Credit Unions and DeFi: Becky Reed on Combatting Fraud with Web3

Welcome to the Banking on Fraudology Podcast, a podcast you can bank on. Where fraud fighters share our experiences, knowledge and insights into the world of fraud schemes, I'm Haley Wyndham. Welcome back to the Banking on Fraudology Podcast. I am so very excited to introduce you guys to Becky Reed. Becky, thanks so much for being here today. I am so happy to be here, Haley. I am going to give you guys a quick story on how I met Becky and how in the world a fraud fighter two years ago before she knew anything about really crypto and Bitcoin and Web 3, we're walk up to this person and I was like, I want to hear more about your crypto currency plan. What are you working on? I go to this conference, this is called Critical Infrastructure. It was hosted by Critical Ops, our very good friend, Chelsea Trebaniac. It is an incredible conference with 16 of the sectors there present talking about how their role is important to the overall infrastructure. What we would do in a world where something happened and we needed to hop on board and fix it, right? So anyways, we're in between sessions and I walk out and I hear these two people talking about crypto and how they are making a stable coin for credit unions. And my ears perked up and I casually walked over and was like, I need to meet you guys. I am a fraud fighter at a credit union and I don't like crypto. And they said, well, you should. There's nothing wrong with it. And we got into this great conversation of how a US backed stable coin crypto available for credit unions to be able to empower their members to actually participate in crypto currency, but in a safer environment. And I was like, I'm a fraud fighter that can get behind that. So we met, hit it off and Becky, I just, I need you to tell people who the heck you are and let them know the power behind this force of a woman in credit unions and crypto and web three. Tell them all about you, Becky. Oh my gosh. Well, I'll try to keep it short. All right. So I am a 30 year credit union veteran. I started in credit unions in the 90s. And at that point in time, and I do talk about this in my book, which I know you'll mention later. But when I entered the credit union space, credit unions were really innovative. And it was one of the things that drew me to the credit union space. And then of course, once I learned about the mission of credit unions and the people helping people and member owned, I mean, I was completely hooked, right? Well, I have always been very engaged with technology. I was kind of the default desktop support, you know, for credit unions, I implemented a ton of software, I've done a lot of project management work, mostly been in the retail side of the house and eventually becoming a CEO. I've actually been a CEO twice at two different credit unions over the last, more, little more than a decade. And I am always struck by how over the last 20 or so years, credit unions have really started to not be innovative anymore. And that is something that I've always fought against. So a little bit about me, a Lone Star credit union is the last credit union that I led and worked with, a super awesome credit union in Dallas, Texas. And super happy to have been able to work with that board and work with that staff to do some really innovative things. I also volunteer a ton. I serve on a lot of advisory boards. I am the board chairman for the National Association of Cusos. I have co-founded multiple Cusos and I am in an ardent overall industry cheerleader and supporter. And I get to talk about really cool fun stuff like crypto and emerging technology and leading culture of innovation and credit unions. I do a lot of speaking events. I'm all over LinkedIn. And yeah, I remember that day that we met you. Hey, we. And that was a, that was a fun day. Yeah. I remember shortly after that conference, it was like there was a networking event afterwards. And it was so funny because I was like, I have to keep talking to these people. And I say these people, it's you and your partner, John. And when I walk of you, and we start talking about the credit union side of things, I was like, yeah, well, what size asset is your credit union? And you were like, I hate when people ask me that. And it was because, and I know now, like even now, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm so conscientious of like asking that question because we think or like the misunderstanding, the misconception of asset sizes that because you're not X dollar amount credit union and assets, that that means that you're not innovative. You're not anywhere close to where they are. But in reality, that's not it at all. Any, any credit union can be innovative. I mean, I left a $200 million asset bank and went to a $1 billion credit union. And I thought, man, the technology that this place is going to have, I'm going to be floored, right? And just be able to buzz through and do all I want. And the difference between those two institutions, it was like, I went back a decade to green screen. And so when you and I met and you started talking about the innovation and not caring about assets as I was like, I need to know this person and like, be close with her. Well, thank you. And I think that is a misunderstanding in the credit union space that smaller credit unions are just further behind than the larger credit unions. And as you've experienced, that couldn't be further