 Hi, I'm Rusty Komori and this is Beyond the Lines. We broadcast live on Mondays from the beautiful Think Tech Hawaii TV studio in the Pioneer Plaza in downtown Honolulu. This show is based on my book which is also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership, and achieving greater success and sustaining that greater success. Today's special guest is Andrew Rosen. He is the president and CEO of Hawaii State Federal Credit Union and under his leadership they have had amazing growth and today we are going beyond banking. Andrew, great having you here today. Thanks a lot Rusty, it's great to be here. Hey and congrats on the success of the book. Oh thank you so much. I'm looking forward to reading it. It took me two and a half years to write. It's amazing. I want to know Andrew, your history, where you grew up at and what kind of activities did you do in your youth? Sure, yeah. I grew up a small town outside of Boston and did a lot of things. I was really into the outdoors, camping, backpacking. Did a lot of sports in school, ran some track, played some football. But for me the most important thing was just getting together with kids in the neighborhood, whether it was organizing a game of kick the can or pick up football. In fact in Boston we had in the neighborhood there's a little pond in our neighborhood that would freeze in the winter and so we just played pick up hockey. That must have been fun. That was great. I wish I could have done that here in my youth. A little tough here. So no tennis? You didn't play any tennis at all? A little bit. Yeah, you know it's funny. My grandfather was a huge tennis guy and up until he was 90 he was still playing and he could still beat me when he was 90 years old. He had this mean drop spin and slice. Well you went to UC Berkeley, is that correct for college? Yeah, I grew up in Boston and then I kind of rebelled and went out west to Cal Berkeley. And how was that experience in college for you? Oh I loved it. I loved it there. It was a big school and I just loved being in California and again the outdoors did a lot of backpacking and rock climbing while I was there skiing. And then you went to where for your graduate schooling? I went to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. And that's where I met my wife, Maya, and she's a local girl. And so she convinced me that we should move to Hawaii. So it's part of our prenuptial agreement. Now tell me about your family. You have three boys? We have three boys. Two of them are in college on the mainland and the third is a senior in high school. So he'll be heading off to college soon. Great. And great, yeah. We had a crazy household when they were all younger and all at home. There was always a gang of kids over at the house and we're always feeding an army of boys. But that's what we love. We love that. I want to know what was your first job that you ever had? First job. Probably when I was 12, after school I would work at the town library. I grew up in this real small rural town and there was this little public library and I'd work there shelving books and checking out books and stuff. And then did you do any newspaper deliveries? Yeah. So when I was a little bit older I would deliver newspapers in the neighborhood just riding my bike and throwing newspapers and then when I got my license actually driving around town delivering newspapers. So that's a lesson to everyone that has delivered newspapers before. They can be a newspaper delivery and work their way up to be president and CEO someday. You can do anything. Anything is possible. Now what kind of experience do you have in the banking industry? So actually before I moved to Hawaii I was doing a lot of international finance and working with a lot of nonprofits and working in developing countries. And then when we moved to Hawaii it was hard to find something in the international area so I ended up working for Bank of Hawaii. And my wife teases me that I became bank man. And for 20 years I was working for banks and just the funny thing is when I was interviewing for the job there she said well what do you know about banking? I said I don't know I'll read a book. How hard can it be? Well maybe not my book but other banking books. Yeah another book. Okay so then I want to know the history when and how did Hawaii State Federal Credit Union begin? Great question. The Hawaii State Federal Credit Union has been around for 81 years. We just celebrated our 80th anniversary last year and it was actually started by a group of territorial government employees. The original name was Hawaii Territorial Employees Federal Credit Union. And basically the territorial employees they didn't have a place to do their banking and so they created the credit union and we started off in basically a broom closet in the territorial office building with one staff person, one part-time staff person. And 81 years later we've grown into one of the largest financial institutions in the state over 100,000 members. I never knew the history about I mean there's so much history with Hawaii State Federal Credit Union. It's amazing. Yeah it's incredible that we've been around for over 80 years and serving people of Hawaii. Yeah. In fact a lot of the credit unions in Hawaii started, some of them started on the plantations and I think credit unions have always been really strong in Hawaii. I think because of the culture it's very similar to the Japanese culture of Tana Moshi where people on the plantation would get together, pool their resources and then if someone had a crisis or they needed to borrow money there was a pool of money that they could use to help each other out. Oh that makes sense. Yeah and so it's sort of part of our culture here in Hawaii. I think that's why the credit unions here have been so successful and have so many members. Okay so I want to know Andrew, why did you make the move from big banks into becoming president and CEO of Hawaii State Federal Credit Union? Good question and let me tell you a story. So I worked for a lot of banks both here in Hawaii and on the mainland and a lot of time I find that