VALLEY FORGE, Pa. – Fiserv credit union subsidiaries preach about their ability to utilize resources of their parent company to bring products to market faster – that's just what USERS did with business services. USERS has released its new Commercial Integrator solution. The backbone of the product is from Fiserv's ITI group. It is essentially using ITI's Premier commercial processing product, which is used by 3,600 financials. This isn't your everyday integration however. ITI is based out of Lincoln, Nebraska, and USERS is tapping into a data center in Brookfield, Wisconsin (Fiserv's headquarters) to access it. The unique thing says USERS President John Schooler is the core functionality of the ITI system has been integrated with USERS' DataSafe teller platform in such a way that tellers and other CU employees don't have to do anything different when processing business transactions. "The system is smart enough to know if it's a normal retail member or a commercial account. They can post transactions, post inquiries and do other routine functions without having to leave our teller platform," said Schooler. "It's a pretty unique approach. We started to look at what we needed to build our commercial functionality, and decided not to rewrite everything, but leverage what was available," said Schooler. Schooler said if USERS just offered its clients the ITI system in service bureau mode all sorts of problems would have come up. "Our initial thought was we'll just have them run the ITI software and we can split back and forth between the two systems. Problem there is you would have to ask everybody `are you a commercial account or regular account,' " said Schooler. Beyond that the CU might have to use two cash draws and maybe even a separate window for business accounts. " Most credit unions have such a small volume of commercial business, it doesn't make sense to carve out that kind of real estate," said Schooler. To keep the business transactions in the CU's general ledger, USERS receives a download from Brookfield at the end of the day and adds the business transactions to the credit union's consolidated general ledger. USERS CU clients can't completely serve business members just through this integration. Schooler said USERS is going by the 80/20 rule. The business functionality within DataSafe can handle 80% of transactions business accounts will make, such as deposits, inquiries, loan payments and others. The other 20% will have to be handled by business specialized CU employees who have ITI's other system functionality in the back office. The initial set up of a business loan would fall into this 20% category. The $661 million Columbia CU, based in Vancouver, Washington, was the first credit union to roll out Commercial Integrator. Columbia is a good test credit union in that it serves 1,500 business members representing $40 million in business deposits and $120 million in business loans.Columbia notified members of the new system functionality and said it's seeing more business deposits rolling in. Two functions most important in Columbia's eyes are being able to set flexible rate structures and perform complex loan participation tracking. [email protected]