for the truth. You have multi-billion dollar credit unions that are still living in the early 2000s. And you have, you know, $80 million credit unions that are, you know, using the latest and greatest technology. I think I'm a big proponent for small credit unions as well because I think that there's so much innovation that can happen at the smaller credit union size just because you don't have the bureaucracy and the red tape that a lot of the larger credit unions have. So you might be resource poor, but that doesn't mean that you can't be innovative. Exactly. Absolutely love that. So anyways, moving on, I want to say before we dive into our conversation on the Web 3 and innovative world that should be credit unions. I want to first of all say congratulations on your new book. It's titled Credit Unions in DeFi, a Financial Renaissance. Let me tell you, it was a fantastic read. I couldn't put it down except to grab my highlighter. And funny story. I was traveling to Washington recently with my grandmother. And so I have the Kindle version and my paper version. And I was like, I was, I had the digital version with me and not my paper version. So I was highlighting it with like my Kindle. And I was, I had to come back to the house and re-highlight it in the book and put my post it note. So I would know exactly what I was highlighting in the comments I was making because I was just, I learned so much from you every time I talked to you, but this book, I couldn't put it down because it felt like I was having that conversation. And I was relating with you on every page talking about your love for credit unions and how, you know, the credit union movement, the grassroots movement. I mean, I'm just, I'm just so in love with this book and, you know, with you as a, as a professional and a credit union advocate. So I just wanted to shout you out. But if you wouldn't mind tell the, tell the listeners a little bit about the book, you know, instead of me fangirling over the book and not giving them the details, why don't you give us a little rundown. Well, thank you so much. One of the things that you mentioned, I'll kind of touch on a little bit because whenever you write a book, when other people read it, it literally is like a window into your brain. And so when you said you felt like you're having a conversation with me when you read it, and of course because you know me, I write the way I speak. And so therefore when you're reading the book, it actually is, you know, right out of my head and into your head when you're reading it. So it's kind of an interesting experience for an author. But one thing that I noticed when I really started learning more about distributed ledger technology or blockchain technology, which most people would recognize in about 2015, 2016 timeframe, I was very engaged with a re-architecting the network at Lone Star Credit Union, along with the QSA that we helped found PRIT. And that experience made me very curious about networks. And so when I started reading about decentralized networks, that was very intriguing to me. And so I started doing a deep dive on it. I honestly did not really care at all about Bitcoin. Didn't care, didn't care about cryptocurrencies in general. I'm not a crypto investor. I don't buy stock. I'm not a gambler. That's just not my thing. However, the more I learned about cryptocurrency, the more I recognized that it was going to completely disrupt payments. And so I started posting a ton about it and I started really seeing the similarities between the crypto ecosystem and the communities that were engaged in the crypto space. And when I'm speaking about cryptography, not just cryptocurrency, but cryptography is the underlying algorithm that encrypts the data that you find on a blockchain. And so that encompasses the whole thing. And when I speak about distributed ledger technology, that's the general term for a blockchain because there are several different kinds of blockchains. So when I started reading about all that, I started to see a lot of similarities. You mentioned that grassroots movement. And credit unions were absolutely grassroots events. People got together and banded together to work collaboratively to solve problems. And that's how credit unions began. And the same thing happened when Satoshi invented Bitcoin. And the communities that have grown out of that share a very similar ethos with the credit union community. And so that really is what prompted me to write the book because I was speaking about it all the time. I was telling people about it. But I felt like, you know, generally I get a 45 minute talk in front of a group of people, maybe an hour if I'm lucky. But how could I really explain all of the opportunities that are available? And what I truly see as a opportunity for credit unions to embrace this new culture in order to win, how can I get that message out to more people in just more than a 45 minute talk? So that was really what prompted the book. Well, I'm very glad that you did it because there are oftentimes, you know, I say, I don't know how I have this podcast. I'm very grateful that I do and that, you know, I get to have these amazing conversations. But it's because I don't know everything at all. I've know the bare minimum of things, right? Especially outside of just the normal operations of financial institutions, which I totally know and love that aspect of my job and what I've done in the past. And speaking of fraud, you