FT. WORTH, Texas-For all of their qualities, commercial lending technologies still don't get along with CU core systems, according to several CUs that have been in small business lending for years. While some basic interfaces are available, the more sophisticated capabilities that come from integration may not be.
The loan manager at $40-million Tongass FCU in Ketchikan, Alaska, said she appreciates the flexible payment schedules delivered by her LaserPro documentation system, but she regrets that her core system won't recognize the schedules. LaserPro is offered by offered by Harland Financial Solutions of Portland, Ore.
"Our core system does not do principal and interest payments for just four or five months," explained Helen Mickel, operations and loan manager at Tongass. "It doesn't allow for a principal payment in October and interest-only payments for the rest of the year. These are two options available through LaserPro."
That's important to Tongass, which caters to seasonal business borrowers by offering flexible payment schedules, said Mickel. But it's not worth the expense of hiring a programmer to build a core interface because the CU's business lending program is small, she said.
"It is so easy and quick to enter loan information on our core system that I don't see non-integration as being a huge barrier," said Mickel. "However, as we grow, it will become more of an issue. Vendors have an opportunity to reach out to other system users and offer interfaces."
Royal CU of Eau Claire, Wis., has built an interface between its core and Baker Hill that is tentative at best, said Julie Frey, business operations supervisor at the $990-million credit union.
The CU purchased from its core system provider an extract file that imports data into Baker Hill OnePoint - but "we're not happy with the extract," which is controlled by the core vendor, she said.
"There are fields we would like to import into Baker Hill," she explained. "Any limitation on our data imported to Baker Hill is due to it not being available in the extract. We are looking at writing our own file to import to Baker Hill for these missing fields."
Even an extract file may be hard to come by with other core vendors, continued Larry Accola, SVP-business loans and services at Royal. "Our previous vendor was definitely not cooperative or supportive, and that seems to be the norm for most credit union core vendors."
The Texas Business Lenders Group (TBLG), a CUSO in Fort Worth, Texas, uses the BizMark small business loan software offered by Cypress Software Systems of North Richland Hills, Texas.
"BizMark is great for what we use it for," but it could be even better, according to Robert Campbell, TBLG president and CEO.
"Having BizMark interface with our credit unions' core systems would be a nice plus in making the process more efficient. That way, the credit union could get the parameters set up in the core system, dump it into their document writer, send it to the imaging system, and track it with the core loan monitoring system."
Accola blames core vendors for failing to interface business systems they way CUs want them to, much less offer sophisticated integration processes, he said. "If we could get the core to build a more robust extract, more data could be pushed over to Baker Hill. Baker Hill is also prodding our core vendor to make more data available."
Accola has a few guesses as to why core vendors are falling short.
"First, there are very few credit union core systems that are business-friendly or functional," he suggested. "Second, many credit union systems have inflexible basic architecture that can not be updated. Third, most of the vendors have not seen the opportunity and potential to serve credit unions doing or wanting to do business lending, and fourth, most core vendors are very resistant to interfacing with other providers outside their company-and sometimes even within their company."
