That team comprises CUSC's people, of course, along with PSCU Financial Services of St. Petersburg, Fla., Credit Union Direct Corp. of Ontario, Calif., and Finivation, a New York City software specialist led by credit union and community bank veteran technologist Brian Bodell.

California-based CUDL provides the automated lending platform. Call center and other support services come from PSCU, primarily from its Phoenix and suburban Detroit locations, and Finivation provides the tech support and software needed to cyber glue that infrastructure together.

Jen Franta, a relationship manager at PSCU's Total Member Care call center operations in Detroit, said her organization uses dedicated agents for the CUSC program, increasing the staffing for peak volume times and assigning them to other clients at other times.

“They're not just getting calls for CU Student Choice but they're highly trained and know that program very well and have been with them since the beginning,” she said. And as more experience and data are gathered, “we're getting a better grasp of potential call volume and the appropriate staffing we need to deal with that scale.”

Meanwhile, helping to engineer the kind of technology infrastructure that enables CUSC and its far-flung partners to work with their growing customer pool and seasonal work ebbs and flows is a sweet spot for Bodell.

“Software is a leaving, breathing organism that needs to adapt and evolve with business needs,” said Bodell, who made his mark in the credit union industry with qbt Systems, a middleware pioneer.