How Credit Unions Can Thoughtfully Prepare for Digital Assets by Starting with Member Trust

Doug English: [00:00:00] Jed Meyer, welcome to CU on the show. I’m delighted to have you join me today and unpack some digital wow for my listeners.

Jed Meyer: Awesome. Well, thanks for having me, Doug. I really appreciate it.

Doug English: Yeah. So let’s, let’s start, as we always do, tell me how did you get started working in the credit union movement, uh, and, uh, tell me about that initial, uh, connection to the movement.

And then, uh, what have you been, uh, what have you been doing?

Jed Meyer: Yeah, I think the initial connection was, you know, my grandfather used to walk me into, uh, Burlington Northern Buildings in, in Minneapolis where they had a, uh, credit union that served the workers of the railroad. Uh, and I used to go with him when they, when I was real young, and we’d get a sucker into all those things.

But then ultimately became, you know, a member as I grew up. And, and it wasn’t the primary banking always, but at the end of the day, we knew Brian, we knew Georgina, we knew the whole. Staff over there. And where it really hit me was, uh, I was fortunate enough after, uh, college and high school was to do a little bit traveling with baseball when I was younger.

This is a long time ago. Um, but I [00:01:00] remember being in San Antonio, Texas and not having a car. It broke down. It’s dead. It’s gone. I’m in the middle. I’m 19. I’m living on my own in an apartment. It’s kind of a new experience for me. I need a car ’cause I have to work to, to pay for it. I worked all the way through college to pay for it, uh, along with my scholarships and um, I just called up the credit union and I remember them saying, Hey.

This is your limit. Go out and spend it. Uh, we know your dad. We know your grandpa. We’ll, we’ll cover it. And then when are you gonna be back? ’cause we didn’t have, uh, DocuSign back in those days. Yeah. Uh, just come in and sign the paperwork the next time you’re back. And to be 19 and, and be away from home and to have a credit union, know your character to that well and just ultimately say, Hey, we’ll give you three or 4,000 to help you out as you do it.

And, and we trust you. We trust your family and we’ll come back. That, that always stuck with me. Right. That, that stuck with me. I finished my college career in and I was actually gonna go back to graduate school to uh, be a guidance counselor and a coach. ’cause psychology is actually my major, uh, was my primary major back at that time.

But I had just gotten two [00:02:00] degrees, communication business as well as psychology and four years while I was the captain of baseball team working two jobs. And I’m like, you know what? I’m gonna take a couple, a couple years off maybe here and a football player from, uh, the previous years was managing a Northwest Bank at the time, uh, and said, come on over, work for me for a couple years.

Uh, and the rest is history. Here I am, and I’ve been in the banking side and the credit union side, large and small. Um, and really just, uh, later in my career realized I’ve gone down a, a few paths and, and I think it was more in that 2009 ish area. Maybe it was ’cause of the economy at that time, but. You know, at the end of the day, we, we were ready to take a big job, move with the, uh, a large, large bank that I was at and move our family and do all those things.

And, and I just looked at my wife and I said, Hey, this is a journey up the mountain. And you know me, I’m not gonna stop till I get to the top right. I might not be the first, but I won’t stop till I get to the top. But I think I’m in the wrong mountain. I don’t, I don’t know if I wanna actually move our family for this.

I think we’ll be successful in some of those things, but I’m kind of missing, looking forward to Mondays right now. Do I [00:03:00] really wanna move? And take you away from a job you love for something. I’m not a hundred percent sure on here. So actually, not only did I not take the job, I actually sold all my stock, uh, resigned and went to a smaller company back into credit unions and took a pay cut, uh, to work my way back up.

And, and, and here we are, uh, 12, uh, well that’s about 15 years since then, but, uh, 12 years now as CEO at St. Cloud Financial.

Doug English: Very good. So, um, you and St. Cloud Financial have been doing some cutting edge things in, uh, in stable coin, uh, and digital, uh, wallets, uh, for your members. And I really wanna kind of maybe start out by maybe a little bit of a tease of what you’re doing and then let’s stop and go back to how you got there.

Jed Meyer: Yeah. Yeah. I think right now what we’re doing, and, and we are live, we’re, we’re finally launching our product. We’ve been working this for about six years, but the best way for me to say it is, is we built a bridge from Tradify to Defi with a core centric solution. [00:04:00] We started with a member and we worked outwards to defi.

Most of the other people in our space are, you know, looking at what’s gonna be the blockchain that’s gonna win, what’s gonna be the currency, cryptocurrency that’s gonna win, uh, which competitor, which product. And, and a lot of ’em are one-offs. And we really looked at it and said, Hey. We think this market is bigger than just a product.

It’s not just gonna be a bolt on something that just kinda lives alongside a tradify. We actually think they’re going to intermingle this is gonna get into that 30 40% and impact a lot of our business, right? From lending to deposits to all of those things. And we said, do we really want in 10 years to be looking at.

10 different partners that were all managing all of their products. ’cause we bought, bought one-off products and both of them all on, uh, managing all of that by the way. And when we do this, we share all our PII with these companies. So we’re actually sharing our consumer data with all of these companies.

And if we can’t do lending now, I’m basically taking my member, I’m encouraging to take money out a tradify system that I can’t leverage in my liquidity or in my market. [00:05:00] Move it to another company that I partner with right inside my system. Uh, and then they might start doing lending to that member that, that didn’t seem like a winning proposition to me.

Uh, so we looked at it and said, Hey, is there a way for us to really look at this differently? Let’s go back and study history. And so we really looked at and studied history at the late eighties and early nineties of. What did the credit union industry do when this new thing called Visa, MasterCard, these money networks popped up that had this plastic card where you can actually use that.

What did we do back then? Nobody said, Hey, I’m a Visa guy, or I’m a Visa credit Union and I’m a MasterCard credit union. And maybe they did back then, but where it actually ended up was. We facilitated a switch, a bridge gap from our core operating systems into those money networks, and that gave us the ability to choose different partners at the, the, the different time to use different iterations of those cards over the years from secured cards and different things, and kind of move with that market to say, Hey, I don’t wanna pick the right product, the right blockchain, the right cryptocurrency.

I actually just want to make sure I’m preparing my technology for this [00:06:00] space because ultimately at the end of the day, the form of money is changing. And to monetize data. So the form of value, it could be Bitcoin, it could be the US dollar, it can be an art in a tokenized art, right? So just think of value being monetized into data.

