In this episode, we chat with our friend and client, Travis Frey, Chief Technology and Security Officer at Dover Federal Credit Union in Dover, Delaware. Mr. Frey has spent more than 20 years in the credit union industry and brings a unique perspective to innovation and IT strategy and execution. Topics discussed include Dover Federal Credit Union's 65th anniversary, how they tackle tech and cybersecurity initiatives, where the future will lead the credit union, and the many challenges facing credit unions in general. Enjoy the conversation with Travis!
In this episode, we chat with our friend and client, Travis Frey, Chief Technology and Security Officer at Dover Federal Credit Union in Dover, Delaware. Mr. Frey has spent more than 20 years in the credit union industry and brings a unique perspective to innovation and IT strategy and execution. Topics discussed include Dover Federal Credit Union's 65th anniversary, how they tackle tech and cybersecurity initiatives, where the future will lead the credit union, and the many challenges facing credit unions in general. Enjoy the conversation with Travis!
Welcome back to Firmer Ground from SRM, where we explore trends and strategies impacting the current and future state of financial institutions in North America and across the globe. This is Neil Dougherty, host of today's podcast and managing director of global marketing at SRM. In this episode, I speak with Travis Frey chief technology and security officer at Dover Federal Credit Union in Dover, Delaware. Mr. Frey has spent more than 20 years in the operational elements of the credit union industry and brings a unique perspective to innovation and IT strategy and execution. We'll discuss a bit about Dover Federal Credit Union's 65th anniversary, where the future will lead his credit union and all credit unions in the art and science of meeting member expectations. We hope you enjoy this conversation with our friend, Travis Frey.
Alright. Well, hello, everyone. Neil Dougherty here, managing director of global marketing at SRM. And my guest today in the studio is a longtime friend of our program at SRM, Mr. Travis Frey. And Travis is the Chief Technology and Security Officer at Dover Federal Credit Union in Delaware, and he's an advocate for embracing innovation in the context of financial services. So happy to have you here today, Travis. Thanks for joining me on the Firmer Ground podcast. I'm sure this is going to be one of the more interesting episodes to date, so thank you so much. How are things?
Things are good, man. Things are good. We're rocking and rolling here in Dover,
I saw and I wanted to congratulate you and your colleagues at Dover FCU. It's the credit union's 65th anniversary. That's exciting. So, tell us a little bit more about the importance of that milestone for your institution, how you guys have been celebrating.
Yeah. So anytime an institution kind of hits those milestones, it's kind of awesome. And you think about 65 years, three generations of members have enjoyed our credit union, and we recognize that. So, what we've done here as a team is we kind of came together. And started really brainstorming, how do we want to celebrate our 65th? What ideas do people have? How do we want to kind of really embrace inclusivity? Asking a lot of our team members about what do we want to do? So a couple months ago, we started really hammering a bunch of ideas together and kind of classified them as stuff we can do. Stuff we can't do, right? Like we can't give away a car. I mean, be cool to give away, like a 65 Corvette or something, but just can't do those things. But where we did land, which has been kind of fun, is we kind of kicked off our celebration in the middle of June. And what we did for the first time in a while is we actually empowered our branches to think of a 1950s theme and decorate their branches accordingly. So we have 45 records hanging under one branch. We have model cars from the air at another branch. And we really wanted to, from a marketing standpoint, to kind of keep our colors and our tone the same, but give the branches some creative license. And we actually gave them a nice budget so they're able to provide cookies and birthday cakes on Fridays, things like that. Really trying to give our members a reason to come visit us at the branch again, right during COVID Sure. Like everybody else, everything pivoted to remote, and we kind of saw that in our transaction volume. Kind of our branch foot traffic is just kind of we wanted to use the 65th as a reminder that, hey, we're still here. We still have branches. We're still here in our community. So then the other big idea we haven't launched this just yet is we're going to do some random acts of kindness in August where we're going to create some teams that are going to kind of canvass the areas. Our communities and do things like buy the first 100 customers a cup of coffee, fill up $20 worth of gas for people buy for groceries, things like that. We've kind of carved out a little bit of our budget to be able to accomplish that and see what we can do with that. Again, really trying to involve more of our team. So it's not just the marketing team doing it or it's not just experienced teams. It's kind of everybody. Yeah. So then the other big thing we did, man, that's kind of going gangbusters is just like everybody else right now. Every Fi out there is trying to get those share deposits in. So we've put together some pretty attractive rates on our certificates. We jumped up the rate on our rewards checking account to 4.65% for the first 15,000 on deposit, things like that. Again, just really trying to enhance the financial lives of our members in our community by offering incredibly good rates and. Reminding them that we're here, you know.
