Too many credit unions put too little thought into their relationships with their credit and debit card processors and should concentrate on getting more out those partnerships.

That is one of the recommendations Lesley Hastings, director of member partnerships at The Members Group, shared in "When the Grass Really Is Greener: Evaluating Your Processing Partner at Renewal Time," a new white paper on the topic.

"The paper arose out of what we had been hearing from credit unions about their card processor searches," Hastings said. "Both credit unions that wound up coming with us and those that did not. They would ask us questions about working with processors, and we noticed that a number of questions kept coming up, so those were the ones we put in the paper." Hastings said that TMG did not put out the paper to market its own products or services or to knock those provided by any other processor but instead to improve the processing experience of all credit unions.