My systems don’t interact with those markets, those networks, right? They, my tradify world doesn’t. Um, and unfortunately in the defi space. Uh, financial institutions aren’t, aren’t needed. So I actually, very early on in this, I was not a crypto enthusiast, by the way, because I, I didn’t own any, didn’t know anything of that.

How early,

Doug English: how early on did this conversation start? You know, we’re here, we are in 2026. When did you start this conversation?

Jed Meyer: Well, in 2012, the multi-family credit unit I was at the CEO said, Hey, can someone go figure out what this Bitcoin thing is? I raised my hand and said, I’ll go figure it out, and I can’t tell 2012.

Wow. So, and I came and I came back. My assessment was. It’s funny money. I don’t know anything about it. Let’s not pay our attention there. Let’s keep going. Right? But I always paid attention to it after that. Uh, and really in that 2000 17, 18, [00:07:00] 19, I kinda watched the market cap start to become material. And we’re a small scaling company, so our number one biggest.

A challenge every day is human capital. Our second biggest challenge is actual capital, right? But it’s human capital is number one. So we have strategies around here with my executive team to say, Hey, you have to spend 15% of your time studying other industries. Uh, so we understand where consumer behavior is going, how that might impact us.

We don’t actually have to. Predicted to be right. We don’t have to go all in, but we do have to prepare to say, can we answer the question to say, if our members go there, what will we do? Who will we partner with? And have we done the work? Because if we don’t do work before we have to, the minute my members demand something from me, I’ve done no work on.

I actually have to take all my human capital. Throw it at that and stop everything else I’m doing. And so we kinda look at it like the equalizer bar of a stereo. How far do we need to move that bar? Right. I’ll bring you back to like the 2015 time or 16 with Apple Pay. Right. If you remember, the articles back then is like, if you don’t launch Apple Pay on day one, your community financial [00:08:00] institution might die an hour later.

I mean, that was what people were saying and we’re like, Hey, that’s not gonna be true. What would we do? Do our members need it? Right now, we have a unique opportunity that we have very intimate with our members. We get about 14% response rates from our members on our annual surveys, which is, um, unbelievable data.

Wow. Uh, that we get from our members, and we can get into that. So we just said, Hey, let’s prepare, understand what we’re gonna do, and let’s keep talking to our members. So we were ready to launch Apple. I, uh, apple Pay, but we didn’t have the cap, uh, human, um, human capital to do so. We had other priorities we thought were more important at that time.

And so we kept asking our members, and I think it was about three years later, we executed the strategy we had prepared for prior. And the same thing here. So digital assets. In about 2019, we sat in a room and said. We have 200,000 people in our local community, 41 financial institutions of which we’re one of the smallest, if not the smallest.

I think we might the second smallest. Um, and we have 28,000 members in that MSA. How much market penetration should we, we’re doing really well? What market [00:09:00] penetration should we expect to be able to obtain, and how do we want to go obtain it? Of course, we’re gonna compete in every. Uh, avenue of our organization, but we’re in the communities.

Nobody raising their hand to be number one. And two areas that we identified was about 12% of the population here in St. Cloud are from a different ethnic background. Nobody was raising their hand to say, Hey, how do we, um, customize our experience into that community a little bit more and, and really ultimately become a primary financial institution to really assimilate.

Boy, I learned a lot through that, Doug. I mean, learning that, you know, a lot of times some of the other ethnic populations where they have multiple people in home, they don’t actually have access to capital, right? And so they’re paying big fees and some of those things, and there’s different rules. How do we get in there and say, credit unions can do this better.

They can become owners. We can do this better. We don’t have to get into all the. The political jargon stuff, especially in Minnesota that’s going on right now, we’re we focus on the human being, what do they need? How do we customize, how do we start with trust and stay there as long as we can? And typically that’s forever if, if, uh, with most of our members, right?

Because [00:10:00] 98% of human beings we believe do not wanna cause you harm. 99%, right? Like, so I don’t like building our systems here at the financial institution. We have to protect risk, but I don’t like building all our systems around the 1%, right? I wanna build around the 99% of people who walk through our doors every day and say, I would never cause you harm.

You’re my credit union. How do I build my systems to meet that need versus saying, I’m gonna prevent fraud of the one percenter, which means all other 99% of you have to go through that same virtual headlock of me verifying and, and, and that you are who you say you are and having access to your own money.

Right. So we look at it a little bit differently and, uh, yeah, 2019 we identified that, uh, human, uh, uh, I’m sorry, digital assets as well as, uh, multicultural two areas. We were gonna go research, study and understand what our strategy would be.

Doug English: Did, did, did I get the data point right? Did you say your executive team, uh, has to spend 50% of their time?

15.

Jed Meyer: 15. 15? Yes.

Doug English: Okay. I was like 50, [00:11:00]

Jed Meyer: no, 15. I, I, you know, we used to say, Hey. Please read an article every once in a while in the industry. Uh, some did more, some did less to, Hey, we gotta study our industry to, hey, consumer behavior and death by a thousand cuts when FinTech started to come into play in 2009, 10.

At the end of the day, we need to study consumer behavior in all markets. ’cause we’re a retail institution. So consumer behavior, not only does it inform us because the financials are the things that backing it, but it also impacts what they like and how they like to do business. So. We can get a lot of insight into where consumers are going by not just studying our credit union down the street or the bank down the street, studying just consumer behavior in our community.

Doug English: So that sounds like the true origin story is that you and your board had the very forward leading, uh, uh, sort of mental position to say we want our, our whole organizations leadership to be looking strongly forward at where things are going and then [00:12:00] solve for where things are going more, more so than.

Doing better with what we have. I assume that was also in there, but it’s also, you know, spending a strategic time looking forward to kind of where, where the puck is going. Um, that, that is, uh, interesting, especially when you are, you, you fast forward six or seven years and now at least to my knowledge, you’re the first credit union that has actually come out with.

Uh, a digital wallet and a stable coin, uh, here in January of, of 2026. So that tells you how long it took to build and now you were building it while the industry was figuring it out. Right? So it might be a little easier now, but anything you can tell us any further about the strategic drive behind that?

’cause it seems like that’s really where a board or a credit union might need to start, is to have that. Who do you wanna be? Where do you wanna go?