That's great. And so it sounds like you've got a good combination here of, like, just kind of fun and member surprises, as well as, you know, kind of the best in breed in terms of products. So that's awesome. And it sounds like you did some kind of crowdsourcing on that, too. Is that accurate to say?
Yeah. So that was one of the big things. Yeah, it was one of the things for us as we kind of, like, start looking towards the future for how we want innovation to work here at the credit union. The past three years, we've gone through a revolution, I guess is probably the best way to put it in, the way we think about problems, the way we try to solve problems. It's not just one department doing it now. It has to be multiple opinions across multiple spectrums, across multiple diversity spectrums, things like that, and try to understand what it is we're trying to build and seek the input from many. So I've been fortunate with the team we have here at Dover. They're incredibly outspoken. We do a lot to create a space that's safe for them to share ideas where we're not. Maybe in the distant past, somebody would come up with an idea and it would be shot down or whatever, and now we're trying to do the yes and versus the no here type of conversation. So, yeah, it's been fun. The anniversary project has been a fun project, and we're looking into doing some more of these, like you said, kind of crowdsourcing. We want to try to experiment a little bit and involve our members and bring some of our members into the conversations, try to get them to be part of it, because now, like you said, everything's remote now. I mean, we do so much remotely now, like, doing a remote focus group shouldn't be that difficult. So these are the things that we're kind of starting to play around with a little bit here as we kind of round out 2023.
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I think when you talk about the idea of crowdsourcing, there's that combo, right, of the internal version, and that's awesome that it sounds like everyone organizationally has the ability to provide that input and to be an idea generator, because good ideas come from everywhere. Right. But you've also got that perspective of potentially bringing it from the outside, which is awesome. Obviously, you need to know what members are thinking, what their expectations are, and actually, just for the listener's sake, could you remind us what your branch footprint looks like today?
Yeah, so we have eight branches. We're in Delaware. We kind of span from. So if you think about Delaware. It's not really a rectangle, but there's three counties in Delaware, so big state, I know, but we have we have a couple branches in our northernmost county, which kind of borders the Philadelphia area. It's Wilmington area, center of the state. We have a couple branches. And then a little bit south in the southern part of the counties, we have states, so eight branches kind of across Delaware. We started as an Air Force credit union, so, you know, our feature branch was at the Air Force base. We've put up a couple of other ones across the state. And our state's unique in that. The southern county in Delaware, Sussex county in 2021 and 2022 was the fastest growing county on the East Coast. So it was growing faster than, like, the counties in Florida. Right. Because southern Delaware has fantastic beaches, affordable housing, used to, anyway. It's a great retirement community. We have really great weather here. I mean, despite being in the Northeast this last year, I think we had winches of snow. So it's very appealing for those that want to see the Four Seasons. But not have the headache of plowing. Right.
And some distinct tax benefits, too, in Delaware.
Yeah. And we're tax free. Yeah, exactly. We're tax free. So that's the big deal around here.
And I asked that question because just I wanted to give some perspective for the listener because I think some of the things that you've done in your role and some of the things that your organization has done while technically being kind of on the smaller side from a branch footprint are really impressive and start to reach towards the future. And I guess that's a good segue, too, into thinking about it. And you mentioned trying to kind of change the essence of what happens in a branch, and you're working on that and some plans there. But you've got this 65th anniversary now, and the question always that I think of is, what will it take for your credit union, for credit unions in general, to ensure the next 65 years are successful? Right. And that the operations and the growth is there and really just the engagement. So I'm curious, just from your seat, from the role that you play, and I know that you're very much involved in day to day operations as well as kind of innovation and technology. I'm curious what you think in terms of kind of what that next 65 looks like to keep it going.
