How will a digital workforce impact the success of customer service and staff productivity in retail financial services?

WAKE FOREST, NC, March 15, 2023 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Chuck Rinker, CEO of PRSONAS™ by nuMedia was selected to speak at The League of Southeastern Credit Unions (LSCU) Executive Dialogue 2023 in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, on March 22nd. This is the 11th year for this event. It is not only highly sought after for vendor partners to sponsor and be a part of, but they only invite three presenters to discuss innovative solutions that can help impact the success of their credit unions. Chuck is posed to discuss what a digital workforce is and its impact on retail financial services. He will feature the longstanding relationship with Workers Credit Union in Lowell, Massachusetts, and their PRSONAS™ digital personality named Olivia. She is an interactive hologram deployed in four different branches. Olivia speaks multiple languages to interact with their diverse customer base while checking in visitors for their appointments and notifying the staff of their arrival, making future appointments, and creating a smooth and efficient experience without interrupting the human staff that handles higher value tasks such as financial coaching and one-on-one consulting.

"I look forward to dispelling the myth that AI is trying to replace humans. We must shift our industry perspective to view these innovations as tools capable of scaling personal engagement. This realization will improve customer service, increase staff productivity, and build brand loyalty," noted Chuck Rinker.

LSCU represents over 300 credit unions in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia with a combined total of more than $175 billion in assets and more than 11.6 million members (about twice the population of Arizona). They provide advocacy and regulatory information, education and training cooperative initiatives, media relations, and business solutions.

PRSONAS™ by nuMedia is powering the next-generation digital workforce to improve staff productivity and enhance the user experience for customers. Their intelligent digital assistance removes repetitive tasks from employees while still providing the benefit of human engagement.

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River Hawk baseball returns to the field as the 2023 campaign begins on Friday, February 17 at #23 South Carolina. Head Coach Ken Harring enters his 19th season at the helm after leading UMass Lowell to the program’s first America East Championship game.

The River Hawks were picked second in the America East Preseason Poll, as announced by the league on Thursday, February 2.

After breaking several program records and leading the team in one of its most successful seasons in program history, the River Hawks welcome back graduate students Joshua Becker, Matt Draper and Gerry Siracusa, who are all returning for a fifth year. UMass Lowell also returns much of last year’s entire starting lineup, including veterans Robert Gallagher and Ryan Proto, with Miles Cota returning from injury.

The River Hawks also return a talented sophomore class that played a major role in last season’s run, with conference award winners Brandon Fish, Jacob Humphrey and LJ Keevan donning the blue and white in the new campaign. UMass Lowell has plenty of depth up and down the lineup, with pitchers Hayden Duke and Zach Fortuna available on the mound and field players Alex Luccini, Roddy Hernandez, Conor Kelly and Frank Wayman as available options.

Sophomore Jacob Humphrey

Adding to the depth of this year’s roster is a class of eight newcomers, including transfers Shane Bogli (Westfield State) and Troy Lopes (Eckerd College) and six freshmen. In that freshmen class are pitchers Brian Foley, Nick DiRito, Jacob Jette and Michael Simes, and fielder players Trevor Crosby and Rob Geisler, giving Harring plenty of options in rotation on the bump and in the field.

Nick Barese has been promoted to Associate Head Coach ahead of the new season, entering his second year with the program and working with the pitching core. Joe Consolmagno enters his fourth year on the coaching staff while former River Hawk Drew Guldin has joined the staff as a volunteer coach.

Associate Head Coach Nick Barese

Every single game means so much in this league and being so close to a championship last season has fueled our fire heading into this season.

Head Coach Ken Harring

Head Coach Ken Harring

The River Hawks open the season with a 17-game road trip, starting with a weekend series against #23 South Carolina. UMass Lowell will visit Florida Gulf Coast, James Madison, Virginia Tech, St. Joseph’s and Delaware in that stretch.

LeLacheur Park will open its doors on March 22 when the River Hawks host Holy Cross for their season opener before a highly anticipated series with defending conference champion Binghamton at the weekend. A midweek game against Stonehill wraps up the home stand before UMass Lowell returns to the road for four games.

Graduate student Gerry Siracusa

Junior Roddy Hernandez

The schedule ramps up in April as the River Hawks close out a road weekend series against Maine and face Dartmouth midweek before returning home to host newly added conference foe Bryant for a weekend series in Lowell. The slate includes road America East series’ against UAlbany and UMBC and non-conference games against Merrimack, Rhode Island and Boston College. UMass Lowell will have home contests against Merrimack and Harvard before closing out the month playing host to NJIT.

Sophomore Conor Kelly

May opens with seven straight home games against Maine, Massachusetts and Hofstra. A midweek visit to Northeastern is on the docket before the River Hawks wrap up the regular season with a three-game series at Binghamton.

Junior Fritz Genther

I think we have a great opportunity here. We've got a great group of guys who have laid the groundwork for this program. We're also playing for Keith Vinci, a longtime friend and our strength coach. He was there in Maine last year for us and he knew we needed him. We're playing for him and his memory.