Jed Meyer: Well, yeah, 1000%. I think there’s two things in the credit union industry that we have to get better at. Recognizing, [00:13:00] number one, our decision making process in credit unions.

Uh, one needs to look at risk a little bit differently and find the risk you’re deliberately going to take, uh, because Batten on the hatches, uh, risk avoidance, and we’ll go through 2009, 2010, 2011. And as soon as that’s done, the boomerang of normal business is gonna come back to us and we’ll just, we’ll be fine as long as we make it weather the storm, we’ll be good.

That, that, that is not the way the world’s going to work, in my opinion, in the next 25 years. This serviced well in the last 25, but we can’t do that. You gotta have foresight, the world’s moving. Um, if it takes you 40. Executives at a multi-billion dollar credit union to get into a room for three months to make a very important decision.

You probably don’t have a, a, a, a fast enough or agile enough, um, decision making process ’cause the world’s moving faster than that. So, and again, I don’t have that answer. I’m just saying, Hey, that’s how we think here of, hey, we have to think differently. The world around us is changing. We are gonna evolve with it and lean into some of those.

Things. And when we looked at the, the, uh, defi space, um, I was blown [00:14:00] away. Our first survey basically came back and it said, uh, when we asked the question the first time, uh, this will be, uh, be four and a half years ago, uh, we said to our members, how many of you own digital assets and how many of you want to own digital assets in the next two years?

It was 22% said we either own or wanna own. And this is four years ago. So we’ve done that and we can show you the data. But so we’ve done that every year and it’s consistently been the low 20%. And, and the only time it hit 16%, our survey went out right after the FTX collapse. Mm-hmm. So I actually thought it was gonna be way lower, uh, but it wasn’t.

And so looking at the saying, Hey, consumers, they’re looking for this. And so when we started researching this, the first thing we hadn’t covered was. Where do you find quality data and information? Right. I, as a CEO was struggling to figure out, I’m, I’m not a, a crypto nerd. I’m not, I didn’t own crypto. I none of those things.

This is all about strategy for me of, hey, the form of money, the rails at which it’s moving is changing. How will we react to that as that can becomes more material is really the question we were asking. And if we can get good at that, we actually can go out and compete for member acquisition [00:15:00] in providing something.

Our competitors are not first, and that’s really where we started. Um, when he said it took us this long to build it, we actually built it much faster. Um, than that we actually have been waiting for the regulation. A big part of our strategy was partnering with regulators, right?

Doug English: Oh boy. We, we, hold on. We gotta get there, but I’m not ready yet ’cause we, I know we need to go there.

Yeah. So, so you look forward, you see the, the defi trend, uh, and that is a material interest for your membership. Then what? What’s next?

Jed Meyer: Well, what’s the risk and the opportunities? The next question you have to ask, right? So should I care if my members are off doing this? Do I care? Does it impact my core business?

Is it a place I have to care about? First question. Second of all, if it is, what are the risks and the opportunities in that space, right? Because this is a place where, uh, so we’ve started looking for research. First thing we, we found was I couldn’t find education the most, the best experts in that industry were self-taught.

Right? People. That’s what we found was is Google or find somebody who’s been in this space on their own [00:16:00] for 10 years. That was, that was kind of what you found.

Doug English: It was pre ai. You didn’t have AI to just ask. Right.

Jed Meyer: So we started going out and really finding and, and we interviewed a ton of companies and we brought a bunch of people in and we landed on the land, which was a QSO owned by another credit union at the time.

We had worked with the land. They’ve been around since about 2009. They’ve been doing core conversion system of optimization since 2009. Uh, serving credit unions. Uh, exclusively. They’ve been in this space forever, uh, and they really had their stuff together. They knew this space, and so we hired them to do basically about 17 hours of training with our executive team.

Then we did, I believe, two or three, two hour sessions with our board, uh, and then the summer of 21, uh, after all that training, I went to my board and I said, the only thing I’ve learned so far is I’ve, I don’t know enough to do anything right. I, I, I feel like I just learned that there’s something out there and I’m in kindergarten, so we aren’t doing anything.

I gotta bring some expertise in here. It’s not super material right now. We’re not looking to launch. So over the next 18 months, I told ’em I’ll look for some sort of two for [00:17:00] hire. So as other positions become available in our credit union. We’ll look for somebody who has this expertise and the expertise we need for our core business.

Well, six months later, our chief lending officer position opened up. We knew of a gentleman in the community who had worked for a billion dollar bank, billion dollar credit union, super well versed in SBA in business lending. We’re gonna go recruit him, and he applied for our job. So he didn’t know this, but he came in.

We actually had the job offer waiting for him when he came in for his interview, and the rest is history. So he joined us. We wrote a strategy and we just said, Hey, and this is right. At the same time NIG was coming out right, and we just said, Hey, let’s stick to our guns. Right. We, we definitely will vet that it’s a buy, sell.

It’s not a bad option. It’s a bolt-on some of those things. But we’re, that’s not where we’re gonna start. We’re gonna start with education. ’cause if the CEO of the local credit union can’t actually figure out this space and doesn’t have great quality places to go get great information, um, our members are, are not going to have it either.

And that’s very dangerous. Our job is to protect our local economy, is to protect our consumers. That’s how we operate. That’s what credit unions do. We’re an extension of the owner of the company, uh, that they are [00:18:00] right. They own this credit union. We are here to facilitate that for them. So we went out, we found a lot of self.

Uh, um, taught individuals with very prominent positions, kind of just a very high level loose definition. So we found doctors and attorneys and business owners that were in the crypto space. Um, and we created a nonprofit called the, uh, Minnesota Crypto Council. Uh, so we all put together, it has a board and it’s been providing training for our community for the last four years on a quarterly basis.

So did you created

Doug English: that?

Jed Meyer: We created that with partnership with other crypto. And so we’ve been, we’ve been at St. Cloud State University to, um, different places where on a quarterly basis our community has a place to go if they wanna learn more about this space. Uh, and so we’ve been doing that now for four and a half years.

Uh, so education was number one, then safekeeping was number two because back then, remember. This not only was legislation and regulation at an all time low, there were still people believing this was completely a fraud network.

Doug English: Yeah.

Jed Meyer: Back then. Yeah. And so we’re looking at saying, okay, let’s stop talking about what we are scared of doing, what [00:19:00] we don’t know.