I was the only person in the room who was asking what's the right thing to do for the customer and that's partly just because banks have a different business model. Most banks are privately owned or publicly traded and their primary goal is to generate profit for their shareholders. The credit union it's a different model. The owners are the members and so you never get into that conflict of what's the right thing to do for your customers versus your shareholders. It's all the same and so it took me a long time to figure out but that was just a better fit for me the credit union model. So is that really, I mean those are like big differences but that's really what you like doing. Yeah and I think it gets back to earlier in my career where I worked with a lot of nonprofits and it's really giving back to the community. The credit union philosophy is built on this idea of people helping people and that's what we really try to focus on at Hawaii State. Yeah so what do you see as the roles of credit unions playing in Hawaii? You mentioned some of the, I mean how it started and briefly how you know the general parts of it but how do you see the role right now? The credit unions they really, they provide an alternative to the banks. There's a few real big banks in Hawaii and they do a great job serving people but they're not always willing to make a loan to everyone who might need it and the credit unions provide an alternative. And then we also help keep the banks in check and make sure that they really are offering good rates and fees and that their fees aren't out of line. And under your leadership since 2012 now, your company has had tremendous growth and you have such a strong team of employees that you've built. How did you do that? Well I was lucky. A lot of, there were a lot of long time employees at the credit union who are just fantastic. And you know again I've worked at some of the largest banks in the country and I would put our team up against any bank anywhere in the country. We've got great employees and that I was able to recruit some people to help fill in some of the gaps. But we do, we have a great team and I think it's really because people are passionate about what we do. It's not just selling people, checking and savings accounts. It's really about trying to help people make smarter financial decisions. And our tagline is always right by you. And our vision is always doing the right thing for our members. And we people, we try to remind our employees of that every day. It's always about doing the right thing. Forget about what our process or our rule says. Is it the right thing to do for our member? I like hearing that. And you have a thing called wallet wisdom and it's a learning culture. Can you explain about that? Yeah, well a couple of years ago we realized that a lot of people in Hawaii are really struggling financially. In fact there's a survey, Alice survey that's sponsored by Aloha United Way. And what that shows is that nearly 50% of Hawaii's households are living paycheck to paycheck. And what that means is if some crisis happens, an emergency, if your car breaks down, you're going to be in big trouble. And what we said is as a financial institution, we have an obligation to our community to really educate people. Again, to make smarter financial decisions, to help plan financially for their future, whether it's sending kids to school, planning for your retirement, buying a home, or even just buying a car. And so we've really committed to, number one, starting by educating our employees and making sure they really understand the basics of finance. They're financially literate. But then also going out to our members and the community and teaching them, how do you improve your credit score? How do you start saving for retirement? Some of those basics, basic budgeting. Yeah, it sounds like you guys do it all. And I like that you do it all because everyone needs help with everything, right? Yeah, what's amazing, because in school, they don't really teach you how to make a budget and how to live within a budget. They don't always teach you those real common-sense financial skills. So we want to make sure that people know how to give them the tools so they can get by. They can make it and be successful. I like that you're doing that. And I want to bring up Magic Johnson. You got to meet Magic Johnson about a year and a half ago. I mean, he's one of the greatest basketball players of all time, but he's also one of the best businessmen of all time. Can you share about your meeting with him? Yeah, I was at an industry conference on the mainland and got the opportunity to meet him. And he's hilarious. He's giving his talk about business and leadership and walks around the crowd. And he just grabbed me out of the crowd and asked me where I'm from and started talking to me. And when I told him I was from Hawaii, he got excited and said, you know, the Lakers used to do training in Hawaii. And I said, OK, when are you going to bring the team back now? So he promised. He said he's going to bring the Lakers back to Hawaii. So we'll try to hold him to that. Yeah, and he keeps his promises. I mean, he's Magic Johnson. So what's not to love about Hawaii? But I was really impressed with how I didn't realize he was such a successful business person after his career in basketball. Yeah, and he's an inspiration to so many other sports stars because of his business expertise. So hopefully, that keeps spreading. Now, I know, Andrew, that your credit union, you guys have done tremendous donations and Christmas situations for, I mean, can you just explain what you guys have been doing? Well, you know, again, we are a community organization, and we believe it's important to give back to our community. And so we do that through a variety of different things. Last year, we collected toys for donations, for toys for tots, for kids around Christmas. But again, a lot of what we're trying to do is around financial education, financial literacy. So we have a scholarship program that we, the Lowell Colapa Memorial Scholarship. So we offer scholarships to kids