FedChoice FCU is one of the first two credit unions to use KeySmart, along with $390 million Elkhart County Farm Bureau Credit Union in Goshen, Ind. The Keystone Suite also includes service bureau, online banking, consulting and programming services, a middleware module, record transfer software and the UPost online honor deposit service. The CUSO now has 108 clients using its range of services and software. As with the other solutions, a major focus of the nine- to 12-month development process for the KeySmart lending platform was integrating it into the Episys core platform, says senior project manager Eric Leighow.

The other main challenges, he adds, were to streamline and automate the lending process while working with different credit unions to find the product that "had all the functionality that most of them would need while building a solution that could be customized at each credit union."

For instance, the eCU project manager says, "we basically built an administrative piece that adds questions to the applications and integrates them into the Episys system so that credit unions can add questions and change decisioning parameters without our help."

The software is modularized, and at FedChoice runs as an ASP, so "there was very little involved on our end in setting it up," Penders says. "The biggest part was simply working with eCU and Symitar to configure the Episys system and work with our internal staff to ensure that we were asking eCU to do for us what we really wanted to do." Penders says the next step for FedChoice will be adding automated, instant funding to the system by mid-2007, followed more line-of-credit and signature loan options and cross-sells to share products. He said the CU also is eyeing Visa merchant and ACH origination capabilities and the UPost solution "to give our members more ways to do things online so they don't have to come into a branch."

Leighow, meanwhile, says eCU considers the Keystone Suite complete for now. "But if someone has an idea they come up with that would work for credit unions," the senior project manager says, "we'd certainly give it consideration for product development."

-- mrapport@sc.rr.com

Instant Insights /

FedChoice FCU Launches Online Lending Platform from eCU Technologies to Serve 'Two Kinds of Members'

Related Stories

Recommended For You