LENEXA, Kansas - U.S. Central Credit Union has notified corporate credit unions that it will be migrating out of the core process- ing business.
U.S. Central has offered corporates a system from EDS for years, but a few years ago signed a deal with Symitar for a new system. There have been a number of implementation delays and earlier this year U.S. Central said it would continue to support the old EDS (now IntegraSys) system as well as Symitar.
"Data processing is just not a core competency that U.S. Central has or wants to have. It's just not our role in the corporate network," said Tom Ferris, vice president of member relations for U.S. Central.
Eighteen corporates are directly affected by this change as they have either migrated to Symitar or are still on IntegraSys. It is up to those corporates to decide how they want to handle core processing going forward. A number of corporates, independent of U.S. Central, have moved to Open Solutions, Inc.'s system. U.S. Central will slowly exit, expecting to not be completely phased out until 2009.
The core processing decision affects all corporates on the front-end in connecting with U.S. Central, which itself is undergoing a major system change it describes as Unified Front End. It's a single location for corporates to use for cash management and other services with U.S. Central.
According to Ferris, U.S. Central conducted an informal survey among corporates about its decision to get out of core processing and the results were positive. "I'd say the vast majority were right in line. The expectation was that it was not a core competency service of U.S. Central."
Ferris said once the exit is complete, U.S. Central should expect to eliminate some cost and overhead for managing the core processing business, but has not quantified that savings.
