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It’s a familiar story. Credit union signs up to roll out an exciting new product or service with a fintech provider; months later, the project remains mired in the implementation process. What went wrong? The CU found itself playing defense after the compatibility of its data system was lost to the uncertainties of platform integration.

According to a recent Cornerstone Advisors survey, 79% of financial institutions have no interest in offering cryptocurrency investing services. This indicates a significant blind spot; according to the same study 15% of US consumers already own crypto, and 60% say they would use their bank or credit union to manage such assets.

Elon Musk and Jack Ma have both publicly stated that their biggest concern for the future is not over-population, but rather under-population. Many thought leaders have raised similar concerns, noting that our current societal structures are ill-equipped to handle such a scenario.

Financial technology can be complicated stuff- and anyone who claims there are easy answers to the challenges facing credit unions probably hasn’t analyzed the issues closely enough.

In 2008, the market suffered a horrible loss due to mortgages being repackaged that were not worth the amounts they were repackaged for. As a result, many people lost their jobs. At that time, I was working at a large credit union. I woke up one day to discover that we had lost almost 90 million dollars. We didn’t lose that money because we were mismanaged or because we had taken high risks, but because of the environment that we were operating in.

Innovation is one of those somewhat nebulous words that many of us use to describe what we do. Over the years, I’ve been involved in some very innovative creations that never actually went anywhere. It’s not because they weren’t really cool or didn’t have a sustainable business model.