Its no secret, credit unions are spending millions of dollars every year integrating technologies. These integrations happen vendor to core and vendor to vendor. It seems an unavoidable cost of doing business. But is it?

The CUNA Technology Council launched a cooperative initiative with council members and credit union vendors to solve this expensive problem. This initiative is called Credit Union Financial Exchange Standards (CUFX Standards). As a cooperative effort for credit unions and vendors, CUFX is creating integration standards. These standards have a pre-set mapping of data field so every time a credit union needs to map this data field it is a plug and play standard versus a professional services development project. CUFX’s experience is indicating the savings to credit unions will be time to market of a new product or service can be launched in half the time.

This cost saving initiative is provided at no cost to credit unions or vendors. There may be some incremental development costs in the creation of a standard but a lot of the work is jointly done with the credit union, the vendor and a team of volunteer developers from the Tech Council.

The beauty of CUFX Standards is that once the standard has been developed it is now available to any credit union working with this vendor for integration. It is truly a cooperative effort in the true spirit of the movement.

Many of the leading vendors in the industry are engaged with CUFX. In fact they are not only engaged but they have paid an annual sponsorship fee to CUFX to be part of our Vendor Advisory Board. For a full list of these cooperative vendors can be found on http://cufxstandards.com/Participation/Supporters/tabid/104/Default.aspx.

This page also includes a high profile list of credit unions that have contributed sponsorship donations to CUFX or are donating technology experts from their staff to help with the development of these standards.

If you are a vendor working with credit unions or a credit union that is tired of paying too much for system integrations, contact CUFX Standards, busdev@CUFXstandards.com to find out how. This initiative is an excellent way credit unions can efficiently and effectively compete as we need to continue to rely on third parties to bring the products, services, access and operational efficiencies to our members.