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According to Xtend President Scott Collins, selecting the right partner proved more challenging than expected.  “We have been providing B2B chat services for nearly a year, but we knew that providing B2C support, especially in an authenticated and secure environment like home banking, required us to buy versus build.  From the onset, we preferred an enterprise solution because we felt we had more control, but most of the recognized industry players were an ASP deployment.  In fact, when we first looked at LIVECHAT it did not have an enterprise solution either.  By the time we re-engaged with them this fall their enterprise solution was already deployed in several European financial institutions.  Over the next few months, our web services and home banking partners over at CU*Answers will put the LIVECHAT software and support team to the test so that we can move forward with confidence.”

Collins noted that several credit union clients were anxious to participate in the beta testing of the new web chat service and that the CUSO planned to be ready for this next by late winter or early spring.

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Prospera Credit Union, located in Appleton, WI, switched their entire daily processing to a mirror system hosted at WESCO Net, which is managed through WESCO Net’s I-Plan service. I-Plan features remote and on-site systems management services for IBM System-I (aka i-Series or AS/400) platforms including managed real-time data replication. Prospera Credit Union connected all branches, including Internet home banking and member audio response telephone banking system through the CU*NextNet network and effectively ran daily production from the remote datacenter for four days.

“This is a significant event because it highlights our ability to provide real-time business continuity services for credit unions.  Data is replicated to the high-availability host at WESCO Net in near real time and rollovers can be accomplished very quickly. The result is that Prospera has the confidence of knowing that if they lose their processing facility, they can operate from ours without missing a beat,” stated Dave Wordhouse, VP of Network Technologies.

WESCO Net has spent several years developing and deploying an affective high availability and disaster recovery plan.  The I-Plan service, inclusive of managed data replication, keeps critical information continuously protected and recovers lost data in a fraction of the time of traditional tape backup solutions.

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The new site for Sentinel Federal FCU is based on the widely popular WordPress with SiteControl platform, which has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards, as well as being named first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. The credit union’s newly redesigned site uses hybrid pages, post designs, and utilizes the built in link manager feature to manage the header and footer links.

Sentinel Federal Credit Union has approximately 7,500 members providing a full portfolio of financial services from 4 locations. For more information about Sentinel Federal, go to http://sentinelfcu.org .

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The CU*Answers CUSO provides data processing and ancillary services to 165+ credit unions across the United States, ranging in size from 200 members to over 60,000. Recognizing that not all credit unions may want or be able to afford a comprehensive e-document management package, CU*Answers offers its “CU*SPY” Vault (powered by eDOC Innovations) directly integrated into CU*BASE for capturing receipts, loan forms and photo ID’s. This option is low maintenance, easy to implement, and inexpensive.

For credit unions looking to implement a more comprehensive solution, CU*Answers works with its cuasterisk.com network partner, eDOC Innovations to provide two other options: eDOC Online, or an eDOC Inhouse Vault. Credit Unions also have the option of choosing an alternate 3rd party for its e-document management needs. The new website provides information and disambiguation of the various e-document solutions, to make it easier for credit unions to choose the best-fit option. The site is based on Wesco Net Web Services WordPress with SiteControl platform as a Content Management System and benefits from features such as site search, contact forms, and RSS feeds. For more information, check out the site at http://edocs.cuanswers.com.

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In March 2008, parent company CU*Answers launched the CEO Tickler program with the objective of challenging CEOs to set some goals for running their credit union business, while gaining insights into their membership base.  Each tickler newsletter includes challenges that are answered in a corresponding CEO Tickler Answers newsletter.

Topics for the 2009 year included Dashboards – Keep Your Eyes on the Road Ahead, which focused on utilizing CU*BASE dashboards to gauge the effectiveness of programs that drive credit unions forward, Strategic Online Banking Tactics, and Goals for Product & Services 2010.

This resource became so worthwhile that credit union staffers wanted the ability to reference the information outside of their email client.  The team at WESCO Net Web Services stepped in, and now these email newsletters are also published as part of cuanswers.com.

Visit online at http://cuanswers.com/ceo_ticklers/

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This impressive count includes many different credit union sites, MicroLender Pay Day Loan origination sites, Retailer Direct origination sites, Prime Alliance Mortgage origination sites, custom Risk Management Report Generators and cuasterisk.com corporate sites.

According to WESCO Net, this is a record year for the Web Services department, with the most new development it has ever done.  The launch of these new sites is in addition to the regular website updates requested by its clients.

David Damstra, Manager of Web Service says, “This has been an exciting year for us, not only have we been able to launch more web sites than we ever have before, but we’ve also been able to expand our services into innovative web applications and the new Talent Source portals.  We look forward to next year being even bigger.”

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The Risk Management Report Generator is a tool which allows clients of the CU*Answers network (cuasterisk.com) to complete their due diligence on services and products purchased from these CUSOs.  The creation of the product stemmed from requirements set forth by the NCUA instruction to credit unions to perform due diligence on vendor relationships.  In addition to storing answers modeled after the questions posed by the NCUA, is also allows credit unions to keep vital contract information along with legal opinions associated with the correlating contracts.  This application is a collaborative effort for a community of clients to establish responses to the questions, and these responses are available to others to use or model their own responses after.

In addition to the pilot site built for CU*Answers, the Web Services team also deployed a similar version for eDOC Innovations.

Jim Vilker, VP Professional Services for CU*Answers describes it as a “full vendor management system for credit unions that partner with the cuasterisk.com network.  It allows credit unions to not only complete their due diligence electronically, but to also view how their peers completed the assessment.”

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