Chartway Rediscovers Its Core Capabilities
A credit union gains efficiencies through upgrades to its core system.
The $2.2 billion Virginia Beach, Va.-based Chartway Federal Credit Union rediscovered the capabilities of its core system and in the process gained efficiencies in upgrades and maintenance, failover tests and staffing.
Chartway selected Symitar EASE, the outsourced delivery model of the Episys core processing platform from the Monett, Mo.-based Jack Henry & Associates some seven years ago but they were not utilizing everything the system offered. “We did a vanilla install and just kind of let it sit there,” the credit union’s CIO Rob Keatts said.
When Keatts arrived shortly after from another large credit union that was running its core in-house, unlike Chartway, which had embraced an outsourced model, he had questions and concerns, mostly about how it would be without having “control.”
Keatts found the functionality of Chartway’s Episys system to be no different than running it in-house. He can still run custom development as desired. And, the technology is not something he has to budget for, or be concerned with, because Symitar does the lifecycle management that previously bogged the credit union down. Outsourcing alleviates the need to manage on premise systems or hardware updates.
According to Kathleen Garvey, outsourcing solution specialist for Symitar, 54% of JHA core clients (banks and credit unions) have chosen an outsourced delivery model and more than 70 of these financial institutions (banks and credit unions) have assets more than $1 billion.
“When clients decide to outsource with us, we deliver our core in an environment that allows the credit union to customize and extend Episys to meet its own unique requirements, just as our in-house clients are able to do. We will complete OS and firmware upgrades, we will complete purges, we will complete release loads, to name a few. Our team of IT professionals becomes an extension of the client’s IT team and allows the credit union to refocus valuable, or limited, resources on revenue-generating projects.”
To learn the full capability of its system, Chartway had Symitar come in for a rediscover session where the financial technology company does a presentation as if they were pitching a brand-new system and detail EASE’s features and functionalities. “We went through that entire process with Symitar, identified a bunch of stuff the system did that we were not taking advantage of,” Keatts explained. He added the credit union gained a ton of efficiency just by using the product in a better way.
Read the full article in the May 9 issue of CU Times.