know, but I think for all of us, we have to understand and in order to prepare and to assess risk for the coming, the new age in credit unions and banks, we've got to know what's going on. So I'm going to ask you questions like somebody who doesn't know exactly what you're talking about. And so I hope that's okay and I hope the listeners can appreciate it. As we look and, you know, again, we kind of went over a little bit about how your book gets dabs into how credit unions are similar. But what is DeFi? And how is it coming? Like, I mean, is it here? Is it coming? And how are we just explain, explain DeFi to me? Absolutely. DeFi stands for decentralized finance. And I just talked a little bit about the distributed ledger technology, which are decentralized networks, also called known as blockchain. And so a decentralized network is different. So think about a credit union core and a credit union core or really any database that is utilized by a company is centralized. It is owned by that company and that company, frankly, makes the rules and they can change things on that database anytime they want. It is no different with a credit union. It's also no different with the social media platforms that we have today, right? And as we've seen, these centralized organizations, if they decide that they don't want to show something or they do want to show something, then they have the ability to do that in a decentralized network that is not exactly the same. And so when we talk about DeFi, that means financial products and services built on a distributed ledger that is inherently decentralized. And so there is a book, another book that I'd recommend for everybody called read, write, own. It's by Chris Dixon. And his book goes through the different iterations of the internet, web one, web two, web three. And when we talk about going into web three, and that's the ownership economy, that means me as a consumer own my own data. And I get to share that data with whom I choose. But at the end of the day, I own it. And that is the ecosystem and the the internet of the future. And when I talk about the future, guys, we're not talking about 20 years or 40 years away. We're talking three or five years away. And Ethereum, I talk about this in my book, when the Ethereum network came out that made it possible for smart contracts to be written on top of a cryptocurrency, that ushered in the ability to create financial products like lending, because that's a contract, right? And to create payments that might be wrapped with KYC data or other types of consumer data or user data. And all of that happens automatically. And it's executed 100% with code. And so it's a completely digitally native way to do finance. And there is a growing movement of people that want to do their banking, so to speak, on a distributed ledger or in a decentralized way that is not controlled by a centralized entity that basically gets to make their own rules. So that's what the DeFi movement really is. I love that. I love how you describe it as the people are wanting this this different ownership, right? And and by the people, you don't at all mean the financial institutions themselves. You mean the consumers? It's what the consumers want. And we've got to get out of our own way, really, and get to the point where, you know, I can think back to my old days, back in the olden days, working general ledger balancing and all. And you'd have like something that was often misplaced. And then instead, you know, there was there was oftentimes that there'd be backdated transactions or things that you wanted to fix, you know, for the end of the month balancing. And you know, in the world of finance, should we really have that, you know, shouldn't we want to get to that transparent world where it's like, instead of hiding the mistake that was made, you actually show it and show what you did to correct it versus, you know, the lack of transparency into what's going on in the financial institutions. Exactly. And I think that when people think about this and they say, well, what could this really be used for? Well, let me give you an example. And I think transparency is something that's important that you mentioned. Also having a record of what changed. I think that also is important. Well, whenever data is encoded on a block chain, that's exactly what it is. It is a moment in time that is recorded forever that is unchangeable, right, that really anybody can look at. So it's a very transparent way to look at transactional data. So let's take a month and database, for example, and let us go ahead and put that month and database that should match your financials and let us put that in a block and record that on chain. And that's called a hash. And in the future, if anything about that database changes, all that is hashed and you should be able to tie those hashes back to the original to be able to see what was it before? What is it after? What changed exactly? And it may not tell you why it changed, but it would give you as an examiner or an auditor or an accountant a history to be able to go back and look at, well, what did this look like before and what does it look like after? And I think that that use case is really simple, but to your point, there have been thousands and thousands and thousands of cases over time where unfortunately, and scrupulous people have made changes to the database to try to hide the tracks, try to cover up fraud, try to eliminate the bad