Mark Sievewright now gets to put his thoughts into action, andhe said he hears that a lot.

Sievewright, the former TowerGroup research and advisory firmCEO who joined Fiserv Inc. as a senior strategist in 2004, is nowthe president of the company's credit union division, the largestsuch organization in the credit union industry.

After years of acquisitions and growth, the division is now thecore processor, the central provider of technology solutions, tomore than 2,500 credit unions, and its ancillary services are usedby thousands more.

Named last week, Sievewright succeeds Scott Butler, who left forpersonal reasons after 25 years in the credit union industry, muchof that with Fiserv, its former IntegraSys division and before thatwith EDS, which sold IntegraSys to Fiserv in 2003.

Sievewright is no stranger to credit unions. During his yearswith Fiserv, in addition to consulting with individual creditunions and trade associations, he participated in numerous state,national and international conferences as a speaker, facilitatorand consultant.

That work was recognized by the World Council of Credit Unionslast year when it presented Sievewright with its Ambassador Awardin recognition of his service.

“I've especially loved my exposure to the credit unionmovement,” Sievewright said of his 30 years in financial services.“It's been a privilege to work with CUNA and WOCCU and lot ofindividual credit unions in strategic planning. It's been atremendous experience that they've granted me and it's allowed meto be confident that I can be as effective in this job I have nowthat my good friend Scott Butler has decided to move on.”

A longtime thought leaderin the financial services industry, Sievewright has spoken andwritten extensively about the transformation of financial servicesand how credit unions must strategize and collaborate aroundproducts, services and information to survive and thrive.

So how will things differ now that his title is president of thecredit union division rather than corporate senior vice presidentof market development for the Brookfield, Wis., company'sdepository institutions group?

“One of the things I was joking about with a client the otherday was how when you step away from running the business some mightsuddenly think you can't run a business anymore,” he said. “ButI've actually had a lot of day-to-day running the business in mycareer,” including managing several hundred people at HSBC inLondon and senior management roles at MasterCard International andPayments Systems Inc.

In his new job, Boston-based Sievewright will be in charge of anoperation with 20 offices and about 2,200 employees, including itsheadquarters in Frisco, Texas. “One of the big things in my agendais to be very visible across locations where we have a significantnumber of people,” he said.

He also said the strategic planning he has done over the pastseveral years with clients and internally “will continue to shapemuch of what I'm going to be doing now.”

Sievewright had a role–”not a major role”–inthe company's melding of its seven individual credit union coreprocessing divisions as part of the “one Fiserv” reorganizationannounced in early 2009. That culminated a process that began notlong after Jeffrey Yabuki became president/CEO in 2005 and wasaccelerated by the purchase of payments processor CheckFree in2007.

The seven members of the CU7 brand lost their individualidentities as the company began marketing and branding by platformnames under the Fiserv label, stressing their integration withancillary products and services from across the broad organization.The company also now refers to core processing platforms as accountprocessing platforms.

Further consolidation “is absolutely not on my mind,”Sievewright said. “If you think about the acquisitions and theevolution of our business over the years, we've done a really goodjob of being able to stay in touch with, say, a $250 million dollarcredit union and what you need in your technology environment. Now,we're going to continue to focus on bringing you the package ofsolutions that you need to be the most effective. I think we'vebecome really good at that, and I don't want us to change thatcourse.”

Going forward, the new division president plans to continue afocus on serving all sizes of credit unions. And that will includethe new Acumen platform for larger credit unions and digitalbanking products that credit unions of all sizes are going to needto succeed with all demographics.

He also pointed to the recentacquisitions of Credit Union On-Line, a Massachusetts operationthat was the only service bureau devoted solely to the Fiserv XP2platform, and M-Com, one of its partners in mobile banking andpayments technology.

“We're still very much engaged in these kinds of strategicopportunities,” Sievewright said.