CU Vendors Suffer With the Rest of Market

WALL STREET – The biggest credit union service providers, who had all rallied to new highs in recent days, were pulled down with the rest of the stock market yesterday after the Dow Jones average plunged 415 points, it’s steepest fall since the days after Sept. 11, 2001. Shares in First Data Corp. declined 4.5% for the day; Jack Henry & Associates fell 3.4%; Fidelity National Information Services fell 3.2%; CheckFree by 3.3%; Fiserv by 2.5%; and Online Resources by 2%, all on heavy trading, as the markets were in a huge sell-off. A statement by former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan suggesting a recession was on it way, coupled with a big sell-off in overheated Chinese markets the night before, caused panic selling as the markets opened on Wall Street yesterday. By late afternoon the Dow was down 546 points–after plummeting 178 points in just one minute when New York-based Dow Jones switched to another data server that quickly calculated trades made earlier in the day.