Digital Growth Award presented to PUSKOPCUINA SICOOB representatives accept their Digital Growth Award Shawn Kanungo Gerard Joyce

World Council of Credit Unions presented its annual Digital Growth Awards and provided educational sessions on a number of digitalization issues confronting credit unions at its 2024 World Credit Union Conference, co-hosted with America's Credit Unions in Boston (USA), July 21-24. 

The WOCCU Board of Directors on July 22 presented 2024 Digital Growth Awards to Pusat Koperasi Credit Union Indonesia (PUSKOPCUINA) and SICOOB (Brazil) for implementing digital solutions that promote financial inclusion, innovation and scalability.

PUSKOPCUINA, the credit union federation for Indonesia, won for the development of ESCETE, which encompasses a cloud-based core banking solution, personalized mobile banking for individual members and an innovative e-commerce platform where SME members can market and sell their products. PUSKOPCUINA is a member of the Asian Confederation of Credit Unions, a WOCCU Associate Member organization.

SICOOB, a Brazilian credit union system and WOCCU Associate Member, won a Digital Growth Award for developing and implementing Sipag 2.0, a digital system that allows micro and small businesses in rural areas to accept electronic payments at an affordable cost, allowing them to expand their customer reach and increase sales. 

First awarded in 2021, the Digital Growth Award is presented annually to recognize one or more member credit union associations or individual member credit unions. A panel of independent digitalization experts selected by WOCCU judged all nominations and selected this year's recipients.

Digitalization issues top of mind at WCUC 2024

The 2024 World Credit Union Conference also featured several sessions on the most pressing digital issues facing credit unions.

July 22 keynote speaker Shawn Kanungo focused specifically on disruptive innovation like AI.

He showed various examples of how credit unions with representatives in the room could be utilizing AI right now to be more competitive and relevant, using the website of Kenya Police SACCO as one example.

“I looked and you have a loan calculator. But when I went to the loan calculator, I downloaded it, and it ended up being an Excel file. And I said, ‘you know, this is not that helpful. So, what I’m going to do is create an interactive web app for you,’” said Kanungo, who then showed how he did that in minutes with an online AI tool. “And it started to come with a code. It started to come up with what I was looking for, and it finally came up with this final loan calculator.”

Kanungo said that that there is no option for credit unions other than to embrace this inevitable future.

“My belief is that there are going to be two types of leaders in the future. There are going to be leaders that leverage this technology, and there are leaders who are going to be irrelevant. That’s it. Those are the two options,” said Kanungo.

Cybersecurity concerns addressed

There was no better way to exemplify the impact of the faulty CrowdStrike update that shut down Microsoft 365 just days before WCUC 2024 than to have that outage prevent one of the conference's scheduled speakers from getting to Boston for a breakout session on cyberattacks and service disruptions.

With flight cancelations forcing David Glod, Vice President for IT Security at Mountain America Credit Union to miss the July 23 session, co-host Gerard Joyce, Chief Technology Officer for CalQRisk, focused on the recent real-world event that also caused service disruptions for a number of credit unions.

“So, you’re thinking, ‘how could we have avoided this issue with CrowdStrike’, because CrowdStrike had access to Microsoft at the lowest level, at the root level,” explained Joyce. “So, diversity in operating systems, if you’re looking for a strategy for combating this, have a different operating system. And have a laptop that you don’t switch on every day, so there’s at least one that is working when the bad fixes hit.”

Joyce said he hopes the CrowdStrike incident provides a sense of urgency to credit unions that haven’t made a plan to prevent service disruptions.

“I urge you to think about what teams you would need if you had a cyberattack. Think about alternates. Think, if John is the IT manager but is on holiday, you need to have an alternative,” said Joyce.

If a service disruption or cyberattack does happen, Joyce advised not turning off power to your servers.

“The regulator would be asking you, ‘how long has this been going on? And how did they get in?’ And if you pull the power on the server, you lose information,” said Joyce. “Cut connectivity (to the internet), not power.”

You can find descriptions of every WCUC 2024 breakout session here.

The 2025 World Credit Union Conference is scheduled for June 14-16, in Stockholm, Sweden. Click here to learn more and start making your plans to join us for more discussions and presentations on credit union digitalization.