things that they did. And Haley, who in the end suffers when that happens at a financial institution? The customers. Yeah, the consumers, absolutely. And so I think now that consumers start to understand the power that they have with this new world, I think that they will demand this kind of transparency. And already, so my 25-year-old son already refuses to allow gigantic centralized companies to use his data and monetize it for their own benefit. And so he opts out of doing a lot of things online because he doesn't want them to make money off of his data. And that attitude is very prevalent, especially among the Gen Z generation. It's there for the millennials as well. And I only think it's going to increase as we get into Gen Alpha. And so we can put the power back in the people's hands, which by the way, is exactly what Cardi Indians do. Yeah, I love it. And the people helping people foundation model and that everything you do is for the members. Like if we can have that mind shift in the executive levels, and this can happen in banks too, but as our backgrounds are heavily more on the credit union side, it's easier to say that if you actually remove the financial institution from your thinking and think only about the member, which is again, what we really do anyway, so we don't want that impact. Imagine those, you know, being able to own their own identity even. Like, I mean, I'm gonna, I don't want to go down that hole yet because I know that's a part later in our conversation. So I'll skip over that. But I'm just incredibly excited for the opportunities. With that in mind, do you think these Web3 technologies, you know, again, this is the banking on fraudology podcasts? So do you think the Web3 technology, such as the blockchain and decentralized finance, can enhance fraud detection and prevention capabilities within credit unions and banks? Absolutely. I've seen it and it completely revolutionizes everything we do from a payments perspective. So all of the payment systems that we are using today, and anybody who's working the back office of a financial institution understands that all of these systems that consumers use today are clunky. They're not seamless, they're very labor-intensive, there's a lot of manual work that goes into it, and it is exorbitantly expensive to maintain. So a consumer might swipe their card and they move on about their business, but what happens behind the scenes, even though it might happen in seconds, is riding on rails that are 40 years old, and is interfacing with core database technology that is 40 years old. And so those are antiquated systems that are right for disruption, and because they are siloed, so Visa and MasterCard do not talk to ACH, right? They don't talk to each other. And so they're really, it's really difficult, the wire system doesn't talk to ACH. And so it's difficult to trace fraudulent transactions when all the data is fragmented. And what can happen, and I'll give you guys just an example, and this guy's is real life, it's in production today, you can see it on chain, today, this is not something that I'm dreaming up that might happen some point in the future. So whenever you use digital currency or a cryptocurrency asset, and it could be a stablecoin, it could be a meme coin, it could be Bitcoin or Ethereum, it does not matter. You're using a digital wallet, which feels a lot like digital banking, okay? It feels a lot like that, or it also could feel a lot like cash app, or Venmo, or Zell, okay? It's just a place for you to store your information and frankly make payments or do P to P. And when we look at a transaction, and if I'm moving some cryptocurrency to you, a digital asset to you, Haley, it takes seconds, and it can settle in finality anywhere, either of us are in the world 24/7 without a financial institution in the middle of that transaction. That is hugely powerful. Now what else is powerful is the wallet that you use, and the wallet that I use, and every wallet that is out there on a distributed ledger, regardless of which distributed ledger, we can trace everything that that wallet has done since the beginning of time. Every payment that has come through, every transaction that has happened, every wallet it has interacted with, that is all traceable on chain. And it is a mistake to believe that only bad guys use cryptocurrency, it is the furthest from the truth, because what really is the case is everything you do is traceable, and remember I talked about the fact that it is hashed on chain, and you can't change it ever. It's kind of like that post you make on social media when you're a teenager and you had a little bit too much to drink, and you wish you could delete it, right? Well you can't, it's out there on the internet. I mean maybe you could scrub the internet and figure out a way to delete it. But on chain, not if somebody took a screenshot of it. Right, right. You cannot change it. And so the ability to let a consumer know in real time that they might be interacting with a wallet that is suspect is something that is absolutely not possible in today's siloed payments system structure. So let me give you an example of what that looks like. I'm going to send you, I owe you for pizza yesterday. I'm going to send you five bucks. I hit send, a yellow box pops up and it says, hey, Becky, before you finalize this transaction, you might want to know that that wallet Haley sent you to was just spun up an hour ago. It's brand