Breakout Sessions
Our conference offers valuable content, collaboration and connections on a global scale. Keynotes and breakout sessions will be filled with industry experts sharing expertise on the topics below.
Click on a topic below to sort educational sessions by topic.
Changing Culture for Digital Transformation
10:00 am - 10:40 am CSTSpeaker: Joe Sullivan
In financial services, one of the biggest roadblocks to successful digital transformation is culture. The best strategies and newest technologies will fail if they conflict with how individuals or groups already believe or behave. Culture change requires intense effort and is often the most challenging part of digital transformation; but successful companies are meeting the challenge by enhancing cultural characteristics that support success in digital space. This session will share a framework for creating and cultivating a culture that both understands and advances digital transformation.
Attendee Takeaways:
- Ways to assess and evaluate your current culture
- Steps to remove cultural aspects that inhibit digital transformation
- Digital culture characteristics, and practical ways to build and sustain them
- The role of effective internal communication in creating one unified culture
Setting Your Credit Union Apart from the Competition with a Brand that is Trusted
1:00 pm - 1:40 pm CSTSpeaker: Danielle Reid
How does your credit union currently leverage all channels of available brand opportunities to ensure maximum brand reach, brand awareness, and competitive advantage? During this breakout session, credit union leaders and decision makers will learn the ways to make their brands stand out among the competition to build trust with consumers while attracting and retaining new clientele. This session will not only cover branding for the future, but other important aspects of marketing including social media and digital marketing solutions and how the failure to have an established or responsive social media presence hurts brands in the financial and banking industry more than they realize.
Attendee Takeaways:
- Establishing a brand that stands apart among the competition
- Planning goals for social media and digital marketing, along with their utilization as an extension of customer service
- Knowing who your credit union's target consumers are and how to successfully connect with them
JEDI Warriors are Critical to Bottom-line Success
2:00 pm - 2:40 pm CSTSpeaker: Carolina Selva
Justice. Equity. Diversity. Inclusion. We've all heard the terms, we all know they're important. But do we understand how critical having champions for change (JEDI warriors) is to our bottom line? This session introduces JEDI concepts in the context of business success and emphasizes the importance of identifying and preparing leaders to successfully leverage diversity.
Attendee Takeaways:
- Explain why justice is important - as the right thing to do and as a marketing tool
- Identify bottom-line benefits of workplace diversity
- Recognize that diversity without inclusion is less valuable
- Acknowledge the role and importance of leaders in adopting a JEDI mentality
What Credit Unions Need to Know About Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
3:00 pm - 3:40 pm CSTSpeaker: John Best
CryptoCurrency was developed to make cash and payments available to anyone anytime. Now there is a new movement called DeFi which is short for Decentralized Finances that takes the cryptocurrency concept even further. What if there was a global, open alternative to every financial service credit unions offer today — savings, loans, trading, insurance and more? Come learn about the DeFi movement and what it means to the credit union industry.
Attendee Takeaways:
- Be able to define Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
- Understand the threats that DeFI brings to credit unions
- Understand the opportunities DeFi presents to credit unions
Organizational Culture and the Role of the Board
3:00 pm - 3:40 pm CSTSpeaker: Korinne Collins
It has been demonstrated that the state of an organization's culture is directly linked to its bottom line. So why isn't this addressed in the boardroom? Board members may believe that culture is too soft to have any real influence over revenues, but evidence is growing that the opposite is true. Perhaps, the most revealing and important fact about culture is that it can, in fact, be measured. It has also been widely shown that boards play a crucial role in identifying the importance of culture to management, and to insisting that their management teams create and nurture healthy behaviors and mindsets in the organizations.
Frugal Innovation: Customer Experience on a Budget
5:00 pm - 5:40 pm CSTSpeaker: Lexi Airey
Although it started out with a bond, Gateway Bank (Australia) has not been a bonded mutual bank for a number of years. It therefore competes in a highly competitive market for customers with the big banks but with a much smaller budget and 60 employees. This session looks at how Gateway Bank lives its value of “small up – do more with less” and how it celebrates the opportunities that come from its constraints. It looks at frugal innovation and encouraging employees to have the resourcefulness of the TV character “MacGyver” to reuse and repurpose to improve the customer experience. This includes its introduction of “citizen programmers.” The session also looks at the hunt for new niches where Gateway can provide a highly relevant experience.
