JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – 2005 is off to an auspicious start for Fidelity Information Services. FIS is the financial institution technology division of Fidelity National Financial, Inc., a Fortune 500 firm that is best known for its real estate solutions. Fidelity acquired its way into the CU core processing space when it purchased Aurum Technology last year. It purchased Aurum shortly after Aurum had acquired Computer Consultants Corp. out of Salt Lake City. FIS recently announced that the $1.2 billion Virginia Credit Union has selected its MISER core system, which is the former Aurum's system. Dawn Jones, Chief Information Officer for the CU, said it had been well served for 12 years on the Summit system but it was time for a change. Jones said Virginia CU wanted a mature product with a proven track record. "We were looking for a vision to the future, a system to take us at least 10 years. We were looking for uses of new technology, better management reporting, ways to streamline our processes." Virginia CU went through an exhaustive two and a half year vetting process of vendors. What was different about Virginia CU's approach, said Jones, is it was truly a group decision. It developed a 20-person technology committee that included business leaders from a cross-section of the CU. The committee had seven different subcommittees, each one performing a different task in researching systems. There was an eight-person site visit team that visited two credit union sites for each vendor as well as the vendor's corporate headquarters. "A subgroup of that visited user group meetings and reported back with their observations and recommendations," said Jones. She described it as a sort of an ongoing Gallup poll. Throughout the process, the committee would be polled on the different vendors. "We kept it running throughout. Sometimes it was very consistent, sometimes it wasn't." Interestingly, other than system performance, one thing Virginia was looking for was a financially powerful and stable vendor. Specific system features Virginia CU liked about MISER was its mortgage servicing and contact management system. Jones feels MISER is conducive for quickly launching new products. The CU also wanted a system to handle its heavy transaction load. Virginia CU's number of member account transactions in 2004 exceeded 33 million. That included four million front-line transactions and 29 million electronic and batch transactions. Jones said the CU wants to get more products from its core provider. Credit unions are notorious best-of-breed third-party hogs, and while Jones said it will still use third-party apps, it wants to reduce the number and get more from Fidelity. She also cited a "passion" among MISER clients about the product. This deal comes only about a month after Fidelity announced the billion-dollar plus Wings Financial CU-the former Northwest Airlines Employees FCU – was moving to MISER. Neither Wings Financial nor Virginia CU cited business functionality as a reason for choosing MISER, even though Fidelity touts the system's commercial functionality. Virginia CU serves mainly government employees and state college students and employees, and Wings Financial serves airline industry employees. Fidelity now has six billion-dollar plus CU clients. The other four are Vystar, Eastern Financial Florida, Government Eployees CU of El Paso and Twin County CU (which will be over a billion after merging with Harborstone). [email protected]