RICHARDSON, Texas – There are a lot of credit union IT products built for credit unions, but few are built with a credit union's help during each step of development. That's what been happening here at Texans CU over the last two years. Not only did Texans CU change its name from "Texins" CU to reflect that it wasn't just a CU for Texas Instruments anymore, but it has also migrated most of its IT systems away from TI. In doing so it was looking for a completely integrated system that linked each and every component of the CU together. The driving force of such an ambitious product was to have the quintessential member relationship management solution throughout the CU. "When we set out on this we had two major goals. First, we wanted our employees to know more about a member's business with the credit union, than the member did. Second, we thought we could improve a lot of our processes," said Darrel Muff, senior technical advisor for the $985 million Texans CU. Murff said so many CU systems have a multitude of pieces hanging off of them, making it difficult to link them together in order to paint a complete picture of how members are doing business with the CU. "We are running the EDS Premier System in an online mode. It's a great system, but not very easy to learn and work with. That's where we kind of said `how can we make that better in each area?' " said Murff. The CU believes it has done that with Texans 2000, an integrated enterprise system that it developed with Applied Technical Solutions, Richardson, Texas and Trinity Net Technologies. The system is fully integrated with its EDS Premier system. " It's an operating system that captures data. The MRM is broken into several areas -member service manager, lending manager, self-service, marketing and sales manager, financial manger. The MRM has an account manager that drives all the new account generation. There's a real-time alert manager for members. You can put member comments, positive or negative, in the system. The final piece is a member contact management piece," said Cliff Larzarine, Technical Advisor for ATS. "Currently there are a number of other products out there, but no one is offering the full breadth, integrated solution, with the MRM aspect. It also provides tools to increase the operational efficiencies of the CU," said Brian Larch, President and CEO of ATS. For Texans, the system has combined direct, indirect and Internet lending; and marketing and sales into one solution that's based around an SQL database that also manages member responses, account originations, collections, and cross-selling that is driven by transaction-based member and product profitability tools. Texans worked with ATS throughout the three-year process. ATS is now marketing this solution, known as FrontLine, to CUs throughout the country. Currently only the EDS interface is available, but ATS says it will develop an interface for any CU system. It may sound hard to believe, but FrontLine is an ASP solution. A credit union ischarged based on how many members it has. The MRM piece of FrontLine has changed Texans' loan origination process. It now has a queue-driven loan origination system that allows a loan to move from the initial interviewer phase to closing in a paperless environment. Murff said call center reps are able to approve about 80% of loan applications during the initial member call. Even the dealerships the CU is working with for indirect lending have access to the same system. The paperless loan process was vital for the CU, which has 21 branches, indirect lending, Internet lending and call center lending. "We were a danger to forests. We had to store paper from all those places somewhere, and when a member called back no one knew who had the paper. Now we have everything in one system, accessible by everyone," said Murff. He said a member can apply for a loan online, walk into any of the CU's branches and the manager can print out the application for the member to sign. Profitability is one beneficial attribute of the system, said Murff. "The way we're building this is we're creating a `rule tool' for lack of a better term. It's a user friendly tool that allows our marketing group to build rules for matching products with members." For example one rule may be to find members who are 40 and over and have $10,000 in a CD, and then market a VISA Platinum card to them. "The system will find out how many members fit that rule," said Murff. Transaction-based rules can be the real key to finding profitable members, said Murff. "You can have two members with $1,000 each in a checking account, but the fact that one writes one check a month and another writes a hundred checks a month, changes the profitability look of the members." The system is also capable of advanced geo-coding and mapping to show the CU where its profitable members are located, and what their profiles are. Murff said the three-year project was extremely difficult to pull off, but one thing that may have helped Texins was that it was replacing a lot of its long-standing systems anyway. "We basically got divorced (from TI) in 1998 and we had to replace everything. TI had our phone system, HR system, networks-the whole deal. Five years ago we were serving the big chip maker down the street, now we're out in the world competing with everybody else," said Murff. The CU now has a couple hundred SEGs and a handful of community charters. [email protected]