LONDON–Underway for more than two years, the Association of British Credit Unions (Abcul) has yet to live with a new core processing platform that is to be shared by its member credit unions.
Abcul has been joined in the initiative by the U.K. government and its Department of Work and Pensions’ Credit Union Expansion Programme. According to the government, the budget for tech piece of the project is £8 million out of the overall budget of £38 million. Fiserv’s shared Software-as-a-Service platform is being used, as is the company’s broader Agiliti solution.
Launched in 2014, approximately 35 British credit unions out of the 200 in the country have agreed to participate. The initial timeline had called for some users to go live by late 2015, but none have gone live to date. Abcul said the system is now undergoing testing.
Abcul created a subsidiary, Cornerstone Mutual Services, “to develop and manage the range of products and services which will help achieve the project’s goals…As with any new banking technology project, a number of hurdles and barriers have had to be cleared along the way which have seen the process take a bit longer than planned,” Abcul said in a statement. “This has, of course, been a common experience for many new entrants in the banking and financial technology fields in recent years.”
According to Abcul, Cornerstone’s procurement hub “has delivered significant savings for credit unions through collective purchasing of a variety of services such as payroll, stationery, print and washroom services. Costs in some categories have been reduced by up to a third, and the average annual saving for each participating credit union is almost £5,000.”