FreedomPay announced late last month that it had implemented the Credit Union Financial Exchange (CUFX) standards on its Commerce Platform, but what does this mean to our clients?

The CUFX initiative began in 2013 with the intention of streamlining how technology companies and credit unions connect applications – things such as account openings and online banking – into core systems. Experts from leading credit unions and top vendors worked together to develop technology standards that make product and service integration across the industry faster, easier and more cost-effective.

Aside from having tech vendors and credit unions on the same page, CUFX will reduce integration time and costs not only for application providers, but for core processors as well.

In addition, it will increase delivery speed for new solutions while simplifying integration; that should reduce both initial and ongoing costs of both offerings created by a credit union and its independent vendors.

Baxter Credit Union (BCU) was our first client to deploy the solution, which gave its corporate customers the opportunity to make cashless payments. BCU is a $2 billion asset institution with more than 187,000 members in all 50 states and is the fastest-growing credit union chartered in the past 30 years.

BCU is rolling out the FreedomPay Commerce Platform in sites where it acts as the onsite credit union for corporate customers. The use of the platform encourages corporate employees to use their BCU credit/debit cards and checking accounts to fund their stored value accounts.

Why is this so important?

“As technology continues to advance and competitors of all sorts continue to up their games, individual credit unions don’t have the resources to maintain a competitive technological edge in today’s industry,” BCU Senior Vice President and CIO Jeff Johnson wrote on www.cuinsight.com. “This is because most credit unions need to support multiple application providers, like mobile banking and teller interfaces, just to meet their members’ service demands, and in doing so, squander crucial time and energy integrating those applications.”

And for FreedomPay, this is what we love the most about our job – providing cutting-edge but still economically viable solutions for our clients. We live in exciting times and are both honored and proud to help our clients reach their full potential.