Musings from the CU Suite

Compiled by Anthony Demangone

Super Tuesday is behind us, as is last evening's GOP debate.  But there's one thing that on one can debate: another weekend is upon us. Grab a cup of Joe and dig into this week's reading pile.

• Harvard research pin-points the secret to happiness. Relationships. (WaPost)
• Millennials are disrupting payments. 89% of them rely on the smartphone to connect to the internet. Only 37% rely on desktops. (Payment Week)
• How do you grow employees when you can't promote them? (GetLighthouse)
• The Wendy's breach is impacting credit unions. (NAFCU Today)
• Photos of the week: Smithsonian photo contest. (Business Insider)
• How about some good news regarding our planet? Monarch butterflies and manatees are on a big rebound. (WaPost)
• It is time to stop treating millennials as one group. (Financial Brand)
• Ford has an in-house futurist. (Business Insider)
• Consumer saving is counter-intuitive. The better they feel about the economy, the less they save. (Business Insider)
• Construction spending increased 1.5% in January. Inside, there's a wonderful graph showing a steady increase in spending within the category.(Calculated Risk)
• Fascinating story on how people who ignore trends tend to build wealth better than those who don't. The rising importance of social media has made ignoring trends increasingly difficult. (Marketwatch)
• Jamie Dimon: Who owns the future? (Bloomberg)
• Uh-oh. Google's self-driving car is partially to blame in an accident for the first time. (FastCompany)
• As the price of oil drops, North Dakota has an "emptier" feeling. (NYT)
• Very interesting article exploring why people don't manage debt well. There are a number of extremely useful take-aways in this article that could your credit union convince more members to refinance their high interest credit cards with a personal loan at your credit union. (ScientificAmerican) Here are the interesting tidbits below...

Tidbit one: We then asked everyone how useful they thought this loan was and how much effort they would be willing to invest in trying to refinance their debt. While almost everyone thought it would be useful, people who just saw a comparison of interest rates were only willing to invest an average of 4 hours in refinancing. People who were told the numerical difference in interest paid were willing to spend an average of 6 hours to refinance. And people who graphically saw the difference were willing to spend an average of 8 hours; that’s twice as much effort as people who only saw the different interest rates....

Tidbit two: One-third of the members received a pre-approval offers in a simple, generic letter, telling them about the pre-approval and basic information about the loan product. Another third of the members received the same information but with extra sentences emphasizing that the credit union has their best interest at heart and wants to help them save money. The final third of the members received the second letter but added that members should call the credit union even if they did not want to refinance their loan. We found that three times as many members refinanced their high-interest personal loans when they received the third letter compared to the first. This is likely because members who received the third version felt that they could not procrastinate. They needed to make a decision, which helped push them toward refinancing to a better loan.

• BOA is preparing for big layoffs in investment banking and trading. (Business Insider)
• Greg Popovich broke down what he looks for in players. For us, it's easy. We're looking for character, but what the (heck) does that mean? We're looking for people — and I've said it many times — [who] have gotten over themselves, and you can tell that pretty quickly. You can talk to somebody for four or five minutes, and you can tell if it's about them, or if they understand that they're just a piece of the puzzle. So we look for that. A sense of humor is a huge thing with us. You've got to be able to laugh. You've got to be able to take a dig, give a dig — that sort of thing. And [you have to] feel comfortable in your own skin that you don't have all the answers. (Business Insider)

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have a great weekend, everyone. I'm off to San Diego for next week's Strategic Growth Conference. If you are attending, please let me know. For those who are not, I hope to see you next year. It is a wonderful conference!