Boosting Credit Union Management & Tech Development
“We were seeing a lot of credit unions that had to put important projects on hold because they, or their vendors, just didn’t have development resources to assign to work that needed to be done."
A couple of credit union-friendly organizations are aiming to help with management duties, such as board packets and workflow creation, and fast-tracking the development process for credit unions and vendors.
The Salt Lake City, Utah-based core data processing CUSO Prodigy (formerly CUProdigy) announced the acquisition of AgilityOrg and the hiring of its founder, Kai Ravnborg.
AgilityOrg is an online credit union management platform allowing credit unions to manage their board packets, create workflows, manage staffing schedules, perform vendor due diligence and create executive dashboards. Its ability to integrate into the core to use data in support of these features complements the Prodigy core platform.
AgilityOrg founder Kai Ravnborg, the original architect of the Cruise core processing platform for credit unions, joined Prodigy as a senior member of the development team. Ravnborg brings over 40 years of credit union industry experience to Prodigy.
“Kai’s dedication to credit unions paired with his vast knowledge of core architecture and credit union operations will benefit credit unions and their members for years to come,” Prodigy CEO Amber Harsin said.
“I have been attending the Prodigy annual conferences with mutual credit union clients for several years now,” Ravnborg said. “This gave me the opportunity to meet their staff and to see firsthand how they put their vision and mission into actual practice.”
The Tampa, Fla.-based Best Innovation Group (BIG), a technology and financial services innovator, released plans for a new service designed to help both credit unions and their vendors expedite development process efficiency. The solution, API Connection Experts or ACE, provides certified development expertise enabling credit unions to bridge the gap between work needing completion on their core or online banking platforms and their vendor’s busy schedule.
“As a trusted partner to vendors as well as credit unions, we could see that both sides are struggling to advance their fintech innovations as a result of the occasional resource shortage,” John Best, CEO of Best Innovation Group, said. “We want to help bridge that gap by supplementing development resources for the vendors and working closely with credit unions to move them forward on projects that might otherwise have to sit on the back burner.”
“We were seeing a lot of credit unions that had to put important projects on hold because they, or their vendors, just didn’t have development resources to assign to work that needed to be done,” Tom Stacy, BIG’s chief technology officer, whose team will staff these engagements, shared. “It seemed like a natural place for us to jump in. We already have a lot of experience developing against these platforms as the result of our voice banking platform integrations we thought we should offer that expertise to our partners for other API integrations as well.”
BIG indicated multiple partnerships are already in progress including with digital banking solutions providers Alkami and Jack Henry Associate’s Banno division. BIG’s resources include obtaining vendor certifications, which assure the highest quality of development work, and consistent outcomes for each client. BIG will continue to roll out additional certified integration partnerships with core and online banking vendors over the coming months.