Let’s talk about what could we do today if we wanted to do something, and where is the spot? Our members need our biggest help. And what we identified was we’re never gonna make a ton of money here, but we’ve been. Um, storing value for our members locally as a primary accountability for a hundred years.

Whether that’s, uh, gold bars behind steel cages to important documents in their safe deposit box. We need to figure out safekeeping. So if I’m not gonna encourage our members to get into this space, but how do we create something where they can have their local fi do the same thing with what they believe to be value?

So I didn’t actually have to answer. The question of do I believe in this space or not? I said, my members do. What are my, I’m not gonna convince the other 80% who aren’t in this space. I’m just gonna say, how am I gonna serve that 20%? And safekeeping goes, number one. And so we started that. And again, FTX collapsed not long, about a year after we started this journey.

Doug English: And then you’re like, oh, um,

Jed Meyer: big things and more people know this than they did four years ago, but you don’t own the digital asset if you leave it in the exchange. You don’t own it, you [00:20:00] actually own a particip, uh, participation and, and rights to a pool of digital assets. So if you, it’s not your key’s, not your crypto.

You’ve heard all that stuff. So until you take it outta the exchange, you’re actually not an owner. You’re just somebody that actually has a lien interest, and you’re a little bit down the line of those individuals. Right? That’s what happened with Ft X of saying, Hey. This is it. You have rights to those things, but I can leverage those assets.

And what if I leverage ’em improperly? I have to pay those people before I pay you back your money. Wow. And so looking at, Hey guys, do you know when you’re buying this, these digital assets, do you really own them? Are they really yours? And they’re not until you take it out. And so the crypto enthusiasts have all these cold storage wallets.

We have so much crypto probably sitting in our safe deposit box that we have no ideas there. We probably have hundreds of thousand dollars in liquidity just sitting there that I can’t redeploy.

Doug English: Yeah.

Jed Meyer: So we looked at it and we understood. The biggest difference from tradify to defi for local fis, which is really the fearful place that should strike the fear into [00:21:00] every CEO who wants to be a perpetual organization and remain local because they believe we are important to our local economy, right?

We are. The minute we go away, our local economy is not benefited. When we don’t look at our, uh, local economy and be resilient, help small business get started, and all those things, when a dollar leaves. Tradify in the past. So if I lose on innovation 20 years ago and the dollar leads me to another institution, that dollar’s lifecycle is gonna be back to a centralized ledger multiple times in its lifecycle.

And I’m gonna have a chance to earn it back. Right. And I can go compete for that dollar and, and get it back into my institution and then have them become my member. Liquid it, you know, make a margin on it, put it back into the community. Do everything credit unions do, right? Well, in the defi space, that dollar leaves.

And there’s never going to be another moment in time where that dollar is forced back to the centralized ledger. And the only two core purposes we have are centralized ledger and liquidity pool. Well, if you read, if you are reading the articles our last couple years, you’ll see large companies out there saying like, MasterCard, visa, and some of those saying, we are not [00:22:00] sure we’ll need Community F FIS as our liquidity pool in the future, uh, in this space.

Right? They’re, they, they, and we don’t need ’em as a centralized ledger. Uh, so when I started learning those things, and then I. Learned that I can move money on the rails of blockchain in seconds for a thousandth of the cost,

Doug English: right,

Jed Meyer: and have it be safer. I, it didn’t matter what the headline said. If the headline said, digital assets is horrible, or Blockchain’s horrible, I’m like, Nope, it’s coming.

’cause that if you learn anything in business that’s coming, it’s coming.

Doug English: Massive cost savings.

Jed Meyer: Yes,

Doug English: super inexpensive, super fast and totally transparent. You’re not gonna stop that, right? Yeah, it’s, I, I, it’s

Jed Meyer: coming. Right. So, so we realized really quickly, hey, Tradify is at risk. This is, this is bigger than just a bolt-on product of innovation where we might lose a couple members.

Uh, and a lot of people, I think we’re underestimating, Hey, we’ll lose about 2% of our members who want to go out to the. FinTech world and do this crypto stuff and then they’ll keep doing their business with us. I think that was maybe the mentality, and I’ve been trying to beat the drums for years now, [00:23:00] saying, actually this is gonna impact more, and it also led us back to the CoreCentric solution that we’re going to talk a little bit more about here in the fact that.

When I look at the core centric solutions, so starting with our core and working outwards, my ability to actually answer all the important compliance and regulatory questions actually becomes easier. Uh, verifying the member to the VSA to redundancy, uh, to firewalls, to all those things. I’m actually taking the best technology I have in my institution and I’m using that to actually plug into those networks versus I

Doug English: I gotta have you help me ’cause I’m, I’m, I’m getting a lost.

So we, we got, we got to, we got to, uh, deland. Yeah, partnering with you, and then you formed the, uh, the community crypto, uh, organization. Uh, and so then you build the knowledge within your community and within your organization. Now what happens next?

Jed Meyer: So the, when we looked at it, it said safekeeping is where we gotta go, so, okay.

Uh, and we want to be able to get to a spot where we’re not [00:24:00] choosing a product or feature set as our, what we’re trying to build here, we’re trying to build a platform, right?

Doug English: We’re gonna just hold them.

Jed Meyer: We’re, we’re doing what we do with the Fed a CH into the Swift network. We’re doing what we do to plug into the Visa MasterCard network.

We built the switch in the bridge that says I can turn any core at any credit union, and you can plug into any DLT money monetary network within 24 hours. That’s where I’m at today. That’s where I’ve been at since June of 2024. So I’ve been plugged into Bitcoin USDC and Ethereum, uh, with our test group since June of 24.

So I’ve been holding them actually live. Using our core in a hybrid self custody option for our members. Okay, so maybe if I read it this way, you know, traditionally there’s been like three or four um, ways to store digital assets, right? So remember going back to safekeeping was our number one. So there’s like three or four online exchanges.

You got your software wallets, you got your hardware wallet. Uh, and cold storage offline. Those are the way people are sterling, those assets. Back then when we looked at it, uh, what we [00:25:00] did basically was just an interior, uh, engineer in an entire fifth way, uh, which basically said our fifth way is, and I’m gonna read this just so I I, I articulate correctly ’cause I wrote it down, but.