Yeah, that's a really interesting mind game to play, to say what is, you know, what is the credit union space look like in? What is that, 2089?
Because of course, we don't know what the world looks like then either.
So yeah, so I think the better way, the better way I look at it is what's it going to take for credit unions to survive? What's it going to take for even small regional banks to survive? There's a lot of external pressures, and daily they grow and they become stronger and stronger. I mean, not to mention that thing, cybersecurity, that just will not it's just a continual external pressure that's not going to go away anytime soon. That's only going to get more and more sophisticated as we move forward. So when I think about that future and how is the credit you're going to survive another 65 years, and what does the world look like 65 years from now? There's a lot of questions that come into play there. It gets kind of wild. At what point do people stop driving cars?
We were promised that a long time ago, by the way.
We were. What I found interesting with that question is if you go back to 1958 and you rewind that 65 years, you were now in like 1897, credit unions really weren't started yet, and banks were still kind of just starting to come around or whatever, but people were driving horses. That was their main thing. And vehicles didn't come around for another 20 years after that. So if you rewound the clock to 1897, instead of what does 65 years look like? We went through two world wars, we went through an industrial revolution. We changed the way we sprawled out from cities into suburbs now. So we've changed our lives. We've changed how we live. The nuclear family became a thing. The word that comes to mind every single time when I think about this is the word safety, right? So that's where credit unions and just society in general, we have to land in this sense of safety. When you think about to go back to Psych 101, psychology 101, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, if you don't have a safe environment to operate, it's really hard to move up that chain of that chain, to get to self actualization, to get to that nuclear family, that sense of safety, what have you. So when you look at the world around us 3s in 65 years now, what are we doing now for Gen Z, for those Xennials, whatever you want to call them, the people born after 1990, that some of them have never experienced a time of peace. Peace. They don't know what it's like to not be at war with something or to have the world at war somewhere. And you see that the reaction of that is they're holding off on major life events, right? They're not getting married, they're not having children, they're not buying homes. And you can say that there's a definite truth to the component of everything is way too expensive for them to do that. And it's unaffordable. But there's also in my head a real lack of a sense of safety in that generation. So for us to sit here and expect them to be this typical quote unquote, capitalistic purchasing consumers, I think it's kind of unrealistic. So I look at that generation as the one that's going to define the next 65 years and what behaviors are they developing now that'll speak to those 65 years? We're seeing Gen Z consumers shy away from lending. They do a lot of research before they reach out to a credit union. And they're not getting hit by other banks. They're getting hit by chime, by sofa, by apple. They're getting hit by tech companies. And you're starting to see the commoditization of banking and banking as a service, everything as a service. To me that's right around the corner. And that generation that's going to be the grandparents 65 years from now, what are they teaching their children and what are they teaching their grandchildren? And that's the stuff that goes through my head and I go back to that word safety every single time is what's it going to take for a credit union to survive the next 65 years. We have to create a sense of safety in our communities. We have to get involved. We have to find ways to create financial certainty for our members, find ways to help them improve their credit score. It's the stuff we've always been doing and that's the good news. If there's a silver lining in any of this it's the good news is Gen Z wants to align themselves with companies that are vesting into their communities. Sure. Well that's been at our core. Every credit union's core mission statement virtually reads the same and somewhere in their is financial well being for our community. Well that's. That's gen z.
