Direct FCU Encounters Its First Conversion Project Hurdle

Editor’s note: Direct Federal Credit Union is a one-branch, $750 million credit union located in Needham, Mass. It is undergoing its first core conversion since 1984 and has partnered with CU Times to document its journey until the new core is anticipated go live in 2021. Contributing authors will be members of the project team and each article will tell a story from a different point of view. Read its previous five articles and continue to follow along at cutimes.com/instantinsights.

Welcome back! If you’ve been following Direct’s progress through our core conversion, you’ve been hearing about how great things were going despite the global pandemic. Well, all good things must come to an end – we hit our first hurdle.

Our project team spent eight weeks compiling every form and letter we use. The forms then went through several layers of brand and compliance review. After that, our IT department had to convert each form to a fillable PDF for Corelation (our new core system provider) to map the respective data field in Keystone (the core system).

In early June, after we were halfway through the process, we discovered that the print functionality in Keystone was not what we expected and could not natively be batched. This means, across the credit union, we would be forced to print documents as one-offs immediately after a workflow is complete. Our current state, specifically as it relates to a high volume of loan applications and corresponding documents, is to batch print daily through our current Loan Origination System, MeridianLink. We met as a team to review this obstacle, and during this discussion we identified several additional workflows throughout the credit union that were currently manual but would benefit from batch printing.

We reached out to other Corelation Keystone customers to understand how they were handling batch printing and quickly learned that no one had been able to identify a solution for this on Keystone. Many customers were eager to have this capability, and acknowledged the benefit it would bring, but most were still completing one-off print jobs and relying on print vendors for statements and notices.

Unfortunately, due to our tight conversion schedule, Corelation was not able to commit to completing any custom work while maintaining our current project schedule. We all agreed we did not want to jeopardize the project plan and had to identify an alternative solution.

One of the reasons we selected Corelation as a partner was for its robust application programming interface (API) and commitment to easily integrate with other programs. Because of the Keystone API, we determined we could extract data from Keystone for our forms and letters and then pass it to a third-party printer for printing and mailing.

Through the Keystone user group, we met with representatives from Xpress Data, Inc. (XDI) and immediately knew the company would be a great partner that could provide us with the solution to our batch printing issue. From our initial conversations up until now, they have proven to be a flexible, accommodating and cost-efficient partner. They will be doing everything from the merging of our data to printing and mailing every piece that goes out in bulk daily. Additionally, they will create PDFs and index them for us to enable an easy transfer to our document management system, Alogent.

Although this solution isn’t perfect, we are satisfied with the outcome. It reinforced why we chose Corelation Keystone as our core and demonstrated how the ability to connect to their API is already benefiting us. Most of our documents will be printed by XDI, and a handful will continue to be printed at Direct – including official checks and auto loan drafts.

Not in the original project plan is the approximately 100 extracts our IT team will need to write for the documents going to XDI. However, we feel confident we can get it done and do not anticipate it will affect our project timeline. I am proud of how the entire project team came together to outline the issue, investigate solutions and embrace the final decision. We fought through our first major hurdle and now have an action plan in place for how to handle any additional hurdles.

4 Lessons Learned From Our First Hurdle

1. During the RFP process, it is imperative to think about your daily workflows from start to finish and have the core vendors walk you through that exact same process using their system. No detail (like printing) is too small.

2. Expect problems and be prepared to drop everything to find solutions quickly.

3. Listen to existing clients. If the same vendor’s name keeps coming up, speak to them sooner rather than later.

4. You will never be able to eliminate all manual processes, but try to automate as much as possible. We always accepted manual printing and are now realizing the incredible time savings we will achieve from automating the task through XDI.

Brian Medeiros is SVP, Chief Information Officer for Direct FCU in Needham, Mass. He can be reached at 781-433-2900 Ext. 273 or bmedeiros@direct.com.