We engineered a entire fifth way column, institutional grade, digital asset, safekeeping and security, the bridge from Tradify to Defi. We’ve converted, converted the entire infrastructure and expertise of our banking operations into the most secure, convenient method for consumers to secure access and monetize their digital wealth in local economies.

Wow. So

Doug English: that,

Jed Meyer: that was our AI copilot told me to say that to you. So I wanted to make sure I gave them some, some, some good do of, uh, say, Hey, this is how you would articulate that.

Doug English: Yeah. So, so. Back, back up to like, how does that get made? Is that you, does your team, uh, create that? You said the, the, the core.

So is your particular, uh, core provider, uh, integral to that? And then of course, you already teased it. We gotta talk regulators, we gotta talk about when they got [00:26:00] involved and how you, how you, uh, educated them and worked through that process. So, uh. Well,

Jed Meyer: the land, the land is the solution, right? So the first place we found in education, they actually had some similar beliefs to us.

Hey, your core is the best place to start. Uh, we can build this differently. We’ve already had some thoughts and concepts. So we just started partying with the land to build this product as a client. It was owned by another credit union, okay? So as a client, we worked the land for two years and we did ask, Hey, hey, if we’re gonna help you build this, can we actually invest in the qso?

And the answer was no. At the time. Uh, until, uh, uh, basically about January, 2024, it came up and said, Hey, you guys can buy the qso. So we’re like, we’re in, we’ll buy it. And we went and found a couple other large partner credit unions. So we have, right now, our ownership group, uh, of credit unions are myself, uh, CCL Financial, about 430 million.

We have Blaze credit unions just under 5 billion outta the Twin Cities. We have altered Credit Union at about three and a half billion in, in Wisconsin, and we just brought on Canvas as another out of Denver, a $5 billion credit union. [00:27:00] Uh, so that’s owned by credit unions displayed by credit unions. We actually now own this QO, but we started as a client and we started building this technology using our core.

So we started building the CU Digital Asset Vault and the CU Digital Asset Vault. Basically is an off balance sheet self hybrid self custody option for our members where they have the ability to actually, um, store and secure their digital assets. We don’t do the buy sell, we don’t treat it as fiat. It’s not in our consumer, but it’s so basically, I don’t like saying it this way ’cause I think it under um, two oversimplifies really something a lot more complex, but just think of an off.

Uh, off balance sheet, safe deposit box that’s virtual. Like we’re storing data for them, right? Because the, the digital asset never leads the blockchain, right? Just like ultimately at the end of the day when we plug into Visa, MasterCard, we, we, the Visa MasterCard networks are protecting the assets. We’re plugging into the network and we’re actually protecting their actual credit card numbers, their CVV numbers.

And we’re [00:28:00] protecting the data. So this is, this is varied, uh, similar to plugging into those networks, right. Uh, so we started building this and we got to a spot in June of 24, where now we are live, we are live and deployed. Um, and, uh, we’ll, we’ll be up to about nine digital currencies, uh, that our system will be plugged into, um, within the next few, a few months.

So. Here we are. We have the NCOA in here in November. Uh, and they looked at our solution. Yeah, so back, back

Doug English: me up to that conversation. Let’s go through how that

Jed Meyer: started. Let’s back up even further. So,

Doug English: yeah,

Jed Meyer: 20, uh, November of 2021, I believe it was somewhere in there. Or may it would’ve been 22 kind of merging together.

We started reaching out to regulators saying, Hey, we have two choices here, right? Innovation in credit unions is, someone goes try something, the regulators come in and they either say, we like you or we don’t like you. Right? I mean, it’s kind of backwards. And we just said, Hey, there’s nothing material here.

We’re still learning. Why don’t we start partnering with them as early as we can? Uh, and of course it was a normal relationship where it’s like, Hey, I have a job to do. You have a job to do. Your [00:29:00] job is to protect, uh, risk and consumers. So they were very skeptical at first, which is exactly what we thought.

But like, Hey, we’re gonna partner with you through this. We’re gonna continue to talk to you why we believe, educate. Uh, and that was four and a half years. Uh, wrote a letter to the NCOA Board, I believe in January of 2022, uh, asking them to deal with the custody conversation that we’re still dealing with today to say, Hey.

We actually have now moved away from the custody. ’cause I think it confuses people. At the end of the day, it’s not about custody, it’s about participating in money networks and storing monetary value. Right. That that’s what it is. We can do the custody and, we’ll, we can get into that, but we started working with all of them.

Um, and ultimately in June of last year when the Genie Act passed. Everything flipped. We’re, we’re now, we’re looked at as more of a partner, uh, somebody that can help the industry. Uh, we actually just had the delan team training in the NSO eight, last specialist last week. Uh, they’ll do another training here this spring.

Um, we’re doing, uh, we’ll be at the state auditor, uh, uh, convention, uh, [00:30:00] training in state, uh, regulators and auditors at their national convention. Uh, and it really, to your point earlier, we really started with our member and a solution, a member acquisition. Found ourselves out in front of the industry and said, Hey, we’re still gonna do the work to help the industry here because this is a very important thing in, in our history.

When we look back, we actually believe, um, this will increase consolidation. And anybody just paying lip service to this thing right now is gonna go buy a bolt on. They’re gonna be happy with it for about a year and a half. Not know how much more risky it actually is to be at a layer four type, uh, relationship in blockchain compared to a layer one type relationship you would have with your core centric solution.

Doug English: And, and I would assume that the credit union digital asset. Solution that the land has created is available for other credit unions to participate in and, and, and have a digital vault, uh, available for, for other credit unions around the country. Is that right?

Jed Meyer: 100%. So it’s been [00:31:00] live, like I said, not deployed since June of 24, working with our regulators.

Uh, we finally got there in November. They were in, they basically said Yes, and then also come train us on this, this world. This is great. This we love, this poses no risk to the, our very minimal risk to the credit union industry. This is what we need more of. Stuff like this. Uh, so then we were comfortable with Saint Cloud Financial to go out and launch.

Right. And so we launched our friends and family. So our CU Digital Asset Vault is now deployed as of December 20, uh, second, I believe, of last year, two friends and family. Uh, next week, Tuesday, it’ll open up to our membership locally. Wow.

Doug English: Wow.

Jed Meyer: Then ultimately a month later, we’ll go out to the entire public.

