That was without marketing the service, something the CU will be doing as it rolls out phase two this summer, says Belinda Caillouet, vice president of IT for the 67,000 member CU.

Spokane Teachers has 11 branches and is opening another in Idaho. "We're going into a new market, so that's when we'll start doing commercials featuring our Web site, along with other promotions," Caillouet says.

The Transaction-Exchange software also will be used to allow members to open up new accounts and order debit cards, and integrate with the SAIL automated direct lending platform from Teres Solutions.

While relatively new to in-house development, Caillouet says, her IT staff of 30 is forging ahead into other areas as well, including building its own member-relationship system with advice tools and other functions, and serving as a service bureau for three smaller credit unions in the area, providing data processing for two and Internet banking to the third.

And Caillouet says she doesn't mind at all following the business rules built into the Harland system.

"We set our controls and then Transaction-Exchange uses those rules to follow our guidelines. Say you have a maximum of $20,000 in a certain account and you try to access $100,000. The system will kick that back out.

"If they had opened up the application but didn't give us the ability to read business rules like that, we might find ourselves having to maintain two different sets of controls. It's very key to us that we not have to do that," Caillouet says.

Her tech-savvy crew also will continue choosing between in-house development and best-of-breed solutions from vendors, depending on the situation and the options.

Jan Wilgus, Harland's director of product marketing, says 25 of the approximately 400 ULTRADATA customers are using Transaction-Exchange to connect their core systems with in-house and vendor-built account opening solutions, lending platforms, card solutions, voice response systems and Internet banking.

Those out-of-the-box solutions include Harland's own offerings, such as LaserPro, Interlink, E3 and Liberty printed products, as well as a range of products and services from vendors such as Digital Insight, Maxxar, Online Resources and PSCU, the company says.

"There could be more. That's the beauty of Transaction-Exchange," says Niles Bay, Harland's vice president of product development for ULTRADATA. "Once the credit union licenses it, we don't necessarily know what's on the back end. They just create their interfaces and go." Bay says the connectivity, an in-house installation, can be accomplished by even a one- or two-person shop as long as the staffers have "a basic understanding of software development kits and XML. And we have a pre-production site to help them along, too."

Open systems have been a buzzword for the industry for several years now, and the Transaction-Exchange solution is part of that effort, but there are limitations built in, and rules.

"A lot of companies will open their database and let you have access, but in our experience that's fairly dangerous," Bay says. "Our approach, instead, has been to apply business rules to the process.

"So when you're putting data in and pulling it back out, and a field is expecting a capital O, you're going to have to enter that capital O or it won't work. In more-open systems, a wrong entry would go on through, which could produce unpredictable results or even crash a system.

"We're avoiding that by leveraging the existing business rules in our core system."

The protected openness of the system also clears the way for what Bay calls "a chance for grassroots development" by IT staff at the credit unions using the ULTRADATA platform.

A Web site dedicated to that purpose will be launched at an upcoming users' conference, Bay says. "That's exciting to us," the Harland executive says. "Now that the propeller heads built the system, it's going to be interesting to see how the user community embraces it." [email protected]