ICYMI (In Case You Missed It)

In Case You Missed It – 5.28.25

Thoughts on yet another lending fintech, creepy AI images, partnership ponderings, weird times (again), and more. Here’s what we noticed, in case you missed it.

Is home equity and mortgage lending still fundamentally local?

This week’s Exploding Topics (a free weekly newsletter highlighting the latest trends using search data – definitely worth subscribing) discussed Figure Lending, a fintech offering a marketplace for HELOCs, mortgage refis, and personal loans. Like so many fintechs, they are very, very carefully not a bank, fully fintech-buzzword-compliant, and promise to streamline and drastically speed up processes for both the “real” lenders underneath it all and consumers.

What comes to mind for me is that of all the dusty, musty, medieval, dead-tree CU processes screaming for modernization, HELOCs and mortgage lending need it the most – and are the most resistant, thanks to the quirks of thousands of local markets and governments, not to mention millions of individual edge cases and the frequent need for boots-on-the-ground services like inspections. Navigating all this is where credit unions can excel – but they also have to get closer to the promised speed and convenience of the high-tech middlemen.

Generative AI images are creeping us out

Not to sound too terribly grumpy and get-off-my-lawn, but… although generative AI is useful for some things, it’s still pretty terrible for other things, like generating usable realistic images. We’re not alone in noticing that sloppy, subtly horrible AI generated stock images are starting to invade some of our go-to stock photo providers. Quite often, it’s hard to notice the extra fingers or creepy, staring, sharktooth grins until you’re working closely with an image. Let’s be careful out there, okay? Pay close attention to the images you use, be a human, focus on authenticity, learn to love the real world’s imperfections, hire a local photographer, and try out some of the (ironically) AI-powered AI image detection tools out there.

Pick partners that fit your culture, not just your spreadsheets

This article from the fine folks at Finopotamus is an interesting recap of a presentation from Ami Iceman Haueter, CXO, and Ben Maxim, CTO, of MSU Federal Credit Union at FinovateSpring 2025.

Although they’re an $8.2 billion CU, and they’re specifically talking about fintech partnerships, there are lessons here for every credit union small or large, and every vendor serving credit unions. Their advice is spot-on: “find people that fit your aesthetic, your culture, that want to work with you, that are as invested in your success as you are in theirs.”

In our many years of working with credit unions, that’s exactly what we’ve found as well. Once you’ve established capabilities, it’s all about people and partnerships, not laundry lists of features and costs on a spreadsheet. Our most successful partnerships with our clients happen when there’s a good cultural fit that allows a long-term foundation of mutual trust, accountability, innovation, and success.

Making moves to prepare for uncertainty ahead

This article from our pals at Callahan is one of the better summaries we’ve seen of the overall “situation” out there and what credit union leaders are doing to prepare for, well, whatever is next. I think the last section, “Here We Go Again” sums it up pretty well; we’ve seen weird times before, we’ll see them again, and credit unions are crucial to riding out the storms and fueling the recovery.

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