MONTEREY PARK, Calif. – Energy First Credit Union is going new wave to do business the old way. The $403 million CU, the former Gasco Credit Union that's now the new owner of a community charter, is in the final stages of testing a just-released security solution that will allow it to use the Verizon Wireless broadband network to sign up new members by meeting them face to face at work and other gathering places around the San Gabriel Valley. The SSL VPN Plus network security software platform from Silicon Valley startup NeoAccel probably will be combined with an online enrollment solution from Andera Inc., letting CU representatives complete the process from laptops in the field, says Ed Cross, vice president of information technology at Energy First (www.energyfirstcu.org). Cross says Energy First hopes to have the whole thing in place about the time the CU opens its first true retail branch, probably in August. The 19,400-member credit union had been a single-sponsor organization with the Southern California Gas Co. and it currently has its headquarters in Monterey Park and a 17th-floor location in the Gas Company Tower in Los Angeles. "Our business goal is to grow membership. That's why we went through the process of getting a community charter," Cross says. "Securing the laptops like this will let our people take the credit union out to where the new members are and sign them up right there." Unlike other systems the CU's tested, the NeoAccel solution runs at the appliance level and has so far offered smooth performance and seamless connectivity with the credit union's core processing platform from XP Systems, Cross says. It also is able to handle Web applications and other Internet protocol (IP) based solutions, so testing voice-over IP telephony with the credit union's Avaya system also is on the Cross' agenda. The NeoAccel SSL solution (SSL stands for secured sockets layer, the standard encryption protocol for securing document transfers over the Internet) is designed to allow the secure use of IP-based and other applications over wireless local-access networks (LAN) and other congested public-access networks without the data loss and high administrative needs of other solutions, the company says. "Until now, SSL VPN (virtual private network) vendors, remote access solution providers, and enterprise end users have been forced to live with the performance problems inherent in first- and second-generation SSL VPNs," says Michel Susai, chairman and CEO of NeoAccel (www.neoaccel.com) in San Francisco. Susai, founder and former CEO of leading switching company NetScaler, launched NeoAccel in February. Although the jury's still out for now, SSL VPN Plus does appear to outperform other systems Energy First has checked out, Cross says. He says the final decision will be made after "we run it through a little security gauntlet. When we're comfortable with that we'll start letting our business development folks take their laptops and sign members up out there in the field." Those laptops, by the way, will be biometrically secured IBM ThinkPads, just to add another level of data safety, Cross adds. -

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