West Michigan-based CUSO, CU*Answers, announced that it had recently signed and converted Stepping Stones Community Federal Credit Union (Wilmington, Delaware) to its “Starting A Credit Union” program intended for newly formed credit unions to utilize its CU*BASE^® processing system at a small fraction of the cost associated with traditional data processing fees.

CU*Answers re-iterated a primary goal in having crafted this unique program was to deliver a strong message to the market space that CU*Answers is financially committed to assisting every start-up effort, and is encouraging other vendors to deploy a similar participation model. CU*Answers stressed that a key component to this program is that it provides free CU*BASE data processing services for an initial 2-year period, bridging that critical time often needed by a start-up credit union working to ramp up its community outreach, while being able to deploy a robust product tool set that allows them to effectively compete with considerably larger financial institutions from day one.