What are the technology challenges for new CUSOs?
If you are a small CUSO, Credit Union service organization, you may be looking for alternatives to using the sponsor Credit Union for your technology. If so, this post is for you.
When Ongoing Operations, A Disaster Recovery CUSO and now a Community Cloud CUSO, got started I thought the sponsor Credit Union would be pretty supportive. In some ways they were, they provided some human resources services and some workspace. Beyond that, they were at a huge loss at how to provide things like a domain name or e-mail accounts to an external organization. On top of that, Credit Union staff largely felt that they had inherited extra work without seeing any of the benefits to starting a CUSO.
Here are some of the main challenges you will need to deal with technically when starting a new CUSO:
- Separate E-mail accounts (sometimes with functionality such as secure messaging)
- CUSO Website Hosting
- Access to servers or hosting for key technology applications
- QuickBooks
- Phones (separate from the sponsor Credit Union)
- Support of mobile technology for employees who spend the vast majority of their time on the road
It isn’t that the Credit Union can’t provide your CUSO Technology, it is more that it isn’t their core competency. It is a big diversion for their IT team, they don’t know how to charge for the services, and they generally aren’t setup from a security perspective to deal with multi-tenancy issues that come along with hosting multiple companies on the same platform.
At the end of the day, Ongoing Operations ended up outsourcing all of our Human Resources work to one provider and now use Insperity. It works great and provides world class tools and HR experience that even our sponsor Credit Union couldn’t touch.
Today, Ongoing Operations provides CUSO Technology for many CUSO’s around the country. CU*Answers, a CUSO in Michigan, does a bit of this as well if you are looking for some choices. The Ongoing Operations – Credit Union community cloud – does a great job of providing your CUSO perfectly elastic and secure technology so you can have enterprise tools for one employee or for 500. The best advantage is that you can spend all your energy (and capital) on launching a new CUSO, not building a technology platform.
Primary Benefits Include
- Per User Per Month Pricing
- Meets Credit Union regulatory standards
- Highly Secure
- Access to 400+ Credit Unions who like using CUSO’s
- Speed of Deployment
- Access to world-class expertise
- Opportunities to Collaborate on new Credit Union Technology and Services
If you would like additional information about the types of solutions Ongoing Operations can provide please fill out this quick form:
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