disaster Is
Coming
PETER STROZNIAK
pstrozniak@cutimes.com
hether you believe that climate
change or some
other natural
phenomenon is increasing the
frequency and intensity of natural disasters, it didn’t really matter for credit unions, employees,
members and their communities
in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, the
Virgin Islands and California that
suffered under nature’s fury.
From August to October, four
major natural disasters, Tropical
Storm Harvey in southeast Texas, Hurricane Irma in the Virgin
Islands and Florida, Hurricane
Maria in Puerto Rico and the California wildfires, left behind a devastating path of destruction that
shut down and damaged credit
unions, or destroyed the homes of
credit union executives, employees and members.
What matters now are the ongoing recovery efforts and reflections of lessons learned that could
help credit union executives prepare for the next inevitable natural disaster that may be headed
their way.
Michael McKinley, senior
claims manager for CUNA Mutual Group in Madison, Wis., leads
the organization’s customer disaster response team. The team
members and/or partners
OPERATIONS
Y18
CYBERSECURITY
Websites Battle Bots
Heading into Black Friday, Cyber
Monday and this holiday season,
the biggest security threat may
come from bots designed to steal
credentials, overwhelm e-commerce sites and siphon funds
from gift cards.
To better understand the
threat, the San Francisco-based
bot detection and mitigation
company Distil Networks analyzed 2016 holiday traffic to approximately 600 e-commerce
sites as well as a sample of 2,600
non-e-commerce sites over a six-day period.
Distil found bots – automated
programs or scripts programmed
to perform very specific tasks
at the request of their architect
– most likely deployed for one
or more reasons over last year’s
holiday season, performing various tasks, such as:
1. Scraping sale prices so competitors can match deals in
near real-time.
2. Flooding a competitor’s site
with more requests than it
can handle (denial of service) to affect their sales.
3. Skewing analytics to impact
conversion rates or performance metrics.
4. Clicking on ads to drive up
digital ad spend costs.
5. Obtaining limited-availabil-ity or temporarily-lowered
goods to resell at a higher
cost later.
6.Populating forums (likely
the customer review section
of the site) with ads for Y16
Must Reads FOCUSREPORT:
NONINTEREST
INCOME
Growing noninterest income remains a priority for credit unions, but the way they’re
achieving that growth is changing. In this Focus Report, learn five new strategies for
reaching traditional noninterest income goals. Y6
he nation’s 10 largest
credit unions fared well
last summer, generating $638 million in net
income during the three months
that ended Sept. 30, up 23.1%
from 2016’s third quarter despite
higher loan loss provisions.
The NCUA quarterly statements
for the credit unions with the larg-
est total assets reflected the slow-
down in mortgage lending and
increase in car lending seen in
earlier reports.
The analysis by CU Times also
showed a major gain in net interest income, despite loan loss
provisions of $478.5 million for
the three months ending Sept. 30,
24.2% higher than in 2016’s third
quarter. For the nine months, income was reduced by $1.3 billion
in loan loss provisions, up 26%
from a year ago.
The composition and ranking
of the Top 10 was unchanged from
June. At No. 1 was Navy Federal
Credit Union, Vienna, Va. ($83.7
billion in assets, 7. 4 million mem-
bers). At No. 10 was Star One CU,
San Jose, Calif. ($9.5 billion in as-
sets, 101,004 members).
The Top 10 had 15. 8 million
members at the end of the third
quarter, up 9% from a year ear-
lier. The gains ranged from Pen-
tagon Federal Credit Union’s 11%
gain to 1.6 million members to
Security Service Federal
MANAGEMENT
Top 10 CUs Net Higher Income
JIM DUPLESSIS
jduplessis@cutimes.com
Y17
Employee
Engagement
Belco Community
CU details its
strategy. Y14
A Big-Picture
Look at NII
CUs demonstrate diverse
strategies. Y8