Project Credit Union - Day 11

I spent most of yesterday trying to understand the Credit Union Expansion Project (CUEP). It took a quite a long time and a lot of reading to get some sense of what the project is about.

In summary, the expansion project has been won by ABCUL and Cornerstone Mututal Services (a subsidiary) and is aimed at increasing credit union membership and helping credit unions become financially sustainable.

It aims to tackle both of these by offering a set of shared services that all credit unions can take advantage of. Some of these services will help reduce credit union operating costs by automating some previously manual processes; automated credit checks for loan applications, for example. While other services aim to make the credit unions more attractive to new members by offering facilities found in more traditional bank accounts; debit cards, saving accounts and online banking, for example.

I’m not 100% sure about the purpose of Cornerstone Mututal Services but I believe it may help ABCUL offer these services to all credit unions irrespective of trade association affiliation.

Unfortunately, everything appears to have gone a little quiet since the announcement of their winning bid on the 16th April 2013. That news story states, “The project will now begin in earnest and further information on what it will look like will be published by ABCUL over the coming weeks.”, but I can’t immediately see that there have been many/any updates.

I don’t doubt that this is a good project in general but I do wonder why it’s so hard to find any real information about it. In particular, one bit that’s still missing for me is how they’re hoping to provide the IT aspect of this project. I haven’t yet been able to find who, if anyone, they’ve partnered with to deliver it. Maybe we should get in touch to see if we can be involved somehow…

For anyone interested in digging into this in more detail (including links to lots of lengthy documents) you can check out the CUEP page on our wiki.