San Francisco FCU Looks to Leverage New Tech Provider as the ‘Single Source of Truth, Data, and Processing’ for All Member Needs
Driven by its mission, San Francisco Federal Credit Union ($1.1B assets; 47,000 members; San Francisco, CA) is steadfast in providing financial security to its members by offering relevant products and services combined with imparting professional and authentic advice. To maintain its drive in continually meeting its mission – especially as the pace of technology and business continues to hasten, San Francisco FCU needed to employ a new core processor that would allow flexibility, continuity, and stability well into the future.
For example, the credit union looks to extend its ability to directly provide products and services to members from wherever they may be on whichever technology they choose to use. In addition, providing responses to members within seconds is a priority – depending on the complexity of the request.
Technology, particularly, application architecture has changed dramatically in the last decade, making said tasks at San Francisco FCU – which has been running on its current core for several decades – nearly impossible to achieve. Its current core hasn’t been able to offer relevant capabilities to today’s digital platforms, necessitating a shift away from the core.
Today, instead of having a single system of record, San Francisco is housing data and processing on five different platforms:
- consumer loans
- memberships
- real estate
- three data warehouses
- digital records and archives
“If we are to scale, remain relevant and deliver the type of services in the manor that our members expect,” says San Francisco Federal Credit Union Chief Information Officer Brad Morrison, “we had to look toward new core platforms with a different mindset toward digital infrastructure and product delivery.”
According to Morrison, the credit union’s team has been laboring under an enormous load or manual effort on disparate systems to give members the impression of efficiency and cohesive process – all with mixed results.
“It was clear that IT could help,” he says, “but the whole credit union had to re-engineer its business onto technology platforms that put the transaction and data into immediate reach to the members or the frontline staff.”
Once Morrison and his team examined the process of understanding how they wanted the credit union to be better with new products, enhanced services, increased performance and efficiencies, etc., they subsequently looked at the challenges on achieving these deliverables.
“We tried to understand how we could leverage new platform architectures to deliver immediate effectiveness on a new core, as well as the open architecture required to continue evolving over the years,” he explains. “Corelation’s KeyStone core and KeyBridge API were the clear solutions to solve the current and future requirements of our strategic plan.”
Morrison adds that KeyBridge is by far the most powerful component of the KeyStone platform – which allows the credit union options to engage with a third-party vendor or develop its own ancillary system. “KeyBridge is above and beyond all else,” he says.
From there, it was just a matter of making sure Corelation was the type of partner San Francisco FCU wanted to be partnered with for the duration – focusing on the importance of evaluating the company, its people, support capabilities, short- and long-term plans, and goals.
“My hope for a successful core conversion [August 2020] is not to apply a new core to our current business practices but to leverage the core conversion to look at delivering services to the members in a new and more efficient way,” he says. “We would like to reengineer the business of this credit union around best practices and a digital channel, which leverages the core as the single source of truth, data, and processing for all of the member’s needs.”
Morrison and his team’s focus is on the digital and technology of San Francisco FCU around KeyBridge and working with Corelation, as well as third-party partners. The selection of a powerful, flexible, and open core system....-->
Driven by its mission, San Francisco Federal Credit Union ($1.1B assets; 47,000 members; San Francisco, CA) is steadfast in providing financial security to its members by offering relevant products and services combined with imparting professional and authentic advice. To maintain its drive in continually meeting its mission – especially as the pace of technology and business continues to hasten, San Francisco FCU needed to employ a new core processor that...