Uh, we really wanted to have a control rollout here, but our vault is live. And when you say other credit unions, of course, yes. Yes. Come in, look at it. The platform. Don’t think of it as a product. Think of it as a digital platform that does a few things for you. ’cause we’re talking about vault right now, but we’re, we’re not, uh, talking about we actually have buy, sell.

[00:32:00] Um, to, uh, so we have our vault by sell deposits and lending already built as well. So even though I’m working with my members to say, we’re gonna let you have the hybrid self custody off balance sheet, as soon as, uh, regulators or legislators come out and say, you can custody these assets, we just flip a switch and it’s right in our core.

Uh, and, and for our members, we can actually have that bridge. And now remember, it is just a bridge, right? So without custody, my bridge today. Only gives me one advantage as a CEO. It’s no different than the Boltons, I’m just not sharing my PII with a third party. Uh, so I’m not cons, uh, sharing my consumer data to allow my members access.

Right? And that’s really the key here. Um, Doug, remember the key here is you are not needed. As a centralized ledger or a liquidity pool in Defi. So what is your place at the table as a local fi? It’s access and trust. That’s actually the value we bring to this space. It’s access and trust. And so we want our members to say, if I want to access those [00:33:00] networks, I know where to go.

My local credit union that I’m an owner of, that I trust that will gimme good advice, uh, and gimme access to those networks. They can get access anywhere else. Same as investments. They can go directly to Phil Fidelity or BlackRock or anywhere else, but they come to my credit union, talk to my investment advisors, and then we bring them there based on what that is.

That’s the way we see the space working in the future. Uh, and so ultimately building it in that way of saying, Hey, it is just a matter of flipping a switch. So today it’s off balance sheet. As soon as custody, we flip the switch. It actually comes into custody. Now I can actually start invoking some of the technology we’ve already built to say, Hey, we’re gonna do Bitcoin backed loans.

Uh, we’re gonna actually, ultimately have some reward programs within, uh, the digital asset space. And, and we use the word Bitcoin because it’s, um, probably the most well known. This is all of those cryptocurrencies. There’re 26,000 of ’em by the way. It’s like.com. We’ve identified nine out of those 26,000 that we’re interested in right now.

Nine. Uh, so be very careful. This is an inter, uh, an area you should do a lot of research. Crawl [00:34:00] before you walk, walk before you run, understand it. Reach out to people like us who can come in and do education for, for your teams. Um, but that’s all built and ready to go. So we’re, we’re still just waiting on regulation and let just.

And then in the meantime we’re out there basically trying to help the industry gain more knowledge. Uh, and then we are bringing in onboarding credit unions to say, Hey, I’m buying the LAN’s platform. Yes, they have a wallet. Yes, they have the vault. Yes, they have all those things, but it’s an apples and oranges co compar care comparison to a lot of our competitors because we have an off balance sheet custody option for our members.

Right. Which is why they’re partnering with third parties because they can’t custody. So even the credit unions or our competitors are going to a. Bitco or they’re going to Union Bank, they’re going to some of these other institutions that will custody it. As soon as that happens, we can flip the switch in credit unions and you’re running it right outta your core.

You’re not sharing any PII. You have access to 10 to 12 use cases as the industry continues to emerge. So that also means as a CEO, you’re con in [00:35:00] control of the pace of your innovation and development. You’re not relying on a third party. Uh, and it’s the best way to actually build and operate in this space from our, uh, position.

When custody happens, now I’m actually on my balance sheet. So when they go from tradify to defi, my dollar stays in my liquidity network. Today it leaves. So the only thing we built with our vault right now is a easy way for it to come back. That didn’t exist before, right? Because Doug, the minute you took it, put it on a cold storage’s wallet and put it in my safe deposit box.

Very hard and expensive for me to get that liquidity back into my Tradify network, to redeploy to the rest of my members. So it’s all sitting there. Now if I have a virtual option that’s just like cold storage. It’s actually safer and we will show that, we can show all the data on that. Um, but it also has the ability and ease of use to actually move it back to Tradify.

Uh, and that’s what I wanted initially. Mm-hmm. So, so custody, um, is important and we gotta get there. But as the industry today, sign up with the land. Convert your technology. [00:36:00] And that’s all cores. That’s not just mine. I’m on correlation. Keystone. It’s amazing core. We love it. We partner with it. Correlation has actually announced already last August, uh, and we just trained in their Salesforce correlation Go forward solution for all of their core clients will be the land solution.

Uh, that’s what their reselling to their rest of their clients. Um, but we are live in DNA two of our owners, uh, our DNA, uh, uh, clients. Uh, and we are also live in Simar. Also another one of our owners, and that was very strategic for us to get ownership and live in three of the biggest cores in credit unions in 2025, and we successfully accomplished that.

Doug English: Wow. Incredible what, what, uh, you have done and how you’re like, just, all right, we’re ready. Just waiting on the regulators now to, to be able to take the next step.

Jed Meyer: And another good example, Doug, of the, of the platform being agile would be this summer. So we partnered with Metallicy, so metallics metal pay there, uh, stable coin.

Mm-hmm. Uh, there, uh, uh, they’re, uh, prevalent in the credit union space now. They partner with CU Ledger and, [00:37:00] and they’re a great group and they built their blockchain from the ground up. So somebody that we’ve now. Formed a corporate partnership with, um, they went out and they were working with a lot of their credit unions in Valera to do the sandbox last June.

If you saw that the Sandbox, they’re gonna work through that. They’re, they’re, they’re working with that. Well, we already had a partnership with them. We’re not in their sandbox because simply we just didn’t need to be because we’re out ahead of everybody else. But we ultimately said, well, we’re gonna launch our own stablecoin as well, because I have the Delan technology.

Very easy for us to do, uh, for us to basically just go do that. So cloud dollar became. Real at the end of last year, one of the first stable coins, if not the first stable coin in credit union land. There’s

Doug English: one I’ve heard of. Yeah.

Jed Meyer: Yeah. White labeled. Um, we, we like everybody else, you have to figure out the liquidity side of that, right?

On three se uh, 24 7 365. Right when mint and burn and, uh, you have to back it one to one with an equivalent assets. So when we’re not open on Saturday at midnight, we gotta be able to operate there. So we’re not gonna start there right now. Stablecoin was always something in our roadmap. It was just down a [00:38:00] little bit further.

