Joseph Winn’s Post

Sending best wishes out to all Americans celebrating our country's birthday. May we always remember our lofty founding principles, recognize how we can continuously improve, and work to raise more people up. We're at our best when we look to the future with hope and leave fear and hate in the past. And be respectful of veterans who may have noise sensitivity, while also keeping our furry friends happy (and indoors). #4thofjuly

Ouch. #Ransomware sucks (I've talked about it before). Best wishes to the Patelco Credit Union team in restoring systems, not feeding the monster of paying ransoms, and keeping members served during this struggle. It's going to be a lot of hard work. For everyone else, this is a perfect time to ensure your IT and third-party security audits are given appropriate attention. Additionally, take the opportunity to re-train staff on recognizing ever-better phishing messages. The best security is usually overcome by human factors (like in this case, where a person opened an email attachment). #creditunions #cybersecurity

Just putting it out there: If your #creditunion is doing this, you're not living the mission. And if it's because you want to find new ways to grow and inspire your staff, comment or DM me, because I know some people who can actually help.

If your member keeps the minimum in their account and no one notices, does it make a sound? Forest. It's a metaphor. #Creditunions aren't interesting on the surface. How are you creating a brand to help improve people's financial wellness?

#Creditunion risk managers know "this is the way" for making sure your institution goes into the red fast: "Musk plans to offer 'extremely high yield' savings accounts that...would basically guarantee that funds are rarely withdrawn from X."

Pride Month is about rainbows and acceptance, but it’s also about speaking out against hate and intolerance. Sadly, that emerged in our city this week. I couldn’t stand by, so I tried to offer allyship and support best I could (it wasn’t my best, given it caught all of us by surprise), before discussing why I was actually there. Scroll to 26:50 for my comments. Go back about 7 minutes if you must see the vitriol. So yes, I’m an ally, officially, on the public record. I hope I never have to get up again in response to that. PS - Members of the council, the mayor, even the city attorney thanked me after the meeting for speaking out, essentially doing what they could not in their positions. #pridemonth

Living the mission is my mission. Advocating the #triplebottomline of environmental, financial, and social responsibility is in more than my #creditunion work. I also serve on my city's Sustainability & Resiliency Advisory Board, which advocates and advances policies to set us up as environmental leaders who also support our pollinators, birds, and human society. Plus, I get a cool name plaque.

If I had a podcast, I'd spend the next hour rambling on (getting the Led out, we could say, ideally with an engaged co-host and guest) about Apple's application of AI, or, as they put it, Apple Intelligence, which conveniently also abbreviates to AI. Definitely a coincidence.  Here's why:  is rarely first to a tech innovation, and generative AI happened fast, so they were seen as falling behind. Obviously, they were working on innovations their way, which usually means, "less gimmicky and focused on privacy". Thus, the industry was waiting to see how Apple would make all these disparate AI concepts actually make life better, rather than just more complicated and contribute to a hype bubble. If you listen to the words they used, there were thinly-veiled jabs at the tech world, and also a fundamental shift: That your data should always remain your data, even if it's leaving your device to have things done with it. And, that those cloud systems should also be held accountable to the same privacy standards you have for your physical device. Are the things they demoed new? Not really, but they promise to deliver what Apple does best: Integrate their hardware and software to make connections no other company can. Does it suck they're only available for the iPhone 15 Pro and M1 or better Macs and iPads? Yes. At the core (get it, 🍎 core?), it's about *helping you accomplish complex tasks easily*. The integration with ChatGPT is a temporary thing to appease the public until their own models get sufficiently advanced. Apple despises depending on other companies for anything, especially core services. I've been following them as they advanced machine learning, first integrating it into their hardware back in 2017 with the "Neural Engine". Yep, today that's the "AI" chip. We've even gotten a bunch of really cool features any other company would call AI. Copying text from images and videos? Lifting people or subjects from photos seamlessly? Even Podcasts switching to your AirPlay speaker if you do that regularly. These are all "AI", because that's just "machine learning". Ok, so I scripted most of an episode here, didn't I? Oh, and this has just as much relevance for #fintechs and #creditunions, because you're focused on AI solutions as well. Buzzwords gonna buzz. Let's just make sure the real goals are always the focus: Transparency: The models need to be open, understood (by experts), and auditable. Privacy: Members own their data, period. No matter where it goes. It doesn't get sold or used to make new models. Usefullness: The system has to be better than the manual approach. By a lot. Sustainability: Modern "AI" stuff can use stupid amounts of electricity. That's not good in a world of climate change and resource scarcity. On-device and low-power platforms should always be the goal. #appleintelligence #CUGeek #artificialintelligence #llms #ai #apple #wwdc Jonathan Taylor, MBA

Having Apple introduce their application of machine learning & generative AI as Apple Intelligence, and using the tagline: "Apple Intelligence: AI for the rest of us." They not only reclaimed the term "AI" as their own, they also put themselves in-between tech bros and the average person. All I'm saying is it's a ridiculously good tagline. #appleintelligence #wwdc

When Reg Z and UDAAP comes to the rescue. #mortgages #secondmortgages #creditunions #financialempowerment