new. It's never had any transactions. Now I might know that Haley just spundered up and it might be perfectly legitimate. Like, okay, great. I'm going to go ahead and send the transaction. That's fine. But imagine the scams that are happening right now that would be stopped just because of that. And I'm all for it. Yeah, I know. It's amazing. And we can also block the transaction. We can put up a red flag and say, you know, this wallet is not something you want to interact with. You know, we can see if it's on an OFACLIST, we can see if if it's interacted with other wallets that are on the OFACLIST. I mean, the capabilities are incredible. And I truly believe Haley, when people like you and other people in the financial crimes community and the fraud fighters, when you see the capabilities of this, you will not want to do payments any other way, any other way. There is no better consumer protection than doing all your transactions on a distributed ledger. I've already started thinking about the conversations that I've had even just this past week in consideration with Operation Shamrock and how we just need to be able to communicate with each other. It's like, is there a place we can go to say that this is a known fraudulent wallet ID? And no, there's not right now. We don't have that. And we need it. And if we could talk with the crypto exchanges, and if we could talk with other FIs even because we're doing a wire to another institution or a P2P to another institution. I mean, imagine the for all you credit unions out there, smaller ones that are just implementing online banking and peer-to-peer transfers. And your fraud went up by 200%. Hello, this is where we need to go. I'm already I'm here for it, which you knew that that's why we have these conversations. So I think you kind of like led into the next segment that I had for us, which is everyone is talking about consortium data right now. Could the integration of Web3 technologies do that same job, a better job, enhancing cross-institutional data sharing and collaboration, meaning not just with the FIs, but we could basically have this consortium that it's or the blockchain would be everyone, the payment systems, the banks, the retail stores even, is that how this is going to work if we can all get on this innovation bayon wagon. Well, what's interesting about that is I just gave you a use case for individuals, right? Individual people having a wallet and the the traceability and the transparency of the transactions that are happening between two people. Companies, merchants, financial institutions, they can have wallets too. Governments can have wallets. Anybody can have a wallet. And so when you're connected into a blockchain and it could be permissioned or it could be unpermitted, and what that means is it's private or public. And if it's a private blockchain, then you would have to have special access in order to look at the transactions, but it works exactly the same. On a public ledger like Ethereum, for example, or Hedera, which is a ledger that we use at bank social, you can use a publicly available scanner. And if you know the wallet address, you can look at up and you can see what the transactions are publicly for free. But if you had, let's say, a private blockchain and you had everybody interacting and sharing information and data there, there's so much that could happen just automatically without anybody having to input any data anywhere because it just happens already. And so, I mean, I don't know exactly how that would look. There are some really interesting use cases about sharing information and sharing data. And what is so crazy is that we're sharing all this cryptographically encrypted data, but it's just data. There's no PII that needs to be in it. There's no information that we wouldn't want to be public in there. It's kind of like looking at just a ledger. I mean, it's a distributed ledger. That's really all it is. And if I know that wallet 123 happens to be Bank of America, then I can look and I can see, well, wallet 123, you know, sent money to the Fed, they sent money to Citibank, they did this or that or whatever the case may be, it is that transparent. And so, I think there's a lot of opportunity for sharing information that is just super hard for us to do today for all the reasons I mentioned. You know, you don't want, you know, PII to be out there, you don't want to start sharing a bunch of information that somebody could hack into that stored into a centralized database. And so, there's so much opportunity, I think, for us to collaborate as people. So think about, think about your consortium and compare that to open source software. So, in open source software, Linux would probably be the example that most people would recognize that name. Linux is an open source operating system. Microsoft Windows is a closed operating system. So is Apple, OS, closed operating system. That means that only the people who work for Microsoft or work for Apple can make any changes to the software. Not true on Linux. Anybody, any developer can open up the toolkit and they can make changes, they can fork it and use it for themselves. They can do anything to enhance that ecosystem. And I think your consortium could be just exactly like that. An open source software platform where people could contribute and make things better. I had taken this question out, but the more that we keep talking about it, I knew I was going to go this way anyway, so