The credit union did its due diligence by requesting sales presentations from its existing provider along with two outside vendors. Vibrant also spent time seeking feedback from other credit unions that recently completed a conversion.

"The conversion is not about the technology, it is about finding a partner in the process that is going to be there with you in every stage of the business, care about the business as much as you, and allow you the ability to live your business model to the full extent," McCombs said.

Vibrant signed with Fiserv in December 2014. A month later, the credit union assembled nine individuals from different business units onto a core execution team and moved the group into a leased building offsite. The execution team spent the first three to four months of the conversion process reviewing and scrubbing existing data.

"It allowed us to have a really clean set of data to work with right off the bat," McCombs explained.

Vibrant recommended credit unions create a concrete plan before launching a conversion. In Vibrant's case, the credit union began working directly with Fiserv on business processes and a conversion roadmap three to four months into the process.

"The Vibrant Credit Union team is passionate about serving the evolving needs of members, and with Fiserv they have a partner with the technology, support and strategic vision to help them deliver unique member experiences at the speed of life," Mark Sievewright, president, Credit Union Solutions, Fiserv, said. "Our experienced and expert team provided a smooth and timely implementation for Vibrant.

McCombs noted, "One of the beauties of core systems today is that it has a significant amount of flexibility and functionality of what you want to do and how you want to build that."

He added the organization wanted to ensure it wouldn't layer old, poor processes onto a new system.

"We looked for the most efficient way to run this process going forward," McCombs said.

For example, Vibrant decided on process flow for functions such as account and loan origination, and ACH.

Next on the pre-conversion schedule was data testing, running mini-conversions and actually transferring data over to the new system. McCombs recalled that while collecting pre-conversion feedback from other credit unions, several said they tried to balance their daily operations with the conversion.

"It just seemed that neither of them went well," he said. "The things that became the hottest fires tended to be what individuals worked on."

Vibrant, which serves 41,000 members, determined it did not want to have to extinguish fires.

"We had 12 to 15 months from when we signed to final conversion and we had a lot of goals we wanted to achieve," McCombs said. "We didn't want to shut down our business."

At the same time, Vibrant was transitioning to a new online and mobile banking provider, and working toward major goals in retail lending, new deposit growth and profitability, so running its daily operations smoothly during the conversion was essential.

Read the full account of Vibrant's core transition in the April 20, 2016 print issue of Credit Union Times.