It’s great for payments. It’s got some great use cases. Uh, I think it’s being over-hyped right now. I think you’ll see that die down just a tad. It’s great and, and it’s good. And something we want to have. Uh, but it’s just one of our use cases, the land’s, the platform that allowed us to get to say, Hey, we can go into deposits, we can go into lending, we can go into storage, we can go into, uh, uh, um, stable coins.

That’s the platform, gives us that agility. So for us, the stand up cloud dollar was very easy for us. Our first, um, work on that this year will be actually in a white label, um, uh, B2B type transaction. So we’re actually gonna launch our stablecoin, uh, our first test case, and kind of what we’re gonna use that for is with a, uh, co-op.

That banks with us, uh, that has other, uh, they’re a food co-op that, uh, supplies people nationally. Uh, and we’re gonna use our stablecoin for settlements between, um, their co-ops, uh, when they’re doing that. And that’s how we’re gonna test and use our stablecoin, uh, initially. So that’s what 2026 looks like.

We’re launching the vault, we’re looking on the. Stablecoin, the land’s out there now selling, [00:39:00] uh, because we are live. And most credit unions don’t wanna be, first. They wanna know somebody else’s live. Well, we’re live now, uh, and we’re ready to go. So we’re looking forward to having a good year. And at minimum, if you choose somebody else, just please do the research.

Um, look at really, where do you think this industry’s going? Uh, not just where we’re at today, because if you just buy a bolt on, it’s gonna, you’re gonna regret that decision later. I think.

Doug English: Yeah. The, the, the board, uh. Buy in, uh, to this, uh, this, this frontier sort of activity is gotta be. Robust. Right. Uh, uh, what, what’s the, what kinda alignment do you need to have between the, the vision of the board and the executive to, to consider a partnership like you’re describing?

Jed Meyer: Yeah. It’s, yeah, that’s, that’s a big deal, especially for a small credit union like us, right? But we’re a growth minded credit union. Uh, when I was hired, they basically said, we don’t believe we’re a survivor. We’re a hun. We we’re a hundred million dollar credit unit 2014, we’re about four 30 now. Uh, and they just said, Hey, we [00:40:00] want you to create a perpetual organization here.

We’ve been in this community at that time for 85 years. We want to be around another a hundred years. Uh, so we can’t just run a fiscally responsible organization. We need somebody that will do that primarily, but also will grow this credit union in the future, and is good at taking deliberate risk and, and, and, and staying out and painting that vision.

So we’ve been on this journey for a while, so I think my board’s a little more open to us when we bring I mm-hmm. We always bring opportunities to our board. So this, this wasn’t new. We brought other big ideas. We didn’t do anything with, uh, yet to, at least yet, uh, to our board. So they, they get these often.

My, I tell ’em my job all the time is just to provide opportunities, whether we walk through the door or not, that’s a different decision. Uh, our job is to look at the opportunities, create future opportunities, because again, in a scaling small company, when you have to do something and you only have one option.

It’s usually not a good situation to find yourself

in.

Doug English: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jed Meyer: So we’re trying to say, Hey, how do I create 1, 2, 3, 4 doors in digital assets through all our research, through what we do? We don’t have to choose any of those paths, but we [00:41:00] wanna be prepared and we want to have those doors available for us so that when we’re hit with that, like everybody else would be hit and the consumer’s demanding it that.

The industry’s demanding it. We have four options to choose, not just one bad option that we have to launch or we lose our members, and so staying out ahead. So our boards built that way. But it, it was tough. I mean, it was a lot of years, a lot of education, um, oh

Doug English: yeah.

Jed Meyer: But you know how that is when you go through that with the right intent.

This is not about ego, it’s not about jets really enthusiast about crypto. So he wants to have a personal agenda here. There, there’s none of that stuff. It’s our members have a need, our community has a need. There’s an opportunity from a business perspective, we are out in front. So let’s monetize that for our credit union and our members, number one, right?

’cause that’s who I’m working for is them, is if I can, uh, say, Hey, we found ourself out in front. Now we can actually monetize and give a little bit back to our members because of that work. What we’re gonna do that too, uh, as an owner of deland. So, but going through that journey, if you know anything, that’s where trust is developed.

The depth, the trust. Because our, our board was like Uhuh. [00:42:00] There’s a couple of our board members are like, no way. And we’re like,

Doug English: great.

Jed Meyer: Stay there as long as you can and don’t move unless you want to. ’cause that’s healthy. That’s healthy. But we’re not gonna stop having the conversations because as you said, no, we’re gonna work through it.

’cause there are a lot of people who been saying yes. And then when you go through that exercise, some of our biggest naysayers before are now our biggest champions because they actually work through all their fears and thought processes. Um, and that’s a little bit of my fear right now. I just think our credit union industry, now that we’ve gotten over the hump again, it used to be I had to convince people like you to have me on a podcast to talk about this stuff that people might be interested to now everybody’s calling, saying, hey.

Four years ago, they called us crazy. Now we’re calling you for advice, right? Um, but don’t make it quick. Easy decision. That’s my biggest advice to credit unions. Don’t do that. Don’t go out and say, Hey, this thing’s out there, it’s prevalent. We gotta do something. Let’s bolt this thing on. I think that’s not the right thing, and I think you gotta dive into this industry and it will be worth your time because it will impact [00:43:00] more facets of your core operating tra five business.

Then I think a lot of our CEOs across the country are giving a credit, uh, credit for. So,

Doug English: so, so for many of our listeners, this may be. The first episode that they’ve heard with, with you and the creation of, uh, a credit union stable coin. Uh, where can. Where can folks, uh, hear more as you, uh, develop, uh, data to see what the asset flows are like, how this becomes a revenue generating, what the usage is?

Are you, are you gonna, are you gonna having talks at GAC or will you, uh, how, how can my listeners plug into this, uh, this initiative? Both, uh, at St. Cloud as well as, uh, the land?

Jed Meyer: So first thing would be I would encourage you to, uh, connect with the land and myself on LinkedIn. So I’m, we’re writing articles and have been so pretty consistently.

I try to stay up on that. My team and I would try to put content out [00:44:00] there for people that would value to help the industry. Uh, so that’s a great place to get data. Uh, yes, we’re out speaking, we’re all the time. I, I, I, I never aspire for that either, but. Apparently we’re out there. I spoke at GAC last year.

