VALLEY FORGE, Pa. – Fiserv, the largest player in credit union data processing, has a vacancy at the top at USERS. According to company officials, USERS' President John Schooler has left the company to pursue other interests. The company would not comment any further on the details surrounding Schooler's departure. Schooler has served as president of the Fiserv subsidiary since early 2004, taking over for Joe Barry, who is now president of Fiserv's credit union group in the Eastern Region, which includes AFTECH, Galaxy, USERS, and Precision Direct. "The company is doing very well. Staff is focused on business as usual," said Barry, who personally called many of USERS' CU clients to give them the news on Schooler. USERS has 320 credit union clients with an average asset size of $182 million. Schooler is a veteran of the credit union industry. He joined USERS in 1987 as vice president of development. He also worked at another Fiserv subsidiary, Summit, heading up a conversion and implementation team, and was vice president of information technology for First Financial CU in West Covina, Calif. Although Barry once led USERS and resides in Pennsylvania, he said he is not taking over any day-to-day duties of the company. "Absolutely not. The management team is running the business," said Barry. He will be involved however in overseeing the unit and in helping to find the new president. USERS is now employing its succession plan. Fiserv has a program in place-known as LEAD (Leaders, Education and Development) that Fiserv leaders go through to prepare them to lead business units. Barry said more than 100 people have completed the program, so there is a large pool to pull from to find Schooler's successor, including some from within USERS. Having completed 139 acquisitions, Fiserv has many business units across the company. Barry said credit unions can expect more cooperation and more collaboration among various Fiserv business units to offer credit unions more products at a lower cost. It most recently did this with two-factor authentication and HSAs. "We have 2,000 people in the credit union group. We're not perceived that way. We're perceived as USERS and Summit and AFTECH and the others, but we have 2,000 people who wake up every day thinking about credit unions," said Barry. Fiserv's seven credit union core processing units are USERS, AFTECH, Galaxy, Summit, CUSA Technologies, XP Systems and IntegraSys. Together, the seven units have 2,800 credit union clients. [email protected]