The Trinergy platform offers the requisite range of services needed to run a credit union, from general ledger to MRM to savings bonds processing, and is "blended totally with Microsoft," Pleshkewych said, running on SQL 2005 and .NET technology and integrated with such basics as Office applications.

It's also customizable, "so each client we bring on board gets a new piece of software we build for them, and we can accommodate what they need and develop it very rapidly," he said.

"For example," Pleshkewych said, "we were able to create and add a health savings account product for one client in just a couple weeks."

Speed to market with customized features is a differentiator for his system, Pleshkewych said. "In our industry today, there are a lot of wonderful screen scrapers but down below it's the old spaghetti code," he said. "Our system is built with a relational database with tools I designed to normalize data and make our system very easy to grow."

Chris Collins appreciates that.

"It puts me in a position where I don't have to say 'no,'" said Collins, who came to Trinergy from R.C. Olmstead to be the new company's sales executive.

"This is a very competitive marketplace, but the things we bring to the table are different, such as being able to incorporate special programming quickly and inexpensively, unlike other systems that have that flat file spaghetti code behind a Windows front end," Collins said.

"You have a lot of money wrapped up in maintaining that old software just to make it work, and if they have a lot of clients, your credit union just becomes a small fish in that big sea," he said. "But we look at our credit unions as consulting partners for the development of the product, to build an enriched system that can be customized with affecting the core.

"It gives our system a different look and feel, since we're event driven and not just a linear flow. And we have features such as touch screen capability that uses pretty large buttons and allows your tellers to no longer have to use a mouse. That alone makes a huge difference in speed at the teller line," Collins said.

"We can do some pretty unique things," he said.

And serve some pretty unique markets, such as church extension funds. There are about 200 of them in the country, Pleshkewych said, and, free from much regulation, they can create some "amazingly intricate types of loans and investments that credit unions can't do."

His largest client has about $275 million in assets and because of the nature of the businesses Trinergy serves, they tend to have very small staffs. "They pool their money and lend it and invest it and use the earnings for missions and to build schools and things like that," he said.

"And because they don't do retail, like credit unions do, they don't need a lot of people. I know of one with $350 million in assets managed by four people."

Trinergy also has a small staff, six right now, a number Pleshkewych expects to be "pushing 10 by the end of the year."

Collins and Pleshkewych also expect to grow the client base–the current credit union users are the $52 million Northwest Community CU in Niles, Ill., the $5 million Maine Township Schools in Park Ridge, Ill., and the $60 million Community Care CU in Trinidad and Tobago–aggressively pricing Trinergy's services "while we provide a solution our clients can feel comfortable with."

"We can customize to their needs, not the other way around, and we have very satisfied clients so far, and we're moving forward," Pleshkewych said.

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