HC, Ken Harring

After the best start in decades, Rutgers softball has struggled down the stretch of their epic road trip.

While fans, alumni and fellow students were shivering from some of the worst winter weather earlier this week, Rutgers saw its bats cool in the warm temperatures of Florida as they dropped two games to the UCF Knights, which extended their losing streak to six.

Coming out of a disappointing showing at the Bubly Invitational, the Scarlet Knights entered the first game of Tuesday’s double header with freshman pitcher Raimy Gamsby in the circle. Gamsby has performed well this season, and the early game against UCF be no exception.

Gamsby spread out eight hits over six innings of work, but UCF scored in the second, fourth and sixth innings and took the game, 3-0. Junior hurler Grace Jewell took the win for UCF, as she pitched a masterful, seven-inning gem in which she surrendered only two hits while striking out four. Gamsby saw her record drop to 5-3, as her teammates could not produce any run support behind her quality outing.

But game two would be no better, as the Scarlet Knights’ offense continued to sputter against UCF pitching. This time junior Sarah Willis surrendered only three hits to Rutgers and struck out seven as she picked up the win in the complete game victory, 5-1.

Rutgers lone run came in the first inning when shortstop Kyleigh Sand scored on a wild pitch, which would constitute the totality of the Scarlet Knights’ offense in the game. The five runs for UCF came off seven hits, with Rutgers starter Jaden Vickers taking the loss, which dropped her record to 4-4 on the season.

Only Sand, Morgan Smith and Kiersten Withstandley could manage hits in the game for Rutgers, who saw their season record fall to 17-10.

After the unforgiving road trip that marked the first few weeks of the season, Rutgers will finally return to Piscataway for their home opener against St. Peter’s on Friday, March 17. The game is the first of two in the afternoon for the Scarlet Knights, who will then face off against Iona in their second contest on St. Patrick’s Day. The games are part of the Rutgers Tournament, which will also see matchups featuring UMass-Lowell and Holy Cross. The games will be played at the Rutgers Softball Complex with television coverage on the Big Ten Plus Network.

By Melanie Gilbert | mgilbert@lowellsun.com |

The first time Avery Hungler’s family tried to celebrate her birthday at Disney World in Orlando, the 2020 COVID-19 shutdowns cancelled the long-awaited trip. This year, they made it down just in time to shelter in place due to Hurricane Ian.

“It’s raining really hard,” the 8-year-old Lowell resident said by phone with her parents, Joe and Bonnie Hungler, from Florida Thursday morning. The Orlando area remained under a tropical storm warning with rain and wind gusts up to 70 mph, and a flash-flood warning.

“I’ve never been in a hurricane before,” Avery said.

It’s an experience she’s not likely to forget, although she also reveals that she slept through the height of the storm Wednesday night.

Her father, Joe, is the executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Lowell. He said that Disney issued a shelter-in-place order Wednesday night, and closed the parks through Thursday.

They’ve been watching the news about the devastation Ian has wreaked on the Fort Myers and Cape Coral communities on the west side of the state that took a direct hit from the Category 4 storm.

“We’re OK,” he said. “The wind was howling — palm trees were blowing sideways — but the resort made sure we were taken care of. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the people in Fort Myers and some of the other places, and it’s horrible. We know we got lucky.”

Hurricane Ian was Joe and Avery’s first hurricane, but Bonnie, who is a director with the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services, experienced Hurricane Erin in 1995, during a trip to the theme park working as a nanny.

“I was on the property for Hurricane Erin,” she said, “and staying with the family in one of the treehouse villas. A tree fell on our treehouse, and we had to be evacuated by climbing under the tree which was across the door.”

She said Disney evacuated the treehouse villas for Ian, as well as some low-lying buildings, but their first-floor hotel room with an exterior door didn’t experience any flooding from the 16 inches of rain that fell overnight from the storm.

Avery, a second grader at Reilly Elementary School in Lowell’s Belvidere neighborhood, is rolling with the hurricane-related disruptions. One of the few activities she was able to get to before the closures was building a droid at Hollywood Studios.

“We’re going to have a movie marathon today, and I’m going to play with my Jack Sparrow sword and droid,” she said cheerfully.

Almost 100 miles away in Tampa, on the west side of the state, Amaris Castillo and her family are also counting their blessings. The former Dracut residents moved to Florida in 2019. Castillo was a reporter for The Sun from 2016 until the move, reporting on Tyngsboro and Dracut.

She was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., but grew up in the Tampa and Clearwater area. Hurricanes and tropical depressions were an annual Florida event, and at first, she wasn’t worried.

“The last big hurricane to devastate Tampa Bay was in 1921,” she said. “Every year there’s a hurricane season, and they all miss Tampa, so we stayed put.”

Late Monday, though, she started to question that judgment.

