Indiana Members Is Among First CU Users of Fiserv BANKLINK

INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana Members Credit Union is making a run for the commercial business of new and potential members with cash tools long the exclusive province of banks.The $1.1 billion institution is one of the first credit union users of Fiserv’s version of BANKLINK, an electronic cash-management service with a 30-year history and a client base that includes about 300 commercial banks and 30,000 business end users, the company said.Fiserv had been collaborating with BANKLINK while searching for a cash-management suite for credit unions, and then after deciding on it, combined its tools with remote capture and other solutions that came along with the big CheckFree acquisition, including core platform integration capabilities.Now all that technology has been scaled and interfaced with many of the core processing platforms Fiserv offers through its credit union division, according to David Lindner, the division’s chief strategy officer.Fiserv BANKLINK features include Web-based cash management that supports both ACH functions and credit and debit transactions using “virtually every SEC code supported by NACHA,” the company said.Check 21 components such as CheckFree’s remote capture are among other elements of the package, the company said, and includes some features that might particularly appeal to the smaller businesses that credit unions target.“The CheckFree technology expands the capture capability beyond traditional dedicated scanners. It allows BANKLINK to expand to flatbed scanners and to lockboxes, so you can scan a coupon in addition to a check, which is something that’s very important to a lot of businesses,” Lindner said.A handful of Indiana Members’ members, such as a doctor’s office, have signed up for remote deposit, said Didi Lindner, vice president of information systems. ACH service will follow, she said.The BANKLINK system is also customizable, Lindner said. Breaking the system down into individual features was a key both to making it appealing and scalable to credit unions as small as $50 million in assets, the Fiserv executive said.“When we scaled it back, we didn’t cut it back. We can offer a subset of the BANKLINK product with no limitation on the upside,” Lindner said.–[email protected]