Attendee Takeaways:
- Celebrating your constraints
- Learning frugal innovation strategies – recycling and reusing what you already have
- Finding your niche
Managing Implicit Bias in the Workplace
6:00 pm - 6:40 pm CSTSpeaker: Tracie Daniels
Have you ever wondered why you say and do certain things that may represent the opposite of who you really are. For example, do you find it easier to connect with a colleague who shares your interests or hobbies, rather than a colleague you perceive as very different from you even though you might consider yourself a very outgoing person. Our brains have developed an unconscious process that results in implicit bias, which can cause us to think, feel and behave in a way that is inconsistent with our conscious way of being. We all have implicit biases and it's important to develop self-awareness to help us manage those biases effectively. This presentation will explore common types of implicit biases: how they are developed, perpetuated, and displayed in our workplaces; strategies for reducing our implicit biases; and how reducing implicit bias leads to inclusion.
Attendee Takeaways:
- Understand how implicit biases are developed and demonstrated.
- Be able to identify the common implicit biases that are perpetuated in our workplaces.
- Develop strategies for reducing their implicit biases.
- Understand the links between implicit bias and inclusion.
Wednesday, 21 July
Cyber Resilience
10:00 am - 10:40 am CSTSpeaker: Gerard Joyce
A resilient credit union is one that can deliver critical operations through disruption. This session will briefly outline the six (6) key pillars of resilience with focus on the cyber pillar (Information Security). The assured confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information throughout a disruption is an essential element in ensuring resilience. Following the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Cyber Security Framework, a roadmap for achieving cyber resilience, will be explored.
Attendee Takeaways:
- A clear understanding of what makes up cyber resilience
- An appreciation of the elements that collectively strengthen cyber resilience
- The confidence to ask the right technical questions
Importance of Member Engagement for Business Continuity
2:00 pm - 2:40 pm CSTSpeaker: Lisa Taylor
The beginning of the session will be used to illustrate and explore the two (2) key concepts: Business Continuity and Member Engagement. Once these concepts are established, the discussion will then move to exploring strategies that Credit Unions may implement to grow the business against the backdrop of a pandemic. The challenges facing member engagement efforts and ways to overcome these challenges will also be featured. The session will then conclude around the position that the most successful strategies to grow and flourish during a hostile business environment involve investing in creative and heartfelt ways to keep members happy.
Attendee Takeaways:
- Practical understanding and application of the terms - Business Continuity and Member Engagement
- How to craft member engagement strategies that work
- Identifying the strong connection between business continuity and membership engagement
People in Crisis: How Credit Unions Can Support Migrants and Refugees Rebuild Their Lives
1:00 pm - 1:40 pm CSTSpeaker: Oscar Guzman
The EIP project is a unique project aimed at leveraging credit unions to help secure economic opportunities for migrants and refugees fleeing Venezuela. World Council's EIP project is working with USAID, UNHRC, and other humanitarian providers to identify employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for these new arrivals and locals traditionally left out of formal employment. Since so many new arrivals lack formal identification much less a work permit it's difficult for many of these individuals to find work. As community-based change makers, credit unions are uniquely positioned to offer services - both financial and non-financial - to rebuild their lives. Explore with Oscar Guzman, Chief of Party of our Economic Integration Project, how WOCCU is working with public and private actors, including credit unions, to improve the economic security of over 100,000 migrants, refugees, and lower income families in Peru and Ecuador.
Attendee Takeaways:
- Learn about the program and its approaches to improving the lives of beneficiaries
- Discuss best practices in financial inclusion for marginalized peoples
- Assess the evidence showing that credit unions are indeed agents for change in this growing body of work
Inter-Cooperation as a Credit Union Super Power
3:00 pm - 3:40 pm CSTSpeakers: Karen Miner, Cory Munden, Mike Mercer
You need to look no further than the cooperative and credit union principles to see that inter-cooperation is hard wired into the business model’s DNA. Considered to be a credit union super power, inter-cooperation is focused on the critical importance of collaboration, thinking big, and building the economy and communities around you. Attend this session to take a deep dive on inter-cooperation from diverse perspectives - from business partnerships and supply chains to the development of new co-operatives. All content will be oriented toward the benefits of inter-cooperation and the opportunities to strengthen credit unions, economies, and communities.
Attendee Takeaways:
- To provide a framework that links inter-cooperation to the credit union business model.
- To explain specific examples of inter-cooperation leadership by credit unions.
- To inspire credit union leaders to see inter-cooperation as a strategic cross-sector opportunity that strengthens the economy and communities.