“I grew worried when I could feel the panic of other Tampa residents around me,” said Castillo, who now works for the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit media newsroom that owns The Tampa Bay Times. “I went to two gas stations — both out of gas. They had the little plastic bags around the pumps.”

With two small boys, ages 1 and 3, and extended family in the area, Castillo and her husband decided to shelter in place.

“We put up our outside shutters on the first-floor windows,” she said. “And I did a huge grocery trip — water, bread, milk, the basics. I was trying to shop as if we were going to be stranded in our home for a couple of days.”

After taking those precautions, she said, “you just pray and hope for the best.”

Even though Tampa was in the outer bands of the hurricane, Castillo said there was a lot of rain and “howling winds.” By Thursday morning, the storm was lumbering east toward Orlando, and the family got their first look outside.

Some small plants were uprooted, but overall, Castillo said the Tampa area was spared the devastation of other parts of Florida.

“We were lucky, and I am so grateful for that. This was a close one,” she said. “Southwest Florida, like Fort Myers, my heart breaks for Floridians who have real devastation.”

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By Cameron Morsberger | cmorsberger@lowellsun.com | Lowell Sun

LOWELL — Wayne Desmond spent his entire life in Lowell. After his wife passed away, he moved to sunny Fort Myers, Florida, a retirement haven, in 2017.

Five years later, his home is completely destroyed.

Fort Myers was hit hard by Hurricane Ian when it swept through Florida and the Carolinas in late September. The Red Cross estimates the storm wiped out or severely damaged more than 12,000 homes in Florida alone.

Luckily, Desmond was visiting family in the Lowell area when the storm hit, and he had plans to return to Florida two weeks later. He never imagined he would be wading through 2 1/2 feet of water in his living room.

“On the outside of my house, it was a 5-foot-high water line. The ocean just came right up,” Desmond said. “I’m about four miles away from the ocean, and it was still that deep that far away.”

But Desmond’s strong Lowell roots are helping him recover from the sudden loss. Owl Diner Charities, a local nonprofit dedicated to helping families and organizations in the Merrimack Valley, is raising money for Desmond, a member of their board.

After he heard about Desmond’s situation, Tom Shanahan of Owl Diner Charities sent a letter out to former golfers who participated in the group’s annual charity golf classic, asking them for donations to support Desmond.

Owl Diner Charities has raised close to $2 million in the last 30 years, Shanahan said, and all the proceeds go to the recipient. Shanahan said he hopes to raise $20,000 to $25,000 for Desmond.

“We’re just trying to try to raise some money for him so he could get back on his feet, maybe buy something else,” Shanahan said. “Wayne’s helped a lot of people out, and it’s time to pay back.”

Katheryn Burk, of Townsend, is one of Desmond’s five grandchildren and is also raising money to help Desmond out. She launched a GoFundMe on Oct. 18, the same day Desmond sent her photos of the destruction to his home.

Burk said the fundraiser started as a way for family members to come together and support their “Gramps,” as he’s known to them, but it still took a lot of convincing for Desmond to OK the effort. He’s “not the type to beg for money,” she said.

“He helps anybody in need,” Burk said. “I remember when I got my first apartment, he’s like, ‘Here’s $4,000 for your first and last,’ and I was like, ‘Gramps!’ Because he knows no one has that kind of money. He helps other family members when they need it.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, the GoFundMe had raised $1,630.

Desmond said he was shocked by the capacity of the storm. Because he didn’t live in a flood zone, Desmond didn’t have flood insurance. He said he was covered by his insurance for wind damage, but that’s it, and there’s no guarantee he’ll get help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He’s now staying with his daughter, Burk’s mother, in Merrimack, N.H., where he visits during the summer.

“I spend about seven months a year down there,” Desmond said. “And after this year, I don’t spend any more time. My house was destroyed.”

The housing park, a Century 21 mobile home community for residents 55 years and older, is “ruined,” Desmond said, and the whole complex of about 320 units may be condemned and torn down given the extent of the damage.

“My insurance company contacted me and said they did a flyover and determined that the property is a total loss,” Desmond said. “I already knew that, I walked through it. It was ugly.”

He managed to salvage some family photos, heirlooms, odds and ends and a special blanket with a photo of his grandchildren. But all of his furniture, tools in his shed and the flooring was left beyond repair.

“Everything has water damage, literally the carpets, the beds, the dressers, everything you can think of,” Burk said. “Now he’s stuck with my mom with no clothes. He literally has nothing.”

Desmond said he bought the property for $35,000, but spent about $10,000 to refinish the kitchen and living room by himself. Though he wants to move back to Florida, he fears that a similar home, in the same park, could cost him $80,000 now.

While he’s hesitant about accepting money through the GoFundMe and the charity, Desmond said he appreciates it.

“I’ve never received anything like this before in the past,” he said. “I’ve always taken care of myself.”

For those interested in supporting Desmond, Shanahan said donations can be sent to: Owl Diner Charities, P.O. Box 2182, Highland Station, Lowell, MA 01851.

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