By Ray Birch
ST. PAUL, Minn.—Last year marked the end of an extensive three-year “journey” for one credit union that completely overhauled its systems, including its core. The CU believes it’s a journey other credit unions are going to need to travel to in the future.
The switch to a new core system, in this case from Symitar, is always an enormous undertaking, but in this case was just one of seven new systems implemented by the $2.1-billion Affinity Plus FCU.
The entire project was one of the credit union’s largest efforts in the past 20 years, if not ever, said Teri Laufers, senior vice president of IT operations and development, who added these kinds of efforts are very likely to be needed by many credit unions in order to remain competitive.
“We really felt our technology was in need of improvement for us to move forward as a successful credit union,” said Laufers. “We needed to build a strong foundation for the things we wanted to do moving forward.”
Laufers acknowledged Affinity Plus has felt the same pressure as other credit unions as consumer expectations of retail delivery have changed as a result of Amazon, Starbucks and the fintechs that are elbowing in on the financial services space.
“We knew we needed to get this done, so we put our heads down and went to work starting in in 2016,” she said.
Numerous New Systems
The first new system was introduced in November of 2016—Encompass, a real estate loan origination system. That was followed by the addition of three more loan origination systems over the next two years, and then a year later by a new consumer loan origination system.
In April 2018, Affinity Plus launched its new digital banking platform that included an entirely new mobile-banking app and online banking solution.
But the change didn’t stop there. At the same time the credit union also debuted MyPlus Rewards, a streamlined rewards program to engage members more closely with the credit union.
Finally, in 2018, Affinity Plus also added a new internal financial accounting system and a new mortgage servicing system, followed in October of last year with the conversion to a new core processing system.
While Laufers said the cost was “significant,” she added the expense is not great when considering the improvement in member experience and resulting improvement in usage and loyalty. Affinity Plus also recognized fairly quickly expense savings due to elimination of numerous manual processes.
Teri Laufers
“It won’t be that long before we recoup our costs,” said Laufers.
The Early Results
Early results indicate that may be the case:
- Mobile banking app usage has grown 28% in one year, and 59% of all Affinity Plus members use digital banking
- The new mobile app has received an App Store five-star rating
- Within six months almost 15,000 members redeemed 140 million MyPlus Rewards points worth $1.4 million
- 33% of all loan applications are now more quickly received through mobile and online banking
Laufers said the credit union had individual reasons for adding each new system, but the overarching goal has been to improve members’ experience.
“We felt the mobile app we had prior to this change was not meeting our members’ needs. And for our core and financial accounting systems, we felt they were requiring us to do too many manual processes. We needed to be more efficient in order to offer the products and services our members need, and free up our staff to do more consultation,” Laufers told CUToday.info.
Open Integration
Kristina M. Wright, senior vice president of member experience, said the new systems are open, flexible and integrate well. She acknowledged that credit unions are known to have multiple systems that do not mesh together well, which leads to a lot of manual, redundant work.
“With these systems having open architecture, in the future they will integrate with other new systems and allow us to do more very easily,” Wright said. “This also allows our staff to execute transactions via fewer systems, since they all talk to each other on the back-end. That saves steps and time.”
Laufers believes Affinity Plus would be far less competitive in the next five years without the investments it has made.
“If you don’t have strong digital solutions, anymore that is a detriment to member service,” Laufers said. “When you are doing a lot of things manually that is a detriment to staff. Both of those things add up to weaker employee engagement and a negative impact on the bottom line. We have to remain relevant with our members, and that means a lot of new technology—that which we have already implemented and that which is still to come. We will continue to respond to our members’ needs as they shift and change.”