Coming up short around the holidays? What if you could skip thatnext car payment without late payments or credit dings?

Enter Skip-A-Pay, a software application developed by Livermore,Calif., online banking developer CUBUS Solutions that integratesinto a credit union's core system and fully automates the processof approving a member's request to skip a pending payment.

Before Skip-A-Pay, it might take a credit union employee a halfhour or longer to process and input a skip a payment request, saidJohn-Ashley Paul, CUBUS CEO. With Skip-A-Pay in place, it takes no timebecause the process is fully automated, he said.

At the $3.4 billion, Huntsville, Ala.-based Redstone FederalCredit Union, Skip-A-Pay went live Thanksgiving Week and in threeweeks, it has processed more than 1,000 skips, said HarryGunsallus, CEO of Redstone Consulting Group, a CUSO wholly owned by RFCU andformed to market the technology innovations it develops.

Gunsallus added that Skip-A-Pay generated more than $35,000 infee income for RFCU in those three weeks (Skips are charged $35 perinstance, a rate that is determined by the institution).

In all of 2011, RFCU Had processed only 700 skips, saidGunsallus. “We generated more pure net income from this in threeweeks than we did in all of 2011.”

An upshot of its successful debut of Skip-A-Pay is that RedstoneConsulting entered into an agreement with CUBUS to marketSkip-A-Pay widely in the credit union and community bankcommunities, said Gunsallus, who's also the big Alabama creditunion's senior vice president of technology and operationssupport.

Every financial institution that installs the software has theability to toggle the risks it is willing to take and to determineeligibility criteria. At RFCU, for instance, a member who hasever been late paying on a particular loan will not be approved toskip a payment. Other institutions may wish to set differentcriteria and that flexibility is built in.

“Every financial institution executive is looking for newnon-interest income,” said Gunsallus. “If you can charge a fee themember perceives as value add, it's a game changer.”