GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — During its 2007 Leadership Conference here yesterday, CU*Answers CEO Randy Karnes unveiled the prototype of its newly designed online banking platform, "It's me 247″ that has more colorful Web site zones, more graphic imagery, a global navigation bar with large icons, demographically-targeted images, local page navigation, tiered services marketing and personalized transactional banking.

"It's more than just asking your name, password and authentication question so that you can see your accounts. It's a reflection of the member and what the member wants to see and the member can personalize it," Karnes said.

The new perspective for design and other innovations are all part of what Karnes described as CU*Answers' effort to "jump to the future" and it will be available in October for CU*Answers clients, he said. Another leap will be the advent of SPSD credit transactions, or Single Pay Short Duration Credit Transactions. These are tools for when payday lending becomes commonplace in credit unions and will allow CUs to pull payday lending reports the way they now pull credit reports, he said. "It's decision modeling for payday lending." CL Verify, the credit bureau for payday lenders is the source of the payday-lending database. "We'll go online with this next year," said Karnes.