Many Talk About Collaboration; Few Deliver

Collaboration is about leveraging resources – such as talent, money, customers and data – to achieve results better, faster and cheaper. Smaller companies need collaboration to compete with larger companies because they don’t have the scale to innovate and maintain quality products and services at a competitive price. Credit unions need collaboration to ensure access to technology and transaction channels, which serve our members in the global marketplace.

There are many success stories of credit union collaboration. CO-OP Financial Services is an example of enabling credit unions to compete with ATM, debit, credit and shared branch transactions in an industry aggregated fashion at a competitive price. The CO-OP ATM network has roughly 30,000 ATMs accessible to credit union members, more than just about any bank. Our trade associations are collaborative solutions for industry advocacy. There are many collaborative ventures in lending solutions, insurance, investment brokerage, technology and others. Each generates an advantage to the participants that helps them meet their mission.

Bethpage Federal Credit Union, SECU of Maryland and Bellco Credit Union have a uniquely deep collaborative relationship. We share technology and related vendor partnerships, leveraging size for better solutions at cheaper prices. We share operations including a call center, real estate and consumer lending origination and servicing, collections and deposit operations. Combined, the three credit unions have more than $10 billion in assets and more than 750,000 members. Each of those members receives the same high quality service, and each institution experiences savings only available to larger institutions. Open Technology Solutions and S3 Shared Service Solutions were selected by NACUSO as CUSOs of the Year in 2015.