I shouldn't have taken it out. But digital identity, the self-sauvering digital identity that I read about in your book, and I'll tell you pretty much highlighted every page, every word in the page, because I was so excited. And I was thinking about it, and this is the way that really I started thinking about it. Even before I read this, it was when LinkedIn did that update and you could validate your, you could authenticate yourself and get that little verified shield check mark where you go through the whole clear process and it's your ID and blah, blah, blah, and you have to truly validate yourself. Well, in thinking of that, it was like, "God, I would hate if somebody could do that with my information," or with that of my children. Like, you know, we've got so many of the hidden fraud in identity where it is synthetics and they are taken to social from one, and an ID and address from another, and making a whole new one. And, but being able to truly be empowered to own your identity, can we get to that world? But, you know, explain what the self-sauvering identity would be in this web-through world. So self-sauvering means that I own it, right? So it is mine, and I own it, and it's portable. I can take it with me. So in today's world, unfortunately, let's think about the financial institution world, and let's also think about the laws that are on the books around the BSA identification of people, right? And how it got updated after 9/11 as well. So, you know, you have CIP, KYC, you know, KYB, all of that stuff. But in the regs, there are very limited examples of what you can utilize in order to identify yourself. You know, your driver's license, you know, a state-issued ID, a passport, and a couple other pieces of information, and that's pretty much it. Well, let's think about it in a digital world, all of the ways that make you uniquely you, and where your footprint is online, all over the place. You just mentioned LinkedIn, not one place. You probably have some other, you know, four or five other social media aspects that could help identify you uniquely. You also may own property, and there's TAD data, or TAD, well, it tax appraisal district data out there that could be validated, where you went to school. Your college could probably validate who you are. Your friends can actually validate who you are. And so there's a thousand different ways and entry points and a digital fingerprints that you have already that can be incorporated into a digital ID that will make it much, much more robust than just the two or three pieces of identification that we ask for today. And so when you talk about self-sauvering, everybody has their device with them all the time, right, their phone. And so what you can do is you can validate yourself through all those mechanisms that I discussed, including a government-issued ID and those kinds of things. And you validate yourself all those ways. And that information is stored in the secure enclave on your device. And that data, just like I talked about your month-end database, now all that data is encrypted and hashed on chain. Now what I don't mean is that all that data is stored on chain. It is not, it is stored on your secure enclave. It is not stored in any centralized honey pot database that hackers can get into. So what that means is now I have my information. It is secured in my phone with cryptographic keys that are required to access it and share it. And if somebody needs my identification, I'm going to give them that information utilizing my device. It could be a QR code. It could be, there's a lot of different mechanisms that I can use, tap my phone somewhere, whatever. And I'm only giving access to whoever I'm giving it to for the data that they specifically need. Let's talk about a liquor store. They only need to know that I'm over 21. Sorry, they don't even need to know how old I am. They just need to know that I have reached the age of 21 and I'm legal to buy alcohol. They don't need to know my name. They don't need to know my address. They don't need to know my height, my weight, my hair color, my eye color, my picture, nothing. All they need to know is that I'm over the age of 21. And then they can record that information that they validated it. They checked it and we're good to go. Now, if a bad guy wants to get people's PII, now he has to go and he has to hack your phone, Hailey. He has to hack my phone. He has to hack my neighbor's phone. He has to individually attack people instead of only trying to attack a big, giant centralized database. Dell just was released that they had a data breach. I mean, my goodness, AT&T just came out with a data breach. I mean, these things are happening all the time. And the type of technology that is going to be required to protect consumers cannot exist in a web to world. We're going to have to go to web 3 where everything is built on distributive ledgers and can be cryptographically and cryptically hashed on chain and not changed. Now, let's talk about now my identity for whatever reason gets compromised. And if I change it, that information's also about there too. It was this, now it's this. And if I try to change my birthday, because that's not something that can ever change, the validators on the network are not going to allow that. They're going to be like, nope, doesn't make sense. Doesn't work. Reject transaction. So now let's say whatever happens, somebody just happens to, you know, I got a virus on my