Uh, I’ll be speaking the weekend before, uh, GAC at the SEAL Collaborate event, uh, this year. Yep. Uh, we, it’s not finalized yet, but I do believe either us or Delan will be part of the GAC breakout sessions at some point, either on a panel or something. So that’s still coming. So yes, you can do it there. Um, but we’re out and about.

And then at the minimum, just my personal contact, let’s put ’em in here. Um, because I think a great place to start, whether you believe everything I just said about the land or not, that’s the beauty of it. Go do the research. I think you’ve come to the same outcome I did. ’cause this was where, where I started, I started where you started completely skeptical, completely.

Like, I don’t know what I’m gonna get myself into. And I found, hey, through all that work, this is the right solution for this, uh, spot. But if you don’t believe that doesn’t matter. The land still has an education, [00:45:00] uh, ability to provide that. So we’re all, uh, we’re spending more LAN’s spending more of their time, not at big conferences.

If they’re actually coming into a lot of boards of large credit unions and really walking with them in their strategic planning, uh, same as we’re doing with the NCOA, it’s, it’s about information and improving their depth of knowledge. Um. More so than anything about our solution, our solution is just the actual solution to what the information we all have to better grasp is.

Uh, so we’re trying to help with that. So there’s plenty of places and ways that you can connect with us.

Doug English: So let’s kind of break them out. So it’s same cloud, financial, federal credit union,

Jed Meyer: uh, financial credit union, not federal, but we are a state,

Doug English: pardon me, about St. St. Cloud, uh, cred finance.

Jed Meyer: Yep.

Doug English: Financial credit union there.

Uh, and then Deland. D-E-L-A-N-D.

Jed Meyer: D-A-L-A-N-D? Yep. D-A-L-A-N-D. Okay. So deland, um, deland cusso dot I believe. Uh, but well again, we’ll put that maybe in the screen here.

Doug English: [00:46:00] Very

Jed Meyer: good. Um, so yes, they’re out there. They also do a ton of other things. So a lot of our d what, what, what a lot of people don’t understand.

LAN’s been around since 2009. It’s not a startup. That was also an important thing for our board of saying, Hey, they’ve actually made money working with credit unions for 15 years. It’s not just digital assets they provide. So yes, you can go buy ’em. ’cause if that falls off the map, we think you’re gonna get our money back over here because they do really good work.

So. Point being is they’re helping our DNA clients with a lot of other things inside their system, our Simar clients, our correlation clients. So there’s a lot of other things that the, the land does as well, um, that the technology that this vault is built on, uh, also has other services. So when I bought the technology for SU Digital Asset Vault, I also got the ability to do other things within my system and my core that that technology has the ability to do as well.

Doug English: Hmm. Yeah. And maybe in a future episode, which I’ll be very interested in, in capturing, uh, w we can kinda, uh, break out some of the metrics that you start to see from that. [00:47:00] Like, how did the technology build your commercial or your lending and what areas. Did you see those ancillary benefits? I think that’ll be, uh, very meaningful to our listeners.

And I wanna check back in again on the progress with your stable coin. Uh, the, uh, how, how engaged your members, uh, are. And then if this becomes, uh, it sounds like it must be, uh, just a cost center so far. But we’re at the very beginning of this. And how does this become a, uh. Trackable, uh, revenue center.

Right now it’s, it’s, it’s retention, right? But.

Jed Meyer: You brought up a really good point. When I’m sitting in front of CFOs over the last two years at large institutions, a lot of times their first question would be is, how do you gonna gimme the revenue out of this space? People’s question, it’s a great question, right?

I’m a CEO, I want, that’s like what I would expect my CFO to ask my answer, uh, very, very quickly, is I can go through every projection with you that you want, right? And there’s plenty of opportunity and ability for money to be made in [00:48:00] this space. You shouldn’t focus there right now. What you should focus on, how much of your current money is leaving you and not coming back because you’re not as relevant anymore.

That’s number one. So 2023, I had $1 million leave my institution to exchanges. Last year it was $15 million, three years, 15 x liquidity. By the way, right now I have $380 million in deposits, and three years ago it was probably 280 million in deposits. So you do the math, the percentage of the actual deposits leaving.

So when I looked at that CFO of like, Hey, you’re a $4 billion institution that has a billion dollar or a million dollars every month leaving, that does, that might never come back. Let’s focus on that ROI first.

Doug English: Hmm.

Jed Meyer: And then let’s look at how you might monetize, because the first thing is. You know, stop the, stop the bleeding, become relevant, and then see how you might be able to look and capitalize on the opportunities.

And that’s what I love about the core centric model is it allows you to do that. [00:49:00]

Doug English: Jed, thank you so much for taking the time. Just incredible work you’ve done on behalf of your members, uh, and the time you spent on behalf of the credit Union movement. So thank you for all the credit union members. You will help with this content and with the work that you and the land have done.

I’ll be very interested to see if I can, uh, meet you at the, this year’s GAC. Uh, and then, uh, you will have an open invitation. As you make progress, I want to come back to this subject again and let’s continue to capture the ideas that, uh, listeners can use to say, you know what? That’s not a fit for my credit union.

We’re just fundamentally, uh, conservative in, in, in a different way or, uh, okay. Let’s start to look into this.

Jed Meyer: Hey, Doug, for those fundamentally conservative credit unions, you can be fundamentally, fundamentally conservative within a new money movement network. You can, again, to me, for those things when you, again, conservative credit unions, guys [00:50:00] gotta go where your member’s at.

Gotta stay relevant and you gotta go in there and you gotta manage the risk and you can do that. I’ve been there. That’s what I want to encourage you to say. You can be conservative in this new space. It is not the wild, wild West. There’s plenty of things that you’ll love in that space that are very similar to how you’ve operated your business before, but you gotta go all there.

If you do the toll in the water, you’re actually, uh, doing the opposite, which is, I want to be fundamentally conservative, so I’m taking the easiest solution, bolting on. It’s actually more risk because you’re not diving into it. So that’s my encouragement. Do the work, and I promise you, you will come up with a solution that’s right for your members and hopefully that’s the land, and if not, we’re still here with you in the movement ready to go forward.

So.

Doug English: Awesome, Jed, thank you so much. I love it. I’m real, really, really, really interesting, uh, interview. I can’t, can’t wait to check in again.

Jed Meyer: Awesome. Great. Thanks Doug. Appreciate it.