My Top Stories of 2019 and Why They Matter to Credit Unions

CUs face a new decade.

Just before Thanksgiving, I spent 10 days in Austin, Texas, where Editor-in-Chief Michael Ogden and I finally had the chance to spend a few days working together in person after more than three years of running CU Times from different states. Among our agenda items for that week (other than tracking down some of the city’s best tacos) was reviewing reports on which stories performed the best on our website through Sept. 30 of this year, and using the results to determine the types of stories we should produce more of – and ditch – in 2020.

Our top takeaway was that our online readers can’t get enough of their internal fraud and crime news, with stories about embezzling credit union executives receiving the most attention out of all the stories on our site. And we get it – there’s something undeniably satisfying about learning the details of a shocking scandal or crime, especially when the story involves people who work in your very own, tightknit industry. These stories quenched our readers’ thirst for true credit union crime, and, we hope, taught them how to identify the red flags of internal fraud and prevent the incidents they read about from happening in their own shops.