BROOKFIELD, Wis. – Being two of the largest credit union vendors and being from the same state, one would think CUNA Mutual and Fiserv would have joined forces on some level throughout their histories serving credit unions. But they haven't done any major partnerships over the years until now. The companies announced last week that they are joining forces on the "delivery and presentation" of CUNA Mutual's payment products during the loan origination process. Fiserv has seven credit union data processing subsidiaries – XP Systems, IntegraSys, Summit, CUSA Technologies, Galaxy, USERS and AFTECH – through which CUNA Mutual can reach thousands of CUs at the loan origination level. Fiserv has 2,800 core processing CU clients. Tom Neil, who heads up Fiserv's credit union division, said he's surprised Fiserv and CUNA Mutual haven't joined forces before. "We're like an hour and a half down the road, actually it's almost due west of here. It's taken a long time to get to this point where we work together. It's a good opportunity." Fiserv's CU subsidiaries have loan origination systems that Fiserv can integrate with to ensure its payment protection products – credit life, credit disability, and debt cancellation – are presented seamlessly and at the optimum time during the loan process, said Chuck Stephens, assistant vice president third-party relations for CUNA Mutual. Stephens spoke to Credit Union Times from the USERS' meeting, where the news was announced. USERS will be the first of the Fiserv subsidiaries to engage in the new agreement. So far CUNA Mutual has contracts with USERS and CUSA Technologies, and will target Summit and XP Systems next. CUNA Mutual and Fiserv have a master agreement on the corporate level, and for the first time CUNA Mutual is engaging in revenue sharing with another company. The two companies will establish a baseline for the business already in place at each processor, put a timeline and steps in place to increase business, and share revenue based on mutually-agreed upon results. "This is a new concept for us," said Stephens. He said this is not a new concept that was brought on by CUNA Mutual's new CEO, Jeff Post, in fact this deal has been in the works for a few years now. So how does it work? There is some integration on the tech side to ensure payment protection docs are populated from data already on the system. "You don't want to have to re-key anything and you want to make sure your forms are seamless," said Stephens. But a lot of the work is marketing. "We basically make suggestions to change how our products are presented, and have them presented in a more aggressive way," said Stephens. He said CUNA Mutual first has to make sure the Fiserv CU clients' employees understand its protection products, and then offer training on how to more effectively market them. In the case of USERS for example, initially USERS will enhance its Lending Navigator (a browser-based loan origination system) and WebLoan (an online loan origination system) to better support the presentation and delivery of CUNA Mutual's payment products. A second phase will enable USERS' clients to generate reports for more efficient tracking and management of the products. This deal does not mean every Fiserv client will be marketing CUNA Mutual's protection products. Some CUs don't use their core processor's loan origination system, or use a mixture of different systems based on lending type. CUNA Mutual in fact has its own online system in Loanliner.com that some CUs rely heavily on. "Many credit unions have a mixture. A lot of what we're doing is finding ways to make it work better together," said Stephens. This deal is indicative of Fiserv's new approach in getting closer to the market. A few months ago it committed $250,000 to the Filene Institute for credit union research and just recently it contributed $25,000 to the Credit Union Museum. Fiserv up until recently has been more of a behind-the-scenes vendor. [email protected]
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