Just seven years ago, Lubbock, TX-based Texas Tech Federal Credit Union (TTFCU) had about $30 million dollars in assets and only a handful of employees operating out of space rented from Texas Tech University. After it changed its charter in 2001 to include students in its field of membership, the credit union nearly doubled in size to more than 10,000 members and around $50 million in total assets. It now has 20 employees in three locations on the university campus and it plans to open an off-campus branch in the next couple of years. The credit union is also one of the university’s largest student loan lenders.

Not surprisingly, this rapid expansion has put pressure on TTFCU’s IT systems. For the last 15 years it has used the same core processor. According to Chris Hutson, accounting manager at TTFCU, the lending and member service platforms have been upgraded over the years, but the credit union had outgrown the accounting module.

To solve the problem, the core processing systems vendor suggested deploying Fiserv Wisdom because it is compatible with its own technology. Wisdom is a suite of back-office financial solutions developed by former credit union executives nearly 25 years ago. About 600 credit unions across the US use Fiserv Wisdom for accounting, investment portfolio management, asset and liability management (ALM) and regulatory reporting. Almost 100 new institutions have signed on in the first eight months of 2007 alone.

After nearly doubling in size, Texas Tech Federal Credit Union needed to update its core processing and accounting systems.

The accounting package provides back-office financial functions including general ledger, fixed assets, prepaid expenses and check reconciliation. The investment portfolio management system allows credit unions to manage their purchases and holdings in CDs and other authorized securities. The ALM product allows credit unions to do forecasting, explore what-if scenarios and determine changes in the market due to rate shifts. The 5300 Call Report Assistant allows them to gather data from disparate sources and automate quarterly regulatory reporting. They can pull information from a core data system, a prior report or other Wisdom programs, for instance.

TTFCU bought the entire Wisdom suite, but tight resources mandate a slow roll out. In fact, it has only deployed the general ledger package since April.

The credit union does not have plans to use the Wisdom investment portfolio management system. It started using QwickRate.com to place and track CDs prior to purchasing Wisdom. Hutson says he likes the reporting features in QwickRate.com, and he can avoid paying brokerage fees by using the service.

For now, he plans to manually key the QwickRate reports into the Wisdom ALM and Call Report Assistant every month. Starting with the September 30, 2007 close, he will run a Call Report Assistant cycle in parallel with the spreadsheets he currently uses. If they match up over several cycles, he will migrate to the Wisdom Call Report Assistant.

Wisdom offers a huge bang for the buck, so selecting the software was a no-brainer, says Hutson. “We didn’t shop for an accounting solution,” he says. “Wisdom was such a good price that when we saw that, we just said this will be our solution. It’s a quarter of the price of other accounting solutions, and we bought the entire suite.”

Besides the cost advantage, TTFCU was excited about certain features including the subsidiary detail for fixed assets and the prepaid and accounts payable system, the ability to track charged-off loans, and the general ledger entry templates.

“They have templates so that every month when I do my loan accrual, I can just go into my template instead of having to recreate a general ledger journal entry, and that’s very convenient,” says Hutson. “The interface is easy to use, and the general ledger and ALM system communicate well.”

Another benefit is that the data can be exported easily from Wisdom to Microsoft Excel. This came in handy during a recent opinion audit when Hutson was able to export the check register into Excel and use the filter and sorting capabilities in the spreadsheet package to create a report.

The fact that Fiserv is a major IT company is another plus. And finally, Hutson is impressed by the high quality customer service he has received from the Wisdom team. “There was a month or so that I was on the phone with Wisdom just about every day,” he says. “They care not just about selling the product but actually that we get the use of it.”

www.texastechfcu.org

www.fiserv.com

By Sherree DeCovny