who are members of the credit union who are going to college or a technical school. We've been doing that for 15 years now. And then we have another program called Investing in Education, where we give grants to public school teachers to help them pay for basic supplies. Great. Now, one of the biggest problems that a lot of companies are having nowadays is security and preventing hacking. What are you guys doing to address that problem? Well, security and combating the fraudsters is a constant battle for us. They're out there, they're trying to hack into systems, they're trying to steal people's identity. So the most important thing is we really try to educate our members about how to protect their own identity and make sure that they're not getting tricked into giving up their passwords or their personal information. So that's really critical. And then we have to do a lot on the back end to secure our members' confidential data. And that's a constant challenge because those hackers, those fraudsters are constantly figuring out ways to break through firewalls and to try to break into confidential data. Well, Andrew, that sounds interesting. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, I want to go real in depth with you about leadership and success. Great. Sounds good, Rusty. You're watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii with my special guest, Andrew Rosen. We will be back in 60 seconds. Hi, Kunisue. I'm your host of New Japanese Language Show on Think Tech Hawaii called Konnichiwa Hawaii. Broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 p.m. Please join us where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 p.m. Aloha. I'm Jay Fiedel, Think Tech. Think Tech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco and Me, which is Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator and energy dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangostorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks, we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays, every two weeks on Think Tech. Aloha. Welcome back to Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My special guest today is Andrew Rosen. He is the president and CEO of Hawaii State Federal Credit Union. And under his leadership, they have had amazing growth and success. And today, we are going beyond banking. Andrew, you've received tons of awards. Can you explain what these are? This one first? Yeah, well, we have the credit union has received a lot of awards and accolades, but this one is the one I'm the proudest of. And this is, it's awarded by Hawaii Business Magazine and it's the best places to work. And so for the last six years, Hawaii State Federal Credit Union's been recognized as one of the best places to work in Hawaii. Great, and what is this fancy award here? So this is an internal service award that we do. Again, service to our members is one of our key goals. So we offer this, it's called the Red Pants Service Award. And you talk about leadership. One of the things that's really important to me as a leader is it's important to have fun at work. We take our work very seriously. We're managing our members' money, but it's also important for our employees to have fun. And so we do a lot of fun videos and one of them has to do with wearing the red pants. So this has become the symbol of always doing the right thing for our members and it's called the Red Pants Always Right By You Service Award. I love that and it's great. It's so important to keep things fun in a very successful business environment and you're definitely doing that. Now, you are a great leader. You are a fantastic leader and I want to know what are your thoughts about leadership? Well, thank you. I appreciate that you're saying that, but really it's about the team. It's about the people we bring on board. We've got fantastic people at the credit union. My philosophy on leadership is that people want to succeed and my role as a leader is to help them be successful. I don't think anyone goes to work and wants to do a bad job. So I think the key is how can you help them be successful? How can you help them win and really excel at their job? Now, we've all been on teams at some point in time in our lives, whether it be sports teams or business teams and we always recognize if the leader is good or bad and those effects from that. What have been your experiences being on certain teams before? Well, you know, I've worked for a lot of different companies, different banks and I certainly, when I worked for Bank of Hawaii and there was some great leadership there and I learned a lot, when I worked for some of these really big banks on the mainland, I was disappointed that there wasn't stronger leadership and they weren't really able to inspire people and motivate them, give them a reason for coming to work every day and so that became a priority for me and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to leave these big banks on the mainland, get back to Hawaii and work with a smaller organization where I could really have an impact on the employees and create a strong team and a strong employee culture. And you're definitely doing that. I mean, you have a great culture of excellence at Hawaii State Federal Credit Union. Yeah, I think we do and again, we've got great people, we give them the tools to succeed, we get them focused on a common vision which is really serving our members and providing that financial education to members, empowering people financially and then we get out of their way and let them do it, let them do their jobs. Do you see? That's brilliant. Now I wanna talk to you about success because you're very successful and I wanna know, Andrew, how do you define success? For me, again, I love what I do and what I love about it is seeing the people around me succeed and so for me it doesn't matter whether it's in banking or in delivering newspapers or any other industry. It's about seeing the people around me grow and succeed and be passionate about what they're doing and I actually get really excited when I have an employee who gets either