During its Annual Stockholder Meeting, Xtend, Inc., a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based multi-owned cooperative CUSO, announced that for the third year in a row it would be partnering with fellow CUSO CU*Answers, Inc. to offer no-charge outbound member calls to help drive awareness of credit union products and services. The call campaigns, which will kick off in late 2011, will be offered to all credit unions in the cuasterisk.com network.

Xtend President Scott Collins comments, “When Randy (CU*Answers CEO Randy Karnes) indicated that they were interested in sponsoring these calls for their credit union partners once again in fiscal 2012, our teams went to work preparing for a new round of campaigns. Over the past two years, we have had over seventy credit unions participate in the no-charge call program, to the tune of 40,000 calls. And since we now have more than 190 credit unions in the network, we are confident that this year’s participation will keep us busier than ever.”

According to Collins, the outbound call campaigns are designed to offer credit unions a variety of choices, but he hopes most will use the calls to help fill their loan application pipeline. “Although credit unions can choose from a variety of topics again this year, we are hoping that they will turn us loose to help drive lending activity, especially from their members who have loans at other financial institutions. And since all credit unions in the cuasterisk.com network utilize CU*BASE (the core data processing system from CU*Answers) we are able to provide a seamless solution, from data mining to lead member follow-up.”

Collins anticipates that his agent team will execute as many as 50,000 calls as part of this program.