3 Takeaways From Day 2 Of GAC 2024

The Governmental Affairs Conference continued on Tuesday with a bevy of lawmakers, industry leaders, and others covering a variety of topics.

Here are a few highlights.

Don’t Be Cable

A decade ago, cable and satellite TV dominated home entertainment. Today, streaming services rule the roost thanks to consumers in their late teens and twenties ditching cable and starting a revolution.

The lesson for credit unions, said Tanya Van Court, founder and CEO of the financial education app Goalsetter, is to partner with fintechs before they’re left behind.

“If [young consumers] go into the fintech space today, how are they going to learn about their local credit union?” she asked during a breakout session.

Conventional thinking suggests young consumers eventually will need traditional financial institutions for services like home and auto loans, but that might not hold true. After all, Van Court said, many cable and broadcast industry leaders ignored the rise of streaming, assuming consumers would migrate to cable and satellite as they got older. That clearly didn’t happen.

Approximately 126,000 consumers dropped cable in 2014, said Van Court. By 2019 that figure had climbed to 5 million per year.

“When you see these trends start to happen, you’ve got to pay attention because it could happen more quickly than you could ever imagine,” she says.

Leadership From Across The Pond

Past GACs have included remarks from world leaders such as Vice President Mike Pence (speaking while in office), former president George W. Bush, former Senator John Kerry, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and more. This year’s event took a different tack, bringing in a leader from across the pond.

Theresa May served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 2016 to 2019, and in a wide-ranging conversation with Jim Nussle, president and CEO of America’s Credit Unions and a former lawmaker himself, May offered lessons in leadership and reflections from a life spent in the public eye.

Despite the high-profile job of prime minister, the role really is about being “first among equals,” May said, noting that although the PM leads the cabinet, “it is very much a cabinet of equals.”

May’s early remarks emphasized the importance of servant leadership, and she lamented that many modern political leaders have focused on benefitting from public office rather than on serving the people they represent.

Prior to May’s ascension to 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher was the only woman to have held that role. May said her time in the job was a sign to women and girls the world over that “if you can see it, you can be it.”

Big Opportunity, Big Risk

As the industry continues its efforts to expand credit access for women, minorities, and other disenfranchised groups, the right partnerships could be the difference between success and failure.

“You all have the power to transform the lending industry into one that reflects fairness, access, and equal opportunity for all,” Kristen Clark, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice, said from the main stage on Tuesday.

To do that, however, credit unions must engage community groups that have insights into the credit needs of communities of color. Those same groups, however, can also help credit unions reach potential borrowers.

AI dominated much of the conversation throughout GAC, and Clark — a credit union member for more than 24 years — noted those tools can be impactful but carry huge risks around equity. She reminded industry leaders to make sure their compliance systems accurately measure redlining risk and to use AI in a safe and sound manner to prevent harm to members and ensure compliance with civil rights laws.

As more institutions use large amounts of consumer data to make decisions and predictions around underwriting, pricing, and loan requirements, Clark warned that, “purportedly neutral algorithms can amplify or reproduce harmful biases.”