And that's such a such a unique take. And, you know, I think if I'd asked that question to nine out of ten people, they may have just answered, well, it's just, you know, continuing the arms race from a technology standpoint. Right, but your answer was something that, you know, even I hadn't thought about as we, you know, kind of were approaching this conversation today, which is the idea of, like, those external pressures and that element of safety and, you know, peacetime versus challenging times and all those socioeconomic pressures. It's such a unique reality that people maybe don't think about when they're either too close to something or thinking about something just more. Because, I mean, the easy answer is, well, we just have to continue to get better at digital transformation and meet expectations. Right, but I think you've shed some light on something that maybe we don't always think about in terms of the day to day operations
We had a couple of team meetings this week where we talked through some of those challenges from the tech standpoint because the technology is definitely going to help position you. The fintech partners you choose are going to really speak to your mission. And that's kind of the other piece of this is you have to think about what your mission looks like, what your strategy looks like, and then you have to find the fintech partners that can help maybe remove some of the friction that's in those processes. And the reality is, and the secret is, the secret sauce that I think a lot of creatives have, you can probably already do this yourself. It's the matter of having the resources to sit down and do it, and can you do it as well as Venmo or as well as PayPal or insert any other system here the challenge is. The pace at which technology is moving, and you throw, you know, artificial intelligence in there, you throw more. You're starting to hear more and more about quantum computing, you know, breaking every encryption method ever known. You know, what what's the constant through all of that? Well, all of that's doing is creating additional layers of uncertainty. And Gen Z sees that clear as day because they're not on Facebook anymore, right? They're on TikTok. They pivot so quickly with technology that if you're saying, my strategy is to keep ahead of digital transformation, move forward technology, you're going to lose people along the way. Because to me, in my head, the strategy really needs to be a blend between the digital transformation and kind of this community transformation. Sure. Because you're not going to get people coming to your branch to do transactions and move money. More people go into your branch because they want to establish new business. They want to solve some problem they can't use technology to do. Or maybe they just want to come in and talk about where they're headed into the future with retirement or what have you, get some education. So education problem resolution and new business line creation, to me, is what the future of branches look like and making sure we have resources, staffing, and technology that speaks to those things and get it done right. And the analogy I give is we can leverage technology to reach out to you and create a really compelling message of why we're awesome. Then we can create a call to action, click this button and go do this thing, and it's really awesome. And then you get to that front door. And the analogy I just gave somebody yesterday was it's like, we're sending out these invites, telling people to come to this party, and they open up the door, and they don't know anybody in that room. Are you going through the door, or are you closing the door and waiting for the next party to go check out? So it's getting all of those things aligned correctly. So when that member gets that message, it's relevant to them, it's meaningful to them. The call to action makes sense, and the next steps are frictionless. To me, that's digital. That needs to be table stakes, like tomorrow. Right. Then beyond that, you have to educate that person that just that just joined the credit union as to why the credit union is special. Why is your credit union special? Why is your mission statement meaningful to that person and creating that connectivity? The connective tissue there, and I don't know that our industry does a great job at that. I think there's definitely room for improvement there. It's an area that we're certainly looking at from a I'm looking at from. Strategic sense of how do we build a platform that can kind of create that connective tissue? And for me, it starts this is going to sound really corny, but hey, man, it starts with leadership. It starts with creating that that understanding the why we're doing something, connecting it back to the not what we're doing or how we're doing it's, the Simon Sinek stuff, right? It's starting with the why and then building your message from that of what we're about.
So if I could take a step back for second, because I think this is that kind of understanding the why. One of the things you mentioned before is to get the future right. It also takes community transformation. And forgive me if this is kind of a curveball, but what do you see as the credit union's role in community transformation? Do you have a role?
