Participants learned how they can begin integrating Credit Union Financial Exchange during a breakout session at the co-located CUNA Technology Council and CUNA Operations & Member Experience Council Conferences in San Francisco.

Credit Union Financial Exchange (CUFX), an industry changing initiative lead by the CUNA Technology Council, is a systems integration standard that connects applications to core processing systems.

CUFX allows credit unions to:

• Reduce complexity and operating expenses.
• Improve member experience and employee efficiency.
• Increase speed of delivery of new business functions industry wide.
• Enable application innovation by reducing or eliminating repetitive, time-consuming customizations.

“The whole goal is to ease the integration between software systems,” says Jeff Johnson, chief information officer at Baxter Credit Union. “One of the biggest pain points, one of the most expensive thing that we do, and one of the things that delays our speed to market, is that integrating different software. CUFX can greatly ease that burden.”

The CUNA Technology Council does not have an exact count of how many credit unions are currently using CUFX because credit unions and provides can download it for free and use “bits and pieces” of it, Johnson says.

“One the things we’re trying to do is get broader adoption of it,” Johnson says.

One vendor to extensively develop CUFX-compliant system is Open Technology Solutions (OTS). “We process over five million transactions a day, and our system has never gone down using CUFX,” says Doug Giorgetta, a development manager at OTS.

Chris Senada, chief information officer of Virginia Credit Union, Richmond, Va., says his credit union developed a loan origination system that integrated with two vendor interfaces. Both providers told  Senada they will be compliant with CUFX in the future.

“If I want to switch to either of those vendors using it’s almost plug and play,” Senada says. “That’s how we’re approaching our providers at our credit union.”

►Click here for more conference coverage from CUNA News, and get live updates on Twitter via @cumagazine, @CUNA_News, @CUNACouncils, and by using the #TechCouncil and #OMECouncil hashtags. Learn more about the CUNA Councils, a member-led professional society for credit union executives, at cunacouncils.org.