individual device. Well, now all I have to do is revoke my certificate, meaning that anybody who I've given that data to now can no longer use it until I revalidate with them. And so it basically puts the identity in the user's hands instead of all of us having to fill out every piece of our information in order to access and get through a gatekeeper in order to do something that we want. You sign up for Amazon, what do you have to do? Give them all your data. You go to Facebook, what do you have to do? You have to give them all your data. You know, and that is just not something that I think in the future world we're going to want. And then also think about doing everything in a digital way in the metaverse, right? You're going to need to have some way to identify yourself and make payments in that world. Yeah, no, I completely and for it. And the more I think about it, it's like even, even if they did try to the hackers take over your phone and they try to put it somewhere else, you know, they're still, it's not going to validate where they're at because they would have to follow back the blockchain to verify that the last transaction matches, this transaction or that the identity matches. And so it's like truly, I'm now, you know, I'm normally one that, you know, I'm not going to say, I don't always go for the new fad, right? The new technology fad, I'm going to kind of sit back and wait and watch it, you know, see if it's success or if it fails. And if it fails, I'm going to be like, well, see, I made the right decision by waiting back. You know, and that's it. So I'm a bit risk of earth. And so I'm incredibly hopeful for the future versus where when we look at fraud in the way that, if I need to institutions, especially are being exploited, you know, there's a lot of gaps in payments and processing and infrastructure and they are being attacked by these fraud rings and these different bad actors. And I'm just, I'm hopeful for the future in this aspect. There's a question that I have, but I'm going to change it to quote your book because we're moving into the, what does the future hold, right? In your book, you say, credit unions have fallen behind as it relates to innovation, resource constraints, regulatory compliance burden, legacy infrastructure, hypercompetition and inherent risk aversion all contribute to this situation. In an analog world, it is cumbersome and expensive to provide specialized products and services to a diverse membership, but in a digitally native world, it is much easier. What challenges do you anticipate credit unions facing in adopting the Web 3 solutions for fraud prevention? And how do you propose overcoming those challenges? Well, I think that a lot of credit unions are encumbered by that legacy technology that they're using, that clunky technology that I talked about earlier. You know, from a user experience when you're working at a financial institution, you're trying to help a member. It is not intuitive or easy in order to try to assist them or even figure out what happened in many cases. I think that credit unions tend to, especially on the smaller end of the spectrum, they tend to get really focused on helping the members in doing the day-to-day and not paying a lot of attention to what's happening outside. I think also that people assume that they have to rip out everything and start over in order to implement some of these emerging technologies and that could not be further from the truth. You can absolutely start bridging the gap and utilizing things that are available. today, but preparing yourself for what is going to happen as these innovations become more popular from a consumer perspective, the digital identities available today. All we need is for people to use them and for other people to accept them. That's really all we need in order to proliferate the SSID today. And so as credit unions move forward, their legacy core systems are definitely holding them back. I don't think anybody would deny that fact. That is a challenge for all of us, but you don't have to just completely start over in order to start thinking about these things. And I do talk about in my book how to credit unions win in this new world. And there are some ways that you can win, for example, you could implement blockchain voting for your board. That's not super challenging for a software developer to do for your credit union. Bank social could do it. It wouldn't be expensive. It wouldn't be super challenging. But that's a way to start kind of dipping your toe into the water and getting used to doing things in a digitally native way where everything is available on chain. And there are the digital identities, you know, using that as an online account opening perhaps that just happens to issue a digital identity that is available when the ecosystem is starts accepting those things more readily. So there's a lot of things that I think every credit union can start to do today in order to prepare for what's happening in the future. And again, when I talk about how quickly this is going to happen, so will V sent Mastercard be around five years from now? Yes, 10 years from now, maybe, they're probably going to look and work a lot differently. And so it's really important. I mean, all of us do a two, three, five year strategic plan, right? Well, let's start incorporating those things now so that we can be prepared for what is to come in the future. I think what scares me the most is that a