Signal Financial FCU Plans Friday Shut Down to Prepare for Pandemic Event

What if the government declared an emergency and ordered all businesses to close their retail operations to stem the spread of the coronavirus? Would your credit union be ready for it?

The $427 million Signal Financial Federal Credit Union in Kensington, Md., plans to find the answer to that critical question on Friday when it will shut down its six branches in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., and its call center. The credit union’s 97 employees will be operating the credit union from their homes or other remote locations, “stress testing” Signal Financial’s pandemic operating program through its virtual private network-authentication system.

“We’ve been using our secured VPN-authentication program here and there with some of our people working from home, but we’ve never had an occasion where the entire staff is doing that at the same time,” Signal Financial President/CEO Francois Verleysen said. “We do have remote call center agents, but we’ve never had all of them remoting in at the same time. So it will be a good, interesting test to make sure it all works. We presume it is all going to work, but we’ll find out for sure on Friday.”

In addition to serving members from remote locations from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., staff will be monitoring and operating from their remote locations the credit union’s IT system, ACH processes, wire transfers, deposit operations and other functions.

“We picked Friday because Friday is a payroll day as well as one of our busiest days,” Verleysen said. “So we want to make sure everything works the way it should work so that in the event that something happens and they [the government] tell us we do have to shut down, we will be prepared. At the same time, if there is something in our program or process that isn’t working, we will figure out through this test so we will be able to make the corrections so we’ll be ready.”

Through its website, social media pages and emails, Signal Financial began informing its 21,052 members on Tuesday about the planned branch closings.

“In our messaging to our members, we’ll help them sign up for remote deposit in seconds if they don’t have it or where they can access cash at one of our ATMs or at shared-branching ATMs,” he said. “So we are giving them all the tools and we are also asking them to plan with us so that they will also be prepared.”

So far, the member feedback has been positive.

“They are glad we are doing something proactively rather than finding out that something goes wrong and we can’t service them during a pandemic shutdown,” Verleysen said.