For Xtend, Inc., a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based cooperative CUSO, the time leading up to Hurricane Sandy, as well as the storm’s aftermath meant business as usual in support of their partners.  The shared resources CUSO provides back office and call center services to credit unions across the country on a daily basis, and the east coast storm simply meant that support teams would be a little busier for the next week or two.

Company President Scott Collins commented, “Our thoughts and prayers go out to our partners who have experienced Hurricane Sandy first-hand.  As we tracked the storm’s progress during the past week, it was clear that many of our east coast credit unions would be impacted and that we needed to jumpstart our business resiliency services just in case they were needed.  We already provide daily back office services for many of those credit unions, but we reached out to the others to offer bookkeeping assistance as needed.  From a call center standpoint, one of our Manhattan-based credit unions began directing inbound calls to our agents Monday morning and others may follow suit if they are closed for a prolonged period.”

Collins noted that Xtend has been offering stand-in support services for nearly five years.  “It’s one of those things that you hope you never have to activate,” said Collins, “but we have engaged a half dozen different times since we first started offering the service.  We work closely with our sister CUSO CU*Answers to go into ‘business recovery’ mode when weather threatens any of our partners, and their team did its usual stellar job with this latest challenge.  It is truly a team effort – a cooperative effort between two cooperatives.”

Collins expects that his teams will be engaged for up to a week or more.