promoted within the organization, even if they get a promotion and go somewhere else because you can see that you've played a role in helping them to be successful in life. And I can totally tell that you are very, your top priority is the wellbeing of your employees because they're gonna take care of the customers. Exactly, exactly. If the employees are happy and they're passionate about what they're doing, they're gonna do a better job and we don't call it in the credit union world, we call them members because they're member owners of the credit union and I think that inspires our employees to take even better care of them. And I always said that good leaders have followers, which is fine, but great leaders ultimately build other great leaders and that's what you had mentioned earlier. Yeah, that's my definition of success is are we creating a team of people who love what they're doing, they're passionate about what they're doing and they do it well. Yeah, now knowing that, I wanna know Andrew in looking back through your life, why are you successful? You know, again, you asked me earlier about mentors who were mentors in my life and one of my bosses at one point, he said to me, Andrew, I expect you not to come to me with problems but to come to me with solutions. And when he said that, that really turned around my way of thinking and really made me focus on, okay, you're always gonna have challenges, you're always gonna have problems in life, whether personally or work related. But the key is can you find solutions? Can you turn a negative into a positive? Turn lemons into lemonade and then turn it into a win, success. All right, now, what's been your greatest obstacle in achieving your success and how did you overcome that? You know, this gets back to the idea, there was a point in my career where I thought bigger was better. And when I left Hawaii, went back to the mainland to work for bigger organizations, bigger banks. And what I discovered was, again, the bigger wasn't necessarily better. It was really about the culture, the people and the obstacle, the problem I had at those larger organizations was there weren't great leaders, there weren't great managers. And in fact, when I worked for Washington Mutual, that lack of leadership actually took the bank down. It became the largest bank failure in U.S. history. And that's how important. That was a company with 50,000 employees and all of those people lost their jobs. Because of bad leadership. Because of bad leadership. And that's where I just said, okay, I'm not gonna settle for that. I want to be in an organization where we can really create that positive culture, empower people to do a good job, to be responsible, to serve the company and the members. Yeah. Now, Andrew, what do you hope to aspire to achieve in your future still? Well, I love my job. I'm in a dream job. But I think our credit union, Hawaii State Federal Credit Union can play an even bigger role in Hawaii in terms of, you know, again, a lot of people in Hawaii are struggling financially. And I want to change that. I want to help change that and really empower people in Hawaii to make smarter financial decisions, to give them the resources they need to be successful, to realize their financial goals and their dreams. Yeah. Now, I love these insights from you. And I have a question like for me, but I know a lot of viewers will have the same question about the differences or can you explain what blockchain technology is and Bitcoin, because that's always in the news nowadays. Yeah. Well, Bitcoin, it's a virtual currency. And there's a lot of people who've made a lot of money investing in it. It's kind of gone up and down. And eventually, virtual currency will probably become more current, more popular and more prevalent than cash. Wow. Right now, Bitcoin is still very speculative because it's not backed by the full faith of any government, the U.S. government or anywhere else. But eventually, we're going to move more and more towards digital payments, digital currencies. Blockchain is the technology behind Bitcoin. I see. And blockchain is something that we're really exploring in financial services as a way to prevent fraud, to prevent hacking, because it allows you to really authenticate who someone is. Today, it's easy for someone if they get your credit card or your credit card information to impersonate you and to steal your identity. If we're able to leverage blockchain technology, we can change that because there won't be any way for someone to steal your identity. Wow, that's interesting insights for me. You explained it in such a great way for me to understand. Now, before we close, I want to ask you one more thing, Andrew. What advice would you give to others who are looking for their own advancement opportunities and promotions? I think, one, most importantly, find something that you're really passionate about. Because if you're passionate about that, you're going to work harder. You're going to be more motivated to be successful. Find a good mentor, someone that you like working with, because then, again, you're going to be more motivated to work hard and to succeed. And then just persevere. Keep at it. Learn as much as you can when you're young. Experience as much as you can. That's great insights. But you're very busy. How are you going to mentor all these other people now? Happy to do it as much as I can. Because, again, that's how I measure success. How many people am I helping to be successful to grow? Awesome. And Andrew, I really appreciate your time in being here today. I want to thank you for all your insights about leadership and success. Yeah, thank you. And thanks for what you're doing with the show and promoting leadership, Rusty. Great. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, check out my website, RustyKamori.com, and connect with me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. I hope that this show and my book will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to consistently outdo what you have done and to ultimately find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.