LAS VEGAS—What is currently happening in the world of payments may be one of the biggest threats—or opportunities—credit unions will face, said Mark Meyer.
“This whole notion of what is happening with payments and how money is being moved in today’s world,” said Meyer, CEO of the Filene Research Institute, insisting credit unions need to pay close attention to competition for their deposit dollars coming from untraditional sources.
Meyer, during the Edge 2025 conference, asked attendees to raise their hands if they go to Starbucks. The event is presented by Trellance, CUDX and the Filene Research Institute.
“OK,” he said, recognizing the large number of attendees who use the coffee giant’s products almost daily. “So, what do you do? You use the Starbucks mobile app and you send money from your credit union account over to Starbucks and it hangs out in the cloud. It’s about $35 a shot, right?”
Among the nearly 5,000 credit unions today, Meyer emphasized that a great deal of money is stored in the Starbucks app, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly—and that does not include other apps in which members also store funds, he pointed out.
Think of this, on any given one day just how many credit union dollars sit on that Starbucks cloud waiting for us to go buy our coffee.
Meyer pointed out that collectively consumers have $1.8 billion sitting in the Starbucks app daily.
Meyer noted that money sitting in the cloud is not helping other members, such as in the form of more loans.
That makes me sad, and it really just pisses me off he said, noting that is just one example of how the new payments environment is siphoning money out of credit union accounts. Meyer termed these kinds of threats “pinhole leaks…And I think we can do better because we want our members money serving our members not the shareholders of Starbucks.