credit union wakes up three years from now and goes, holy God, I completely, you know, I blinked and all this stuff happened. And now I can't catch up. I'm not going to be able to move forward until I spend a bunch of money and do a bunch of stuff to completely rip everything out that I already have in order to make these things work. I agree. And we've talked about it in the past before, but the mergers and acquisitions of the credit unions, like the credit unions, they're here for a reason. And you are to serve your members. Your goal as the credit union, and this is where I think a lot of credit unions really mess up, is that your goal is not to build your membership. Your goal is to maintain your current membership and ensure that you are providing those financial services that you promise them you would. Your organization was created to sponsor support and encourage these individuals who would normally have access to these payments and systems and whatever they now have this access. But we're worried about trying to be bigger and trying to get more. And it's no, you have to focus on what you have. And so to those smaller institutions that aren't looking right now at your fraud people, you need to do that because you are one fraud attack away from going belly up and somebody needing to merge with you or acquire you. And you need to take that into account as you strategize what your plan is and how you're going to support your members because you don't want to leave that up to the next big bank that buys you out or big credit union, you want to be able to ensure that your members, the ones that you created your credit union for are going to be supported and taken care of. I love that. And I do get into that in the book with the grassroots. I really believe that the smaller niche credit unions are what is going to be the most prevalent in the future. Not to say that the larger credit unions are not going to be around. But I think that the larger you get, the less specialized you're able to be. So for example, if you have a credit union that is focused on a garden club in a particular town, you know, you maybe only have 300, 400, 500 members. But think about the products and services that you could customize that would just specifically help those people. And that is what credit unions were created to do. And that is what is capable in this new landscape because everything is digital. We live in a digital world. Our identities, our digital, everything that we do is digital. And because of that, there's things that we can do and create and support to provide financial inclusion. People who, that's why credit unions were created to make sure that people had fair access to affordable financial services. And there's no better institution in the world than a member-owned bank, which is a credit union. And to be able to have the people, assisting the people in order to make their financial lives better. I'm sensing in my future that I need to start a credit union for fraud fighters. Imagine having the members vote on what we need to do for fraud services like, oh my gosh, we would be the safest most, we'd be the fraud utopia of a financial institution. I'm just, I'm just thinking about the future here. I'm excited. So before we go, is there anything you want to add before we close out our conversation, anything that I may have missed that you want to make sure that our audience understands or knows? Well, I just recommend for the folks out there that want to learn more about what the capabilities are for payment, fraud protection and traceability. Take a look at a company called Chain Analysis. They're probably the most prevalent in the space as it relates to fraud detection and crime traceability online. They write some really cool white papers. Go take a look at those and I think your mind will be blown. You're going to start thinking about things that you have thought about before. And so go do your own research and check on that. Also, I encourage everybody not to tune out when you hear about crypto. And it's not just the sand bankman freeds. It's not just the crypto bros out there trying to scam somebody. Out of their money, there are legitimate real business use cases that are happening today that are being built out similar to what happened in the early days of the internet in the early 2000s. That is happening and it is expanding rapidly. And one other thing I'll say is you really don't need to understand all the nuances of the technology in order to use it. If you were to ask your board or your members today if they understood how an ACH works, they would say no. But it's something they use and work with every single day. And it's the same thing with DLT. And I also forgot to mention and you didn't mention it in your intro either. But you've got your own podcast as well. I do. Grow your credit union. And I have thoroughly enjoyed it. It's taught me even more about credit unions that I didn't know. And I'm just loving the content that you're bringing. Thank you. Thank you so much and your episode will be coming out soon. Oh great. Yeah. Well, y'all have to check that out. Maybe if it's live before this one, we'll link it in the show notes. There you go. Cool. All right. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Haley. Thanks for listening to the Banking on Fraudology podcast. If you don't want to miss any future episodes, make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen podcasts.