IBS Journal May 2015


DHCU Community Credit Union in software and brand overhaul


DHCU Community Credit Union is going through an enterprise-wide brand and technology revamp, shortly changing its name to Vibrant Community Credit Union and its core system to Fiserv’s DNA. The brand change is coming into effect in early May, and around the same time the bank will introduce a new internet banking solu- tion, supplied by Texas-based digital bank- ing software developer, Alkami Technology. A new mobile solution, also developed by Alkami, will follow in a couple of months. The credit union is also going to open three new branches in the next four months in its home area of the Quad Cities (a region of four counties in northwest Illinois and south-eastern Iowa). The new core system, however, is not


going live at DHCU/Vibrant CU until March next year. It will be deployed on a hosted basis. The teams are now cleaning up the data and starting to move it onto DNA. The products have already been set up in the new system. ‘We are actually ahead of schedule,’ says the credit union’s president and CEO, Matt McCombs. The contract with Fiserv was signed


on 30th December 2014 and the dedicat- ed project team was assembled in January


‘Saturday with Santa’ at DHCU


2015. McCombs says that as the project is a collaborative undertaking of business and IT, the project leader is a VP of business, but he reports to the CIO. There are seven peo- ple from the credit union working on the project full-time. Fiserv has also put togeth- er a team to work with DHCU/Vibrant and McCombs describes it as ‘a strong team with strong processes in place’. He admits that the team was wary that following the sales process, the vendor’s sales people could disappear never to be seen again, but everyone was relieved to see this was not the case. ‘Fiserv’s head of sales checks in with us once a week or so, and also pro- ject leads and product department people from Fiserv are regularly in touch. The sup- port we receive from across the organisa- tion is impressive, from the top executives to the people on the ground,’ he observes. On the way out is the Episys core sys-


Matt McCombs, DHCU/Vibrant Credit Union


tem from Jack Henry’s Symitar division, which has been running at the credit union, on a hosted basis, since the mid- 1990s. Moving to a new version of Episys was considered, says McCombs, and the vendor was invited ‘to present to us as if we were a new client’. Two other solutions were evaluated alongside Symitar’s offer- ing, Fiserv’s DNA and Corelation’s Keystone. Of course, it would have been an easi- er project if the credit union stayed with


14 © IBS Intelligence 2015 www.ibsintelligence.com


the incumbent provider, notes McCombs, but the team felt that what was offered by Jack Henry/Symitar ‘did not align with our vision, and what was offered to us going forward did not differ much from what we already had’. Corelation was an interesting option and the company had ties to Symi- tar: Corelation was founded by CEO, John Landis, who helped to write the Episys core system, and the majority of Keystone users today are converts from Symitar. However, it was felt that Keystone was still too ear- ly in its stages (it was brought to market in 2009/10) and ‘did not yet have what we needed’. The credit union is proud of its ‘blue


collar’ roots and the ties to the John Deere Harvester Works factory, having started there in 1935 with $40 (hence the original name, Deere Harvester Credit Union, later abbreviated to DHCU), states McCombs. Nowadays anyone living or working with- in a 50-mile radius of any DHCU/Vibrant branch can become a member and the credit union is keen ‘to transition from member service to member experience’. The new brand and front-to-back office software are vital components of this tran- sition. ‘We were looking for an easy to use system, that would enable efficient pro- cessing at the back-end and would allow us to introduce changes and new products


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