Yeah, I believe we do have a role. And I'll tell you, some of the areas that we are actively focusing on is affordable housing. This issue is countrywide. It's nationwide. You go back to that safety thing, okay? So when we think about safety, I go right to three major pillars of safety to me are literal safety, like police force, firemen, those basic levels of safety in our community. Second thing would be health care, making sure I have a physical physician that can take care of my issue, a nurse that's there to help me with through that process, or whatever it is. And then the third thing is education. So you're talking about police officers, you're talking about firefighters, you're talking about nurses, doctors, and educators. So those, to me, are the five pill in my head. And, you know, you could argue it wherever you want to argue. Those are the five areas. Sure. You've covered the bases. There struggle, for sure. Yeah. There's other little nuances, I'm sure. But those are the five areas that, you know, I consider. If you if you're doing those five things well, chances are your city is thriving. But the reality is, when you look at those five verticals, they can't afford housing in the communities that they're trying to establish themselves in. We have a hospital here in Delaware, a beautiful facility. It's a learning hospital. It's in that growing county Downstate. It's right behind my house. So it's just a beautiful facility. And we were actually at a conference with them, with some of their leadership two years ago, and they were saying that they had twelve physicians, they were going through the residency at the hospital, and eleven of them were moving out of the area because they couldn't get houses to afford. These are doctors, man. Like, doctors can't afford houses. And then for me, where this hits me personally is one of my children is an English teacher at the local high school. Ah. And, you know, with his salary and the cost of everything, there's no way he has an option to not live with mom and dad. So and he's talking to his colleagues at school, and he's finding 30 somethings that are in the same boat of, yeah, I still live with my mom and dad in their basement or what have you. And it's they love to teach. They love to reach out to the kids, live with that sense of safety. But we're not doing anything to help those segments of our population nation find affordable housing, find affordable programs. So our credit union, we're committed to working through that. Diligently working through that with the various 501 c three nonprofits in Delaware, with the various entities in Delaware. I actually lead a consortium of sorts, affordable housing task force out of the Sussex County area, where we have bimonthly meetings with legislators, with city government, with developers, with builders, with people in these call them credit marginalized communities where we're trying to connect the dots. And where does the credit union come in? Man we're a lender, right? We can find ways to take risks for these communities to get people into these affordable homes. We have. The other community that's in there is the laborers community, right? So “itin” lending needs to enter that equation. We got to find ways to get more creative with lending. Where maybe a multifamily house. So it's a four bedroom, three bathroom house that's got three families living into it with a shared mortgage payment. We have to figure out ways to write notes. We have to figure out ways to write loans that speak to those diversifying, marginalized lifestyles that are kind of not, quote unquote, normal, you know, whatever you want to, you know, classify that. I want to say normal. It's you know, when I was growing up, it was the American dream. And now, like, there is no American dream. It's I hope you can afford your car payment and your student loan payment and your home and your insurance.
Well, the normal used to shift. Right? And I think post pandemic, it's truer than ever. It's interesting you brought that up. I'm actually looking forward to I have a conversation coming up with Mr. Rodney Hood of the NCUA who's also very much an advocate for affordable housing and kind of looking at the creativity in that space and how do we kind of flip the norms so that affordability becomes a reality again. So I think that's a really great take. I love the fact that obviously you're very engaged in that and that the credit union is also engaged in just thinking creatively. Right. There's some realities in operating that I'm sure make it hard at times for you to do exactly what you'd love to do tomorrow or the next day. But at the same time, the fact that you're taking that on, that you're having some ideation around that is really excellent. And I think that will continue to be hopefully one of the differentiators for credit unions as that world kind of moves forward and the reality of things and costs continue to shake us up at times. Right. So I think that's awesome, and I appreciate you sharing that because this conversation, I thought we were going to go down one path and talk a lot about technology and innovation. And now we've already talked about community safety and the role of the credit union in the community. And I think that those are all very important elements of how do you think about operations, how do you think about your impact, your charter, your vision for going forward? So I think that's fantastic. But I do need to bring you back around to technology at some point because I know you're good at that. So let's get into that for a second. So you mentioned fintech relationships a little bit earlier, and I just wanted to kind of pick your brain a little bit in terms of what you think the state of the fintech working with credit union relationship looks like right now. Maybe what are some of the areas where fintechs are best set up to support credit unions and vice versa? And if you have any just kind of stories about how you're working with fintechs that you're willing to share, I think that would be great for the listeners as well.
