At DCU, the conversion engaged more than 800 employees and its headquarters, operations center and 18 branch locations. New services, along with core processing, include an ATM platform, audio response, Internet banking and plastic cards, as well as teller, lending and back-office systems.

“We can say without reservation that the conversion was a resounding success,” says Carlo Cestra, DCU's president/CEO.

The core conversion was completed on Sunday and more than 100,000 new transactions were posted to the system by that afternoon. DCU also was able to fully re-open its operations a day earlier than planned.

“It felt good to keep the call center open over the weekend, it felt great to keep Internet banking and all our other electronic services going all weekend, but the best was opening doors a day early,” says Kris VanBeek, the credit union's vice president of IS.

DCU says it plans to use its new capabilities to soon introduce new services such as accepting home-scanned checks, health savings accounts and cash-management enhancements for online banking.

Across the country in Portland, OnPoint Community leaders say their conversion also came in under the 48 hours of scheduled running time they had planned.

Although the conversion was from one XP System solution to another, it was as involved as converting from a competitor's solution because it involved essentially a total platform replacement, including the addition of Web-based platforms for member services, financial services and lending.

The transition was smoothed by XP Systems staff helping with custom learning plans for each job position at the $2.5 billion, 300-plus employee CU and a blend of e-learning, classroom training and hands-on practice, the company and CU say.

“Having the practice system loaded with our database and having practice PCs at each branch made a huge impact,” says Rob Stuart, OnPoint's president/CEO.

The XP2 system integrates hardware, software, and services through a Web-enabled Windows environment with an open relational database and IBM pSeries as its main server.

John Edwards, president of XP Systems, a California-based unit of Fiserv with about 300 clients, says the DCU and OnPoint conversion follow “on the success of other recent XP2 conversions,” including at $1.8 billion Teachers Credit Union in South Bend, Ind.

“We at XP Systems are truly proud of the huge accomplishment XP2 represents in advancing core system technology for progressive credit unions,” Edwards says.

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