It is a brutal battleground.
When a credit union's core system, its single most expensive piece of equipment, is up for grabs, there are dozens of companies that want that business.
Buzz aside, there are few competitive core conversions in any year. David Gibbard is a former senior vice president at Birmingham, Ala., core system company EPL, and is now an independent consultant in Atlanta. He said this year there will be 40 to 60 competitive conversions. He also said that number had ticked up because suddenly, credit unions find themselves putting more demands on cores, for everything from mobile payments to collections, and in some cases, older cores are proving inflexible.
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Samuel Brownell, onetime cores guru with Callahan & Associates and now founder of CUCollaborate, recently issued a report documenting credit union satisfaction with core systems. He offered a more bullish estimate.
"North of 60" credit unions will convert this year, Brownell predicted. He also indicated he detected rising dissatisfaction with cores among many credit unions.
At Cornerstone Advisors in Scottsdale, Ariz., cores expert Scott Hodgins offered a third opinion. "I have not seen a huge uptake in core conversions. But I have seen a lot more looking," he said, referring to credit unions that shop for a new core but hesitate to pull the trigger.
"There won't be one big winner. There's a lot of market share out there," he added.
Hodgins' last point is key. Sometimes the core systems battle appears to be Fiserv (with 2,317 credit union cores per the June, 2013 count by Callahan & Associates) versus Symitar (with 695 credit unions in the Callahan count), but that is just part of the picture.
Needs vary, so do budgets, and so – importantly – do past personal relationships with core vendors.
CU Times interviewed several credit union executives about their core systems and found a range of opinions. One credit union bashed Fiserv, while several others sing Fiserv's praises.
Similar mixed opinions were shared regarding D & H's UltraData core, and CUSOs CUProdigy and CU*Answers.
Read what they said in the Oct. 15 issue of CU Times.
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