TAMPA, Fla.—Trellance announced it has divested CSCU, the CUSO's payments processing business. CSCU is now a separate company.
The newly formed Trellance said it will retain CSCU’s Optimize card growth solutions offerings and CSCU’s thought leadership initiative, The Payments Review.
“The divestiture signals our commitment to providing solutions to credit unions facing the challenge of accessing quality talent and expertise to implement new strategies to compete and thrive,” said Tom Davis, president of Trellance. “Our entire consulting portfolio is comprised of services and programs that are a foundation that credit unions can grow upon.”
“Trellance will retain CSCU’s experienced portfolio consulting team to provide new insights, resources, expertise and execution capabilities to credit unions, and the senior leadership team that is passionate about the credit union movement. The Trellance 2018 annual conference, named immersion18, will be held May 7-11, 2018 at the Fort Lauderdale Marriott Harbor Beach Resort & Spa in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,” the CUSO said.
Davis told CUtoday.info the move allows Trellance to be more focused and nimble in meeting its member credit unions’ need.
“We just felt this needed to be done,” Davis said. “In our past, as in a lot of CUSOs’ pasts, we served many masters. Trellance made a dedicated, focused decision to make that master clear. And when I say master, I mean we bleed credit unions. We always have. We just want to make sure Trellance is a credit union focused CUSO that is here to support credit unions. That is our mission. This move removed any cloudiness.”
Davis explained that for a long time CSCU had been placing more and more services under the CSCU umbrella.
“Over time we felt we needed to be more structured and more organized,” he said. “At CSCU we had been working strategically on what we were going to do going forward, and as opposed to adding a bunch of services we looked at our core and said do we have two core businesses? So selling card processing made sense.”
Davis said the revenue from that sale stays with Trellance.
“So all our credit union owners, the CUSO concept, our annual meeting, that all stays under the Trellance umbrella as a completely separate entity,” he said. “All of the equity, articles of incorporation, the bylaws . . . all that stays with Trellance.”
Davis emphasized that CSCU credit unions’ payment processing won’t be impacted.
“Nothing there is disturbed,” said Davis. “This move does nothing to disturb CSCU credit unions’ processing relationships, or their ownership interests. But the two entities are separate now. Their processing relationship going forward with FIS will be underneath the CSCU brand. In all of this, priority one was to make sure there is no disruption to our credit unions, that there was no credit union left behind, and no gaps. We will be working closely with CSCU going forward to make sure that is the case.”
Davis noted that about half of CSCU’s staff moved on with Trellance and the other half remained with CSCU.
“This is going to set up the CUSO and our credit unions well going forward,” said Davis, noting the move will lead to more product releases in the next 12-24 months. “We think this makes us somewhat of a unique CUSO—a consulting company owned by credit unions, for credit unions, and directed by credit unions.”
More information can be found on the Trellance website, www.trellance.com, on its FAQ document or via phone at (888) 930-2728.