Last week, CU*NorthWest, a CUSO located in Washington State, along with network partners from Xtend and CU*Answers in Grand Rapids, MI, held a Town Hall for a group of Southern California clients and prospects hosted at South Bay Credit Union in Redondo Beach.  

The meeting was held to update clients on upcoming developments for the CU*BASE^® product line, discuss the recent conversion of credit unions in Southern California, give a general business update on CU*NorthWest and provide a platform for client experience sharing.

“This was a great opportunity for our credit unions to share best practices and leverage collective skill-sets.  I am looking forward to benefiting from our collaborative efforts.” said Jennifer Oliver, South Bay Credit Union CEO.

In addition to the standard user group topics, “We worked with these credit unions to help form a vision for larger collaboration using the tools native to their core processing solution and network.  These credit unions have a strong drive to work together and have agreed to taking concrete steps in establishing cross operational services agreements to facilitate rapid access resources from other credit unions in the network” says Greg Smith, CEO of CU*NorthWest.

CU*NorthWest and Xtend will now work with these credit unions to execute standard operational services agreements setting the stage for a “network neighborhood” functionality to be added to their core processing environments.  The “network neighborhood” will first create a constant visual reinforcement that participating credit unions are available to each other in the network but will also establish a technological platform for resource sharing while allowing the individual credit unions to maintain security and control over contracted resources.

“We hope these credit unions will not only leverage the myriad of business blueprints available from the network for collaborative execution of back office functions but will go further and use these tools to create new cooperative businesses with other credit unions in our network” said Greg Smith, CEO of CU*NorthWest.