Coming up short around the holidays? What if you could skip that next car payment without late payments or credit dings?

Enter Skip-A-Pay, a software application developed by Livermore, Calif., online banking developer CUBUS Solutions that integrates into a credit union's core system and fully automates the process of approving a member's request to skip a pending payment.

Before Skip-A-Pay, it might take a credit union employee a half hour or longer to process and input a skip a payment request, said John-Ashley Paul, CUBUS CEO.  With Skip-A-Pay in place, it takes no time because the process is fully automated, he said.

At the $3.4 billion, Huntsville, Ala.-based Redstone Federal Credit Union, Skip-A-Pay went live Thanksgiving Week and in three weeks, it has processed more than 1,000 skips, said Harry Gunsallus, CEO of Redstone Consulting Group, a CUSO wholly owned by RFCU and formed to market the technology innovations it develops. 

Gunsallus added that Skip-A-Pay generated more than $35,000 in fee income for RFCU in those three weeks (Skips are charged $35 per instance, a rate that is determined by the institution).

In all of 2011, RFCU Had processed only 700 skips, said Gunsallus. “We generated more pure net income from this in three weeks than we did in all of 2011.”

An upshot of its successful debut of Skip-A-Pay is that Redstone Consulting entered into an agreement with CUBUS to market Skip-A-Pay widely in the credit union and community bank communities, said Gunsallus, who's also the big Alabama credit union's senior vice president of technology and operations support.

Every financial institution that installs the software has the ability to toggle the risks it is willing to take and to determine eligibility criteria.  At RFCU, for instance, a member who has ever been late paying on a particular loan will not be approved to skip a payment. Other institutions may wish to set different criteria and that flexibility is built in.

“Every financial institution executive is looking for new non-interest income,” said Gunsallus. “If you can charge a fee the member perceives as value add, it's a game changer.”