Mid-States Corporate adds bill pay, quietly building Web design business

NAPERVILLE, Ill. – Corporate credit unions are meeting more and more of their member credit unions’ online needs. The $3.7 billion Mid-States Corporate FCU announced recently that it would be offering online bill pay for its member CUs to offer their members. Mid-States is using eBP MemberPay, the bill pay solution of U.S. Central’s e-com subsidiary, Corporate Network eCom. MemberPay features a back-office administration system that allows CUs to control members’ profiles, passwords and access. It also shows activity in real-time and allows the CU to customize graphical elements, branding, and wording. A number of other corporates, including Southwest Corporate, Mid-Atlantic Corporate, CenCorp, Empire Corporate, Tri-Corp, Louisiana Corporate; and others are also offering electronic bill pay. These corporates say electronic bill pay is just a natural extension of corporates’ item processing function. However, corporates seem to be expanding into online areas other than bill pay. Just recently the $100 million CorpStar inked a deal with Fiserv’s ITI to deliver core processing in a service bureau environment. As for Mid-States, it has quietly been building a Web design business. The corporate employs two Web designers at its Indianapolis office (the old headquarters of INDICORP which merged with Mid-States). So far Mid-States has designed Web sites for about 15 credit unions. “I think every corporate is looking for an edge now that we’re in a higher competitive environment, which has been outstanding for credit unions. They’re getting a lot better service and it’s made corporates better,” said Ken Bator, vice president of marketing for Mid-States. When Mid-States merged with INDICORP, it noticed some high-tech talent in INDICORP’s marketing department. Two of those employees were transitioned to Web designers. “They’re trained on the latest software. We’re using Dreamweaver and Macromedia Flash. They’ve been doing a heck of a job. We haven’t blown the roof off the building, but it’s been steady, doing two or three credit union sites at any given time,” said Bator. Bator said Mid-States can get a CU Web site up and running for about $3,000. The corporate can also host and do any maintenance on the sites. “The way we’ve looked at our business the last couple of years is we’re here to help credit unions serve the membership better. We’ll take care of certain aspects of their business, so they can take care of the members walking through their doors,” said Bator. – [email protected]