Sure, sure. So, yeah, I mean, fintechs they need to be an important part of any credit union strategy. But the reality is there's a lot of shiny nickels out there. And you send a team to a conference, and they come back with 15 shiny nickels they want to deploy, and they go back to their core. They go back to their It team who's, like, had this discussion at a conference in Chicago. You have It teams at credit unions that are just there to keep the lights on. And that's what their focus is, keep the lights on. And with the never-ending threat of cybersecurity, it seems like that's literally. And then since the Pandemic, we went from a nine to six five day a week department to a seven by 24 by 365 department, because we have people, vendors, connections. We have activities taking place all the time on our network. If we have an update in the past, we'd say, okay, at 07:00, we're going to run this update because no one's online. Well, then we find out there's, like, three teams online at 07:00 working on a project, because that's the only time they had to do it. And because of the Pandemic, now we've given them this awesome tool where they can connect anytime they want. Well, that's kind of that's great, but that means now I have a team that's, like, they're already at their wits end, and now we're going to give them 15 shiny nickels to say, okay, figure out how these kind of get lined up. So one of the things that we've done here at Dover is we've taken a step back, and I like to say we've kind of downshifted the vehicle a little bit, the innovation vehicle a little bit. And instead of going out and finding shiny nickels, let's take a look at the nickels we already have, and let's make sure they're optimized. And that'd be my big strategic advice to any credit union that would listen to this, is take a look at what you've already made the investment in. Are you getting everything out of it? You can you know, a lot of these fintechs and that's fintechs in general, tech companies, the tech partners that you have probably have multiple uses that sit under one roof that your shiny nickel is already you already have it. You just don't know you have it. So you have to go back to your vendors and ask them, hey, can you do this thing for me? And what we're finding here is a lot of them are like, oh, yeah, we've been doing that for 30 years. Let's just flip this switch, turn on this billing, and you got this piece of rocket and rolling. Because the part of the fintech relationship that to me is twofold is often left unchecked. But it's a challenge I have because I'm the technology and security guy here at the credit union. When it comes down to vendor management. Right. So I have to know about the fintechs, how they're connecting, how they're secure, are they sock to compliant? Do they understand how the data flows work? Do they have their ducks in a row? Or are they just really, really great at making cake? And, you know, you don't ever get to see the kitchen they're making the cake in. I need to see the kitchen they're making the cake in. I need to understand how this thing interoperates. I understand. I need to understand where the risks are, who's patching it? How is it being patched? Prove it to me. Show me this stuff. So some of these fintechs have never kind of seen NCUA audit and kind of what needs to be put through that. And we're informing them. And that scares me sometimes when I'm saying this is what you need to do. And they're like, well, I guess we'll do it. Well, we already partnered with you and you haven't done it yet. Let's get this thing going. And the other part of it that becomes a challenge and we saw it with the Silicon Valley Bank. Insanity is now not only do I have to worry about who your cloud service provider is and are they safe, do you understand how your system all works and is it safe? I need to understand where you bank now and where are will you be here tomorrow? Yeah. Are you able to make your payments? Right. It's kind of a wild world we live in. Sure. So understanding with those fintechs and again, our strategy has kind of been a we were going hot and heavy after fintechs for a while, trying to solve problems. We've taken a step back. We said there's a lot out there. Now we can re prioritize our strategy. We can figure out how to do the digital transformation while we're doing the community transformation piece and then align the partners that need to make sense. So I mentioned it. Lending. It's a great example of there's a lot of fintechs out there that do ITIN lending, which is double thumbs up. Awesome. We probably already have all the systems that do it. We just have to develop the procedures. So does it require another partner? Maybe not. Does it require some innovative thought and maybe some challenging of the way we've quote unquote, the way we've always done it? Probably. And we can get there. So we look at our fintech partnerships as they have to make sense, they have to solve a problem and they have to make sure that that problem they're solving speaks to our overall strategy.
Yeah. And I mean, I think you raise so many good points there. But the one that really resonated with me is the reality that oftentimes, at best, you're getting 20% to 30% of the potential of a platform of a tech that you've bolted onto your systems. When the idea of optimization seems like such an ideal scenario in terms of putting that in the strategy, because we see it time again whether it's working with clients, whether it's even evaluating our own tech stack and looking at what we have available to us as a professional services company. And there are a lot of situations where if we're honest, we can say we're not getting any even 18% to 20% of the optimization out of this. So I think you make a great point in terms of that kind of downshift idea. And it sounds to me like recently I talked to one of my colleagues, Cynthia and she was talking a lot about this sort of security first mindset. She puts a lot of time and effort and has a lot of expertise in the cybersecurity space. And it sounds to me like you have that kind of dual challenge of thinking about how to maximize your tech stack, but you also have constantly managing the idea of security threats. So do you look at your business as kind of a security first business in the way that you've built out your platforms, your methods, your processes? How do you feel you guys kind of stack up against others in that space?
