A new white paper offered by Card Services for Credit Unionsurges CUs to review the way they process debit and credit cardtransactions with an eye toward both reducing costs on the debitside and increasing revenue on the credit side.

Card Services for Credit Unions is the association of creditunions which process their card transactions with FIS.

The paper, which CSCU commissioned from the First Annapolisfinancial consultancy, outlined three different approaches to cardprocessing and laid out the costs and benefits of each.

The three are full-service card processing, where the CUoutsources most of the day to day work of running a card program;self-administered card processing, where the CU and a processingvendor share responsibility for different parts of a card program,and the pass-through option where the CU handles almost all thecard program responsibilities.

A key aspect of all three approaches is that many CUs rarelyreview or examine their processing approach, CSCU said. The authorsof the paper attribute this phenomenon, to some degree, to entropy– a situation where the CU has made a decision years ago about whatsort of card processing it was going to use and then never, orrarely, re-examine it.

The paper also urged that that credit unions evaluate their cardprograms not only by how expensive they might be but also by howmuch control they allow.

A full-service program might appear to carry a higher payment toan outside vendor, but that payment also needs to be comparedagainst how many of the credit union's resources are tied upadministering a card program.

But while a card program which is processed and managed in housemight take more resources it also could allow the CU to have morecontrol to meet member card needs, the paper noted.