USERS Knows Hawaii; Core Processor Serves 25% of the Market

VALLEY FORGE, Pa. – For those who haven’t been to Hawaii or know the culture, the word “ohana” may not mean much, but to those at USERS it’s everything for doing business in Hawaii. Ohana means family in Hawaiian and USERS has learned it has to treat its Hawaiian CU clients as family to keep the relationship strong. USERS has one of the strongest presences among any credit union processor in Hawaii. It recently added Windward Community FCU in Kailua as a client, making it the second Hawaiian CU to join USERS within a month and the 25th overall client there. With only 100 CUs in the state, this gives USERS a quarter of the market. When mainland firms want to serve Hawaiians it’s no secret that they need some kind of tangible presence on the islands. USERS has had a data center on Oahu since the 1970s. “I think trust and loyalty is very important for doing business in Hawaii. Over the years USERS has ebbed and flowed the staff for the data center,” said Larry Tankeloff, SVP of Operations for USERS, but USERS has consistently shown that it is committed to serving the CUs there said Tankeloff, and that’s now paying off. The fortunate thing for USERS is there has been churn of late with other processors, so it is positioned to pick up new business. A few vendors have dropped out of the running, and one is involved in some changes that may open some doors for USERS. Tankeloff said USERS tries to keep Hawaiian CUs in the mainland loop by inviting them to all its mainland conference, but also realized that it needs to bring conferences to them. For the last five or six years it has been holding mini client conferences twice a year in Hawaii. Ward Yamamoto, an Account Manager for USERS who is located at its Hawaii data center, said USERS is also prepared to serve all sizes of CUs. Hawaii has a lot of smaller CUs, and turning them away would not go over well with other Hawaiian CUs. USERS has clients ranging from as small as $1.7 million all the way up to $760 million. “A lot of it is word of mouth in Hawaii,” said Ward. The data center has 12 staffers and is based in Honolulu. USERS has clients on the islands of Maui, the Big Island, and Molokai. That concept of ohana can be seen with USERS disaster recovery. Tankelooff said one of its clients, Hawaii FCU, was nice enough to act as a backup disaster recovery site, which is tested every year with multiple CUs. Tankeloff said the CUs in Hawaii also appreciate USERS keeping equipment fresh. It has a three-year buying cylce, where in year one it buys CPUs, in year two it buys CPUs, and in year three it invests in telecom. “We rotate it for disaster recovery purposes. It justifies that we’re always on new equipment,” said Tankeloff. [email protected]