Yeah. So, I mean, I think we do I think we do a I think we do a really great job here. I think my team, we've put a lot of time and effort understanding and kind of building out security systems, security architecture, things like that. And when we bring in third parties, we introduce risk, because now we're connecting their network to our sacred garden, so to speak. So one of the things that we've kind of implemented here is, before we sign a contract, I'm looking at your sock two, and I'm holding your sock two up against the same standards the NCAA holds me up against. I recently talked to another really large credit union in California and they said that they are actually visiting all of their vendor data centers now and they're finding shocking stuff like vendors that would be if you took a picture of their data center and put it out on a forum would be completely a shame. And we'll lose customers over it. So that kind of shattered me a little bit. As far as well, I can read the sock too, everything looks great, but is your whole data center sitting in a utility closet somewhere with water running above it that we're one leak away from catastrophe? So there's some of that kind of stuff plays in my head a little bit, but I would say we're generally speaking, we've become a very security first focused institution. In one of my other goals here at the credit union. Again, wearing that security hat on was really creating this culture of paranoia, right? You look at ransomware attacks, you look at the ingress points on your network and you talk to anybody in It who's worth their weighted salt, they're going to tell you they got these amazing solutions that live outside of your network, and it's filtering all this traffic and it's doing all these amazing things. But if you're not spending time training your staff to not on stuff, they're literally just letting them in the door. Unlocking the vault and say, take whatever money you want. We trust. Right?
And also, every three days for all those amazing security points, you hear about a new data breach, right? And obviously, you have the challenge of protecting member data as well.
Yeah. And you got to do more and more patching, more and more awareness, more and more vendor management. It becomes a challenge. And you factor that. Plus, oh, by the way, we got these 15 shiny nickels we want you to deploy. It's a real challenge from a resource standpoint, from a department standpoint of, where do I need to put my where do I need to put my resources today? Where do my chips on the table today? So we do our best here as an institution to make that happen, but it's always security first. I do not want to put anything at risk that doesn't that we obviously I want to be risk averse as possible. Low to moderate is kind of our kind of our risk tolerance. Definitely gearing on the lower side than on the moderate side. But like I said, we do loans all day long, and they're moderate risk transactions. So I say that jokingly. We underwrite them. Well, and all that stuff. At the end of the day, it's always a factor of is that member going to pay you or not? At the end of the day, it's a factor of, is that employee going to click on that link and do something bad in your network or not? So we do our best to create a culture of paranoia here. I like to say when it comes to technology, and I think we've done a pretty good job of it.
Yeah, well, I think sometimes we call that like a zero trust mentality, too, right, where it's just the scenario around assume that everything could get messed up, so we got to have all those pieces in place to avoid that, right, but we've talked about a lot of things, right? We've talked about challenges as it relates to kind of socioeconomic pressures, the rising costs of everything, right. Affordable housing.
But we definitely talked about a lot of these different items. We talked about the pace of change and technology. But are there any other bigger issues or potential threats that keep the executive team at Dover FCU up at night? Is there something that you guys are really tracking toward as it relates to kind of your midterm and longer term planning that you think is important for any credit union to be evaluating or thinking about as it relates to, again, just that kind of future proofing and guaranteeing that you can continue to meet expectations?
Yeah, I think one of the things that our team here probably is in tune with is I'll use the word velocity sometimes 3s from a tech standpoint. It wasn't so long ago, it seems like it was just yesterday. I was able to sit down and put together a pretty cohesive five year plan of where we're going to go with tech, where we're going to go with vent or alignment conversions, et cetera, et cetera. And then as time went on that became it's really hard to look at five years. We're going to scale back to three years, right? So three years, we can still put together a pretty cohesive it plan. And then during COVID and they're coming out of COVID it's like, I can't really build a plan greater than six months from now. And that makes it really hard when you think about all the vendor checks and all the vendor due diligence and all the security concerns, that takes a month or two to get through. And by the time I've gotten through it and said, okay, that's a vendor we want to use, they get scooped up by another provider, or they go out of business, or some other weird thing happens, right? FTX blows up everybody's trust of blockchain and everybody's trust of digital assets and crypto and stuff. So you get these really crazy curveballs thrown at you and velocity of change. To me, it's a challenge that we've never had a face before as an industry. We've always had the benefit of, oh, we'll just wait and see. We'll just wait and see. Well, the wait and see time period now is way shorter than it used to be. So creating that agility to be able to meet that need and then the immediate things that are keeping us up at night is like everybody else is deposits liquidity, keep the loan machine going, bringing in deposits and attracting that loyalty base with that. Velocity is one of them, and I would say the other one that keeps me awake at night is Relevancy. How are we maintaining Relevancy for our members, for those we serve? There's that recent study, something like the average consumer has like, 32 different apps on their phone that can move money around, right? You know, with that, that's the kind of stuff where I think about Velocity and I think about Relevancy. You know, do they know that they bank with us or are we just another app that they pay their loan to? Do they know what that all means?
