SANTA ANA, Calif. — The $6.8 billion Orange County Teachers Federal Credit Union is using a fleet of 258 ATMs to reach the parts of membership that are spread through rural areas in its large field of membership.
According to David Hanighen, vice president of information services for the CU, the credit union has a field of membership that includes teachers and school administrative staff under a Trade, Industry or Profession wide charter. In practice, that means the CU has to serve a membership of 350,000 over an area of 40,000 square miles, from north of Los Angeles to the Mexican boarder running north to south and from Huntington Beach to the desert areas of California running east to west.
To reach these members without building new branches, the credit union has deployed 258 ATMs, the largest credit union ATM fleet in California, across the area. The CU purchased some of the machines from CU Ventures, a now defunct ATM network, and others from usual channels, Hanighen said.
In some ways the ATMs were not ideal since the older machines had to be upgraded to meet the increased security encryption standards as well as other modernizations, he said. But the CU took advantage of the opportunity to work with ACI, the firm helping it drive the ATMs, to streamline the administration of the ATMs and centralize it to one redundant server.
The improvement allows the credit union, for example, to update the security encryption keys for all of its ATMs every quarter, a practice that surpasses the industry standard, from one central location, Hanighen explained.
Hanighen said Orange County Teachers does not particularly cross-sell products or services from its ATMs, but does allow numerous different services, such as using transfers to make loan payments from the ATMs. He also noted that, significantly, the credit union has not seen activity at its ATMs drop off even though the CU has seen member use of Internet banking rise.
"Of course, much of the traffic at the ATMs is cash based," Hanighen said, "but we have still seen our ATM use flatten out after a period of some decline and even increase at several locations."
Hanighen also said the ATM presence has helped the credit union introduce itself to potential members in communities where it has no branches. The credit union has not yet built a branch in the very populous San Diego County for example, but has seen growth in its membership in the county from the presence of the ATMs there. –dmorrison@cutimes.com
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