Addison Ave & GTE FCU

UC4 Provides Automation Solutions for US Financial Institutions Coast to Coast

"Anything I have dreamed up we have been able to accomplish with the UC4 platform and TCCUS."
Kenny Rywant, GTE Federal Credit Union

Customer Snapshot
Company: Addison Avenue Federal Credit Union
Business/Industry: Finance
Company Headquarters: Palo Alto, California, USA
Presence: national
Webpage: https://addisonavenue.com
Members: 135,000
Assets: US$ 1.8 billion

Company: GTE Federal Credit Union
Business/Industry: Finance
Company Headquarters: Tampa, Florida, USA
Webpage: www.gtefcu.org
Members: 209,000
Assets: US$ 2.1 billion

The Company: Addison Federal Credit Union
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Addison Avenue Federal Credit Union is a full-service financial institution serving more than 135,000 members nationwide. Addison Avenue offers its members both traditional credit union services and a full range of investment options. Addison Avenue specializes in meeting the needs of high-tech companies. Sponsor companies include Hewlett-Packard, gilent Technologies, CH2M HILL and many more. Services include help for relocating employees, seeing its members through the process of mergers and acquisitions, and guidance for international employees new to the country.

The Company: GTE FCU
The credit union's mission is to help member-owners build and secure their financial success. As a cooperative, not-for-profit financial institution, GTE FCU does this by giving citizens in our field of membership the opportunity to pool their savings, lend them to one another and own the financial institution through which they conduct their business; by providing financial education resources that help members make informed monetary decisions; and by making our products and services available to members via the Internet, by telephone and through branch locations.

The Situation
Financial institutions on both coasts have been chosen The Complete Credit Union Solution (TCCUS) to streamline operations with scalable, real-time enabled technology and an Oracle relational core data processing platform. TCCUS, a robust financial management suite from Open Solutions, provides strength and flexibility for financial organizations both large and small.

For even greater increases in efficiency, smart credit unions have integrated TCCUS with UC4 Software to completely automate processes and business rules.

The Challenge: Business grows, Batch Window stays the same
Errors and latency caused by manual data entry or operation, jobs running at the wrong time or out of turn on traditional calendar-based schedulers, and delays in receiving critical information all threaten the batch.

"If our batch didn't run," said Bill Gunn of Addison Avenue Federal Credit Union, "there would be no account dividends, no interest would be credited, new loans would not be funded, and the numbers customers see on the website would be wrong. I don't even want to think about what would happen."

The Solution
The UC4 platform automates many of the steps that can delay or even stop critical processing. Using dynamic parameters and an intelligent interface to each application that must feed into TCCUS, the UC4 platform eliminates the potential for errors and slowdowns caused by human intervention.

"Error notification is crucial to this whole process," said Kenny Rywant of GTE Federal Credit Union. "On our legacy system, we had an additional product that captured the errors and then a third product that sent out the notification. I like that scheduling, monitoring, and notification are all bundled into one application. Because the UC4 platform is integrated with TCCUS, we find out about errors sooner."

UC4 Benefits
The UC4 platform integrated with TCCUS provides IT with better tools to ensure batch jobs run on time, every time, within the allowed time. The UC4 platform eliminates the need and frequency of tracking  down costly errors with the ability to scan output for problems, re-run jobs automatically, and provide appropriate notification when necessary.

The Challenge: Business grows, and out-grows existing Applications
Just as TCCUS offers credit unions scalable solutions, the UC4 platform also grows with the business. An object-based architecture means that it is easy to add new conditions to modules as business changes, creating jobs that are complex and intelligent, yet highly flexible.

"Our legacy system – Summit on an HP platform – had been around forever," said Gunn. "We used Maestro with it and it was very solid. But we built in everything. So when HP discontinued the  HP 3000 and Summit migrated to UNIX, we literally wanted a more 'open solution'. Flexibility is what led us to TCCUS. We also did a proof of concept with the UC4 platform and it was the only automation tool that met all of our criteria."

The Solution
It wasn't long before Gunn was integrating applications and automating financial processes. After three months, Gunn estimates that Addison Avenue Federal Credit Union was 97 percent automated in core and daily processing, with plans to move the UC4 platform into the datacenter.

UC4 Benefits
Open Solutions knows credit unions expect more than just business as usual – they expect business to grow and designed TCCUS with success in mind. Integrated with the UC4 platform, TCCUS responds even more effectively to changing demands.

The Challenge: Business grows, Personnel Budgets do not
"We felt confident in deploying TCCUS," said Kenny Rywant. "When I asked for budget for up to seven operators to run IT ops 24/7, I actually got it. But as a result of implementing the UC4 platform, we are currently running IT Operations with just two operators."

The Solution
TCCUS excels at intensive processing. A highly secure application, it has built-in check points to allow users to verify their jobs, data, and processes before processing begins. To complement TCCUS, the UC4 platform tasks the avoidance of errant data one step further, automating TCCUS queues and kicking-off jobs so employees don't have to.

"With the UC4 platform, those new positions were actually allocated to more important jobs," said Rywant.

Addison Avenue had a similar experience. "We've been able to promote one of our team members to a more satisfying role. The ability to redeploy people has been very valuable to us. Before the UC4 platform, we needed a 24/7 staff plus an on-call. We have clearly seen a cost reduction. We no longer have to have techs creating schedules, so people are getting back to doing the jobs they were hired to do," said Gunn.

UC4 Benefits
The UC4 platform and TCCUS keep operating costs low and leverages valuable employee resources.

Other UC4 and TCCUS Customers

• BECU
• DFCU Financial Credit Union
• ESL Federal Credit Union
• Fairwinds Credit Union
• Hickam Federal Credit Union
• Idaho Central Credit Union
• North Island Credit Union
• Royal Credit Union
• Securityplus Federal Credit Union
• Smart Financial Credit Union
• South Carolina State Credit Union