SANTA MONICA, Calif.-CUSO Web sites are challenged to provide financial information to their CU member/investors so they won't go surfing elsewhere, but where are they getting the content to fill the site? Ken Davis, director of sales for GoInvest.com here is hoping more CUSOs and credit unions will discover the four-level content base of such information his company provides. "CUSOs are a target market for us, and I'd sure like to have more of them know about what we do," said Davis. A 20-year veteran of the securities business, Davis said, "What we have isn't gimmicky. It's solid information that is available elsewhere, but you'd have to collect it from various sources. What we do is bring it together in one place. I think there's value in that now, because of information-overload. There's more than enough to satisfy 90% of investors." Right now, the only CUSO using GoInvest is XCU Capital (xcucapital.com) but Mark Allen, president said that they had been working with GoInvest.com for six months now and was very satisfied. "We right now on Level 2 (Level 4 is the most complex, 1 the least) and I think it's a great way to provide information at a reasonable price. The cost is around $20,000 per year," said Allen. Allen said that the link on the CUSO's page goes directly to GoInvest and that the transition is relatively transparent. There is a link for each of the 11 credit union's working with XCU Capital and the CU identity is carried over. He's pleased with the feedback, he said, because they haven't done any aggressive marketing yet to promote the link. "At first, we just wanted to make sure everything worked right. Now, we'll start promoting it, and the separate CUs will start as well." Davis got lucky, he said, because he got XCU Capital as a client through a "cold call." "It just goes to show you that if you have the right product at the right time, the cold call still works," he laughed. Now that he's become aware of CUSOs and credit unions and met and spoken with several managers, he's impressed with the dedication they have to serving the needs of members. Next up for the site is to implement on-line trading, he said. -
caburger@cutimes.com