And I would imagine the Relevancy piece is also kind of will the next generation be in a relationship with the credit union as well? Right? I mean, I have to imagine that's on your minds as well.
100%, man. 100%.
Well, I mean, I think, again, we've covered a lot of stuff. We went out a few years. But I just have one last question for you, Travis, because I know you're. You're a proponent of the early rise and grind mentality, so just kind of more on the personal side. And I'm jealous because I'm not a morning person. I don't know how you do it, but what's your current wake up schedule? What passions are you using that time for these days?
Yeah, that's a great question. About two years ago, I kind of started a journey of I needed to get healthier. I had some health issues, so I went dieted, and I started losing a lot of weight, and I dropped about 60 pounds over the course of a year. Awesome. Yeah, it was pretty cool. And then boosted my metabolism, boosted up all that stuff. So I kind of landed on this concept of mind body spirit. I was listening to a Peloton instructor. This is really, really random. I don't own a peloton. By the way, but I was listening to one of the coaches, and it was a commercial, I think, and basically the coach was saying, this next 45 minutes on this bike is just for you, so let everything else melt away. This is your selfish time to just work on you. And I kind of stole that concept and said, okay, I'm going to change my lifestyle a little bit. And yeah, man, I started, I start I usually get up around 430 in the morning and from 430 to 530 I try to walk a five K or kind of throw in some jogging there. Every once in a while I try to do between 150 and 250 jumping jacks. And then every other day I have a lifting routine just to kind of exercise and feel better and all that kind of stuff. And I usually wrap up around 630. So that's kind of the body part of it, the mind part of it. I try to read as much as possible, which is a challenge, but I'll do that on my lunch break here at work where I'll sit at my desk and pull out a book. I'm reading a fantastic book called Stolen Focus by Johann I can't think of his last name, where he talks about the psychology of ADHD and what's happening with technology and what's happening with psychology and how they're collaborating against you, so to speak, to steal your attention and steal your focus. Just fascinating read. And then from a spirit sense, again, I mentioned before, we spent some time my wife and I are fortunate enough to spend some time kind of building a bit of an oasis at our house. So it's kind of like a reflection stand or a reflection area. We can kind of chill in our little garden area. We try to decompress throughout the day and have some share time with each other. So, mind, body, spirit, great. That's my advice to anybody. Find an hour a day where you can just give it to yourself and improve something, whether it's mind, body, or spirit, whatever. And for a while there, I was teaching myself AI. I was going out and reading about Chat GPT and building APIs and trying to leverage that. I want to say I got bored with it, but I got frustrated with it, so I kind of went on to something else. But it's always find something interesting, go exploit it and spend some time on it. But yeah, man, my rise and grind is 430 to 630 and high protein, low fat diet and just rocking and rolling, man. I feel great.
Nice. Well, you've definitely inspired me and I love the plan. It's always good to have that plan. So I can't thank you enough, Travis, for joining us today on the podcast. My pleasure. I love the fact you were able to share a lot of different experiences, a lot of different perspectives on, obviously, how Dover is doing things, but also how you look at the industry and the opportunity in general. And I really think our listeners are going to enjoy this conversation. And of course, I would encourage anyone who isn't already connected with Travis on LinkedIn to do so because he's always got some good content out there as well. And just thank you again to our listeners and Travis, I will talk to you soon. Thanks again.
Thanks so much, Neil. I appreciate it.
Thanks for listening to Firmer Ground from SRM. Please stay tuned for our upcoming podcast, and until then you can visit us@